Category Archives: Celebrations

A Christmas Reprise – 10 Years Later

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WordPress kindly reminded me of a post I wrote on this day 10 years ago.

You can read it here.

Christmas has been a relatively simple family affair for quite a number of years and continues to be even more so.

This year we are travelling interstate for a week at the beach with our 2 adult daughters and 2 granddaughters. They are now 17 and almost 19 so there will essentially be 6 adults. And a dog……..as the accommodation is pet-friendly.

The accommodation is booked. We will have a rough idea of a possible menu a week or so before we leave. Our gifts will be the time spent together and some cash for everybody. I will write a Christmas email to friends and family.

None of us need or want an over-the-top, consumerist event to celebrate.

This is a photo that the house-sitters sent last year when we were in Europe. Islay will be included this year and is sure to be the centre of attention.

I foresee a relaxed and fun time together and lots of beach time with Islay.

This photo is from when she was 7 months old.

Cooking, Brewing, Bottling and Freezing

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It is nearly 2 weeks since the family came to visit and we celebrated a milestone birthday for our younger daughter. Thank you for your patience while I get back into the swing of regular blog posts.

There was afternoon tea and socialising with friends and family. Of course, there was cake!!

Dinner with the extended family. It was so good to be together.

So, now it is back to regular transmission.

Today was a busy one in the kitchen.

GMan bottled the latest batch of home brew.

He also started 2 more loaves of sourdough bread. These will be baked tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I had a large bunch of celery and a leek which I had bought earlier in the week with a plan to make soup. I ended up with 14 serves of celery soup and 12 of leek, poato and broccoli soup. It is really just leek and potato with the addition of whatever broccoli stalk I have in the freezer. Today there were 5 large stalks.

I also retrieved a bag of frozen cherry tomatoes from the freezer and made another batch of tomato sauce.

The links to the recipes for all of these can be found in the recipe index.

Here is the result of my handiwork.

All of this was done between 11am and 2pm to make use of the free electricity offer from our energy retailer.

Daily Doings

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In the week since my last post I have celebrated another year around the sun. My birthday was fairly low-key but enjoyable. GMan and I had dinner at the local hotel and I was overwhelmed by the many celebratory messages from family and friends both near and far.

The soundtrack to our lives for the past several weeks has been the heavy machinery working on completely resurfacing a couple of kilometres of our road. It is the main truck route which bypasses the historic centre of town and some sections were in very poor condition so the upgrade is welcome. It should be finished within the next week or so.

These are a couple of views at the moment. It is all wet as the water truck had just been past. They are working hard to minimise the impact of dust on adjacent properties.

As you can see from the photos we are enjoying some glorious autumn weather but we know that winter is not too far away.

Hence, one of my activities today was to cook up a big pot of leek and potato soup. I bought a 5kg bag of local potatoes from the farm gate about 10 days ago so the soup was a perfect way to use quite a few of them. I bought 3 large leeks a few days ago.

Here they are sliced up and ready.

I like to have a stock of premade soup in the freezer as it is perfect for a quick lunch or evening meal in the cooler weather. I have a bunch of celery which will also be turned into soup. That could be a job for tomorrow.

Finding Friends

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I went to Melbourne on Saturday and had the absolute pleasure of catching up with these ladies. They are colleagues from my student nurse training and we were barely 20 years old when we last saw each other.

Our lives have taken remarkably divergent paths yet we are bound by a common thread from all those years ago.

This connection occurred because one of our former colleagues took the time to reach out on what was the 50th anniversary of the commencement of our student nurse training. The wonders of social media has meant that some of us have managed to arrange a reunion next month. I am really looking forward to that but in the meantime it was a happy coincidence that we were able to meet up briefly the other day.

Friendships are made through all sorts of encounters during our lives. Some endure and others fade. Some are rekindled in new circumstances, others not so much.

50 years is a long time and we have all matured, changed and been shaped by our experiences and the world around us.

Celebrate and Support

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This is a day late but I could not let International Women’s Day pass without acknowledgement.

It is a time to stop, pause and reflect on the achievements and contributions of women across the globe in all different fields of endeavour. Whether it is in parliamentary offices, gardens, executive boardrooms, hospitals, laboratories, classrooms, sporting fields or any of the other myriad of places where women work and play, their contribution deserves to be celebrated.

On a personal level I am grateful for the women in my own family who have provided an example in previous generations – my mother and both of my grandmothers have definitely shaped who I am today. I am proud of my daughters and all that they continue to achieve. My granddaughters, on the threshold of adulthood, give me great optimism.

It is over 120 years since non-indigenous women in Australia were able to vote but that right was denied from indigenous women for a further 60 years,

The right to stand for public office as well as voting is important and should not be underestimated. We need to continue to be vigilant and demand respect for women who are in the public realm. Despite Julia Gillard’s now famous misogyny speech nearly 14 years ago, women with a public profile continue to be vilified and demeaned by certain sections of our population and the media. I will not dignify any of the comments I have heard and read recently by referencing them directly but I will say that this is not acceptable.

So, on International Women’s Day or any other day, let us not forget the valuable role that women play in our society. Build each other up and celebrate.

Turning of the Year

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I could not allow the fact that I am currently overseas on holidays prevent me from a final post for 2025. As we see out the last of 2025 and prepare to welcome a new, unblemished slate my wish remains the same as what I wrote at the end of 2024:

Resolutions are not really something that I do but I am keen to work on some key principles and encourage others to do likewise as we move into 2025. Things like kindness, gratitude, sharing, empathy and community spring to mind. Nothing too big or exciting but simply woven into every day and making a difference to our own and other people’s lives.

Unfortunately, there have been many events which have sorely tested our collective kindness but they have only served to strengthen my resolve in 2026.

May 2026 be all you wish for and I look forward to continuing to share my thoughts and experiences with you in a few weeks when I return home. In the meantime you can follow my holiday adventures here.

Celebration of an Evolution

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The quilt which was an 18th birthday gift is now in the hands of the recipient.

Yesterday was the 18th birthday of our elder granddaughter. Her growth from baby to young lady is beautifully captured in the reel of photos below.

It has been an absolute joy to witness her transformation and watch her finish her secondary schooling. She is now poised on the threshold with exciting life and career prospects ahead of her.

Congratulations!!

Countdown

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Almost 2 weeks since my last post. While I haven’t been writing there seems to have been plenty to keep me occupied. Sometimes it is difficult to get motivated to write as I am loathe to repeat myself and after 14.5 years of blogging it can begin to feel like more of the same. However, in a lot of respects our lives and routines are remarkably repetitive.

The spring weather is as unpredictable as ever with days that hint of the coming summer interspersed with others that feel like winter. Nevertheless, we are enjoying the spring flowers and fresh foliage growth. The fleeting nature of spring flowers makes them particularly special as we have a small window to enjoy them before they are gone for another year. The daffodils are finished but the wisteria are looking their best this week.

Like every year, 2025 seems to be gathering speed as we race towards the end of the year. We no longer have work Christmas parties, end-of-year school activities or even a huge focus on a family Christmas but the countdown to Christmas has crept up on me.

We had a short break last week and spent 3 nights at Walhalla, about 3 hours east of Melbourne. It is a historic gold-mining town which now has a permanent population of 20.

This is a view from our accommodation one evening.

It occurred to me today that it is 10 weeks until we fly to Europe for a trip which we hope may include a white Christmas.

Before that we have another 2 night short break here in Victoria as well as about 10 days in Queensland visiting family, a weekend of volunteering/attending the local Folk Festival and the usual round of events, meetings, visitors and so on.

I really do need to be organised to make sure everything goes smoothly.

How do you feel about the latter part of the year? Are you planning or already prepared for Christmas and the year’s end?

Birthday Outing

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Today is GMan’s birthday and coincidentally we arranged to go to Melbourne with the express purpose of going to the exhibition of French Impressionism at the National Gallery of Victoria. It includes over 100 artworks drawn from the extensive collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

However, the first thing that caught our attention was before we even entered the gallery. The bare plane trees on the footpath outside the gallery were adorned with a series of threads of paper cranes as today is the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. This modest yet powerful memorial was appreciated by many people passing by.

The exhibition is very popular so there were lots of people around but still enough space to view all of the paintings as well as the detailed information adjacent to each.

Here are a few photographs of some that particularly caught my eye.

Entrance to the village of Osny by Paul Gaugin.

Two peasant women in a meadow by Camille Pissarro.

There were 19 Monet works in the exhibition. Some were quite familiar subjects such as waterlilies, the Japanese bridge in the garden at Giverny and haystacks but here are a couple of less well-known pieces.

Road at La Cavée, Pourville

Boulevard Saint Denis Argenteuil in winter

Finally, a view from inside the foyer of the gallery.

After the gallery adventure we headed back the Elio’s Place, a small European bistro in Flinders Lane for a birthday lunch. Then it was a couple of errands before catching the train home. It was a full and fun day out.

Some Special Sewing

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I have put my head down and done some concentrated sewing over the past couple of days. It is a birthday gift for our elder granddaughter.

The result is that I have now completed 21 patchwork blocks which is half of the total needed for a QS quilt.

I wrote a post in February which you can read here in which I mentioned that I had done the first block.

Here are the other 21 blocks ready to start sewing.

The disappearing 9 patch is essentially a 2-step process. The first is to sew the 9 pieces together and you can see some of them here at that stage.

After that, each block is cut into 4 pieces and rearranged before restitching. This gives the overall random finished pattern.

I hope to have the patchwork completed in the next week or so but it is somewhat dependant on other activities.