Blurry

Slightly blurry bougainvillea.

Not a big fan

Australia Day, today.

A day that has always been problematic - if you must have a national holiday to celebrate our "one-ness" as a nation, then it needs to be held on a day that isn't the anniversary of when the white fellas turned up and unilaterally moved in on the basis of vacant possession. Add to that the way its become increasingly embarrassingly jingoistic and awash with cheap sentimentality (see also, Anzac Day). And if I see one more goose walking around wearing the flag like a cape ...

On top of that, it's hot, and the fan (pictured) is the only thing standing between me an a complete meltdown.

On the positive side, I got a four day long weekend out of it, which isn't to be sneezed at.

Slacker

Well, I've been a real slacker both on the photo and especially on the posting front. Small compensation (from a diversification perspective) but I've been crafty. Two socks, nearly finished, snapped last Tuesday.

Since then, the orange ones are completed (bar sewing in a couple of ends). Yesterday's photo also served the practical purpose of being a record of how I picked up the stitches for the vertical sections.

And today, the finished article. The second black and white is still under way.

The only other day I took a photo was last Friday: the road on the way home.

Anyway, resolved to try to be a bit more diligent.

Sunny Monday

A nice contrast to last week's pic of much the same scene. This is what summer in Sydney is supposed to look like.

Weekend

Missed Friday all together and then snapped but didn't post over the weekend. Clearly by the end of the working week I'm over everything.

This hydrangea - looking less blue in the photo than in real life - is proof that my total neglect approach to gardening occasionally pays off. I must have planted this maybe seven years ago - it had a couple of ok seasons then died back during one of Sydney's drought-like periods. But this summer it's back. I did nothing to encourage (or deserve) this. Just nature reasserting itself, I guess.

This tree is, just down the street. I love the gargoyle-like growth on it.

Cupcakes

Anything can be made better with a cupcake.

Socks

The third and last of my Amazon packages turned up today, so I now have another sock knitting book. Can you have too many? Surely not.

The real question, I suppose, is whether I'm game to try colour work (which I generally don't do well) on socks. Lots of tempting options in the book, but lots of other gorgeous single yarn ones too.

Cross

I'm little miss grumpy this afternoon. Actually I'm little miss pissed off beyond all reason. Sometimes work sucks. Actually, its just a very few (one?) people at work who suck, but its amazing the damage they can do.

So I'm cross. I'm a little bit cross about (or because of) the continuing hot weather, and I'm absolutely fuming about someone a colleague aptly refers to as the bitch queen from hell.

But I'm home now and I'm not cross about cross stitch. What a pathetic segue.

This is a detail from the wonderful and subtly subversive "you are not alone" pattern from Cross Stitch Ninja (although I've changed the font for the text). Look closely.

Late change

Looking forward to a cooler change this evening. Not that its been anywhere near the temperatures they've had elsewhere in the country, but still, hot and humid and yucky for the past few days.

This is the view across Pyrmont Bridge back towards the city - my afternoon walk home.

Night light

End of an extremely unproductive weekend. Energy sapped by the heat which seemed a lot worse than the numbers would suggest.

Two for the price of one

So I had the weekend all planned when my package from Amazon turned up. (Yes, I know season 4 starts in the US tomorrow, but we don't get season 3 on the box until next week. Pathetic really. One day TV execs are going to have to wake up to the concept of the intertubes. Deeply tempted to find season 4 on channel BT.)

So keen to get into it I forgot to post the photo.


Saturday - hot and sunny. Very hot. Not weather that suits me, but the murraya seems to like it.

Commuting

One of the (few) compensations of being back at work in early January is the really quick commute home. There's next to no traffic. There's next to no-one on the bus. Apart from being quicker and more comfy that usual, it helps maintain that sense of lazy summer.

Wage slave

Back to work today after about two and a half weeks off over christmas. Spent most of the day with that vaguely disoriented post-holiday feeling as you try to remember the details of what you were working on. The big picture stuff comes back easily enough, but once you actually try to do something it's all a bit of a challenge.

Most of yesterday's butterflies have blown away. There's meant to be a storm tonight, so I suppose that will finish off the rest of them.

Flutter by

Lunch down by the water today. Great day for it - cloudless and hot but with enough breeze coming off the water to take the edge off the heat.

I meant to post a pic of something by the harbour - the water, the expensive boats moored there, the wharf, one of those apartments I'd love to live in but couldn't afford.

But then, walking home from the bus stop I came across a piece of footpath scattered with this lovely butterfly-shaped confetti and they made me smile.

Crafty

Knitting again, after a burst of jewellery making in the run up to christmas and then a little diversion into cross stitch. Knitting and summer don't always go together, but socks are always a safe choice - and I always seem to have a couple of pairs half finished.




These ones are in Blue Moon's Socks that Rock in a colourway called Gibson. They're a pretty standard top down sock, borrowing a stitch pattern called Sliding Bars from one of Cat Bordhi's books, which you can just barely see in the second image.

I've also finished, or nearly finished, a couple of baby jackets. They've been sitting around almost finished for a couple of months now, but as they're intended for a couple of people I work with who are expecting babies now-ish, I really has to get my act together.

Both are in Morris & Sons' Paddington, which is 80/20 bamboo/merino. It's a gorgeous yarn - with the silky touch that bamboo has. The pattern is my variation on Helena from Knitty but with a square neck, and with the stripes sort of influenced by Dream in Color's Tulip cardigan.

The autumny one is bigger - probably good for about a one year old; the blue green one is much closer to genuine new baby. I'm not a big fan of traditional pastels for babies.

A walk in the park

The Moreton Bay figs at North Sydney Oval are a lot more impressive that this photo would suggest. These ones are in the park, but there's also one inside the oval and you can sit under it at the footy or cricket. At least, I think it's still there.

Frangipani

Frangipani are one of the quintessential images of summer for me. Frangipani and christmas bush; running under the sprinkler to cool off in my grandparents' backyard (a childhood that predated water restrictions); a southerly change at the end of the day; and the smell of rain on hot asphalt.

That said, today's frangipani come complete with raindrops and an overcast sky - not quintessential Sydney summer at all.

Stardust

I've been thinking about doing an a-photo-a-day challenge on and off for a while (in my probably never get around to it kind of a way). New Year's day seemed like a good starting point, and then I read a suggestion that your birthday is a good starting date, rather than the pressure of the beginning of the year. Like that was going to buy me a lot of time! So, here's the first photo.


Not a lot of thought went into it - I was running out of time if I wanted to start this today, and I didn't want to go outside and look for something, so I was wandering around the house looking for something to photograph when I spotted this tiny star-shaped piece of paper, dropped on the floor when I was punching shapes out of scraps of paper in case I wanted to use them in some unspecified craft project some day. The title suggested itself once I looked at time image (truly, it doesn't look that dusty in real life).

I wouldn't want to overstate what I'm hoping to achieve. I'm not even remotely a photographer; I've got a little automatic digital camera, nothing fancy; I can point and shoot and understand a couple of the settings on it. This would be the limit of what I know.

But the object of the exercise isn't really the photos. I want to make myself see something new each say - or perhaps see something familiar in a new way. If I get better at taking photos - and I hope I will - that'll be a bonus. I also want to make myself write something - even something brief - most days, and this gives me a starting point. Maybe I'll write about other stuff as well, who knows.

So, lessons learned today? The date on the camera was wrong (now fixed) and I need to vacuum.