The rivers are on the rise

Not very meaningful for most of you.  This is the road to Snake Island which is between the two rivers.  Here the Murray is nearly up to the road.

This is the other side of the road - don't know if it is the Murray seeping under the road or the Darling seeping towards the Murray.

This is the boat ramp on the Darling at Wharf Road behind our place.  The objects beside the tree are a bench, log railings and a sign.  After all this excitement it's nice to come home to our beautiful house.

 I love this view when the roller-door goes up.  I always feel I am entering an enchanted castle.  And tonight I had the perfect summer tea.

Red Sky at night

Georgia's blog featured some beautiful red CT sunrises recently.  Then one night last week out walking the dogs, I noticed our brilliant sunset.

Looking west:  the shops opposite us on Darling Street.  The place with the fairy lights is Jade Temby's Gallery, a lovely little cafe cum gallery serving organic coffee.

Looking south down Darling Street towards the Artback Gallery and the caravan park.  I'd left it too late to capture the sky behind our gallery. When I went inside and up to my room, this was the view through the verandah window to the west.

Smalls

I have started on my NY resolution.

Cunningly I timed my spree with the January sales.  Pleased as I am with the purchases, I'm intrigued.  I had a bra fitting in England (wearing sports bras or no bra for years made this a little daunting and the sort of thing I could only do on holiday) 40B.  The 2011 me walked boldly into Bras n Things in Mildura and got another fitting 14E.  How is this possible?  I think of myself as 14B, so perhaps I'm right.
Look at my Chrissy presents from Georgia

It's the print at the back - my cottage on the cliff at Porth Clais that one day will be mine...  Currently the print is reclining on the mantelpiece in my bedroom awaiting a bedroom makeover.  But there was more.

Much more actually.  But I am besotted with this seal who now basks blissfully in my blue bowl.  It is such a perfect memento of our time in Wales together.

I keep my marbles in the other blue bowl...

Good so far

I was munching on my croissant in the garden in the shade this morning and wondering what images I could use to capture the year so far.  Harping back to my previous post, I wanted to share with you another incident at the gym on New Year's Eve.  The Billy Joel song 'Days to Remember' came on.  I've always liked this song and used to use it myself for a final stretch routine when I took aerobics classes in Bellerive (it is a very old song).  This time I caught the lines 'And so we embrace again behind the dunes / This beach is so cold on winter afternoons / but holding you close is like holding the summer sun. / I'm warm from the memories of days to come.'  This, of course, is a very nice idea and very relevant to Bellerive but I also realised that it is what gardening is all about.  So I thought of the beautiful Mermaid rose I bought on the way home from the gym.  E voila.  Here it is.  I have read that it was Monet's favourite rose and I've always wanted one.  Feeling very pleased with myself as I drove (I'd also bought some new towels in a sale - first new ones for about 10 years...), I was thinking what would make the day happy for Steve.  Selling a painting, I thought.  When I got home, he had sold one of his Sand Series.  So another good reason for a glass of bubbly.  And then, exhausted from all this early morning thinking, I realised that the table illustrated how I like my life to be.

At which point Steve came in to say he'd sold another painting - a dog portrait this time.  May the year continue in this vein.

New Year's Eve

Well we made it to 12 noon... it's in the 40s here and abounding in mosquitoes after all the rain over previous weeks so sleep was a little hard to come by last night.  The gym was only open for 2 hours this morning so, as I left, having tried to protect the garden from the searing to come, Steve and I agreed we wouldn't even try for midnight tonight.  Midday will do.  So we've had a glass of bubbly and will have another tomorrow morning for New Year in Europe and the States.
It was lovely at the gym.  I go to Curves which is very girly but it suits me fine.  Today a young girl in a pink fairy costume came in with her Mum and was determinedly copying her.  Two ladies were doing their stretches together, chatting away and unconsciously mirroring each other's moves.  I've been in a girly frame of mind over these holidays.  Some years ago I bought a book called The Evolution of Woman from a stall in a small town just outside Armidale.  The book was written in the 1970s and I've been saving it for a suitable time - it's not very large and I thought I could breeze through it in a day fondly remembering our feminist attempts from that time.  But I'm still only about halfway through.  It's is not the bra-burning call to arms I was expecting but an academic anthropological work which dovetails neatly with some of the stuff I've been thinking about recently, like when did humans start to consider themselves as separate from other animals?  This of course has implications for when you stop being a carnivore and start being a cannibal.  Very interesting stuff and it's doing my brain in.
Perhaps in response to this, I have only one NY resolution: to  wear nice underwear from now on.  I'm quite good at keeping my resolutions so feel I've achieved Nirvana at the age of 57 - well, I'm as good as I'm gonna get.  And mulling over all this as I was driving to the gym, I thought how wild it would feel to be in full burqa with only fabulous underwear on underneath, and perhaps some freedom-impeding stilettoes.  And then the terrible realisation that the Coolgardie would be covering charcuterie not fresh meat.
You'll be pleased to know I have no photos of any of this.  So I thought I'd share these with you - symbols of hope for the new year.  Here I am some years ago reading on my favourite redgum on the Darling when we were deep in drought and I was deep in depression.

 

Here I am at the same tree a cuppla weeks ago.  Very different headspace and a very different river.

I've had a fabulous 2010.  Best year this millennium so far.  Here's to 2011.
Flow river flow.
(But not as much as in Queensland.)

Christmas at last

Very quiet Christmas for us but absolutely perfect (well, as perfect as possible when there's no upturned table and reindeer footprints all over the house; no Hallelujah chorus to welcome guests;  no tangle of children and dogs; and no Mel sipping tea from the Arzberg china.)  We did at least dust off the Arzberg...

and Steve cooked a fabulous repast of 24Sage Leaves Chicken with rosemary potatoes and beans.  We'd started the ham on Tuesday, the day we got it from the butcher, so had a little rest from it.

And then the party was over.

Thank you!!!!

Sarah and gardens

While I was gardening in the rain yesterday, I heard a cooeeee that I had not heard for some time - and there was Sarah looking like a cross between Mary Quant and Twiggy and carrying an elegant and intricate floral umbrella that was more like a parasol.  Sarah spends her time stripped to the waist slaving in her garden or swanning around like a super-model.  She used to live in a shed up the Darling and created a garden there that was like another world.  I was furious when she sold and moved to the Clare Valley, having based all my plans for a future bicycle on treddlying to her place.  I have no photo of her but here's the bag of walnuts she brought me.

It was a bit like an early harvest festival yesterday.  Firstly Steve N brought around some eggs.  Then Sarah arrived with the walnuts.  She was in town for Annie's Market, a tradition of some years standing held before Easter and Christmas.  It is a beautifully girly event which used to be at Annie's garden but is now held at Artback, a gallery and cafe at the end of Darling Street and opposite Annie's place.  Sharyl, Raeleen and I had arranged to meet there for lunch, which we did, and emerged 4 hours later.  But not empty handed.  I bought 2 bottles of wine from a vineyard at Yelta just over the river, some chocolates from Broken Hill and a bracelet from Ashley and Sarah's Dangly Bits stall.  I was also tempted by dip tins, buckets and watering cans made by Wally the Tin Man but by the time I got my act together, Wally (in his 90s) had gone home.  And I was referring to him as Willy the Tonne Man, so delicious did I find the Yelta wine.
The weekend I got back from Tasmania, I took Mum to the Clare Valley to visit Sarah's garden  as part of an Open Gardens scheme.

I suppose I can understand why she relinquished the shed in Wentworth.  Here's Mum having a rest and a read as I explore.

Unfortunately, no matter how long I stood and waited, those 2 women insisted on being in the photo.

Sarah has a wonderful sense of whimsy.  Here's her chook made from an old dip tin.  And here's her chooks.

Bit of a dodgy photo I know - taken through heaps of fox-proof mesh and in the shade- if you click on it you'll see better.  Huddled chooks to the left (Sarah once left them in my care in Wentworth, and I think they remembered), beautiful swan right of centre and happy gnome in the right-hand corner of enclosure.  The gnome was Sarah's farewell gift from the Yelta / Wentworth Garden and a Glass of Wine Club which she always referred to as The Gnomes.  Finally, a parting shot of a lady who filched white pelargonium (Sarah had sold out of potted up cuttings...)

ouch