Come & Gone.

 My boys have been home.  You can tell because only my boys would leave clothing draped over the verandah chairs in winter.   It gets wet.  The birds poop on it.  The cats use it for blankets. And then there is this...

You would not believe how badly it stinks.  Not just fishy but old, rotting stinky~fishy. *sigh*

They redeemed themselves by replacing the old pine staircase with this lovely hardwood one. OT salvaged it from a condemned house & it was lugged over in a tinny, sanded back & oiled.  We have been tripping over the stringers in the hallway for months, waiting on the boys finding a convenient moment while we wobbled up & down the old staircase in fear of life & limb.  The backs are still to go on but they are usable & it is so nice... though the jury is still out so far as the cats are concerned.  They lost a perching place.

The boys are gone again, of course.  They have busy lives & OT has a wedding to plan but they have left me with all the fishy clothes to wash & the fishy bags to dispose of & beds to be stripped & remade.  Just the same, I would rather be doing all that than have them never come at all. They are such busy, busy people & we have got used to being quiet.  The halcyon days of carting ODD round Brisbane for whatever musical mania she was involved in are over & in all honesty ~ I do not miss them.  I do miss the music & rehearsals but all that running?  Nah. It is lovely to sit with the fire glowing, the rainbow lorrikets screeching through the trees & cats vying for space on my lap.  Bliss.

A Little Indian.

“Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

When you don't like to cook & are vegetarian in the midst of carnivores, mealtimes can become problematic.  The temptation, @ least in my case, is to become lazy because thinking what to cook, then what I need in order to cook it & maybe having to go out to buy what I need, just takes too much time from things I would rather be doing ~ which is just about anything else. I know.  I know...but I eat to live, not the other way round.

Anyway, like most people, I run out of ideas.  No matter how full the fridge is there's never anything to eat. *sigh.*  Actually, I probably run out of ideas faster than most simply because I get tired of the *same old, same old* rather fast.  We've been there for about a week now so it was time to gird my loins & consult Mr Google ~ though seriously, it never matters; I investigate the ingredients & omit half of them because it's stuff I don't like & who needs stuff they don't like in their food?

What I decided to try, minus all the funny things & icky things & unobtainable things, was Chitrannam ~ which is just a fancy name for lemon rice. And let's face it, if you absolutely have to cook, Indian is a pretty good option. It not only smells good, the colours are pretty amazing as well.  And it doesn't have to be hot.  I don't like hot.  And you can always add nuts.  Lots & lots of nuts. Poppadoms. The man had steak with his.  Ugh!

I said the colours were amazing.

It didn't taste too bad either.

A Most Traumatic Day.

I'm a cat person.  I make no apology for it.  Dogs & I are not sympatico.  Now the MOTH used to be a dog person  ~ a long time ago, before he met me but we have only ever owned one dog because, like most women, the bulk of care fell to me & I find dogs just too much.

Over time the MOTH has come to tolerate the plethora of cats in his life but it was Issi who turned him into a cat man.  Issi was an alpha male, protective of his person [me] to a fault, incredibly loyal, smart & affectionate.  Some animals who come into your life are just special.  It is an honour to know them.  Issi was that cat.  Losing him was devastating.

It was the MOTH who said to get another cat.  In fact he said to get 2 cats & though we were all still grieving Issi one does not look a gift horse in the mouth & so the girls & I went cat hunting while the iron was hot.

The MOTH gave us a long list of instructions.  He had very definite ideas about the sort of cats he wanted.  Luckily we did what he meant, not what he said because he was quite rattled by the 2 we finally brought home.  Not what he was expecting. They were older kittens, semi~long~haired, timid, & being Ragdoll Xs, very immature.  But they were exactly right for our house being affectionate & docile & happy just to be with their people, which is nice because we are home a lot.

 Marlow was incredibly timid & once bonded to me wouldn't let me out of his sight.  It drove us all to distraction while he matured & grew up a little into a very confident, social cat.  His brother is still very skittish around strangers.  Even now, neither cat is very far from me.  Oh, they go off on their own but never so far as they can't see & hear me & know exactly what I am doing & they expect, as a matter of course, that they will be petted any time I happen to wander past, even if I have to wait for them to reach me.

Our routine in the mornings is predictable ~ & we all know how cats like routine. I am almost always first up & depending on whether one or both or neither cat has slept with us cart cats downstairs with me because the first order of the day is to feed them.  Only then can I proceed to make coffee.

As soon as the cats have finished eating they proceed to the verandah door & wait to be let out.  The thing is, no matter how early I get up they are never allowed out until it is fully light, which just now, is just before I take the MOTH down to his boat.  By the time  I return they have finished their business & are waiting to greet me @ the pathway before settling into their daytime positions: Kirby on the shadecloth over the western garden, Marlow on one of the verandah chairs.  On wet, cold days they are usually back inside before I get home.

Yesterday, Kirby greeted me enthusiastically but there was no sign of Marlow.  Not worried.  Very occasionally he gets distracted & arrives a little later & I will find him happily ensconced in one of his usual possies. I called him around 9ish, not having seen him but no cat arrived.  My prayer partner arrived shortly after that & we settled in for a couple of hours of serious prayer.  I called Marlow again when she left.  No cat. By now I was starting to worry.  Understand:  this cat never does this!  He is constantly underfoot, moving when I move, always there, somewhere in my vicinity, always squeaking & chirring to me.

By the time the MOTH arrived home I was seriously concerned. My imagination did not help.  I was having trouble keeping the most awful thoughts @ bay: crabbers who put cats in their pots; snakes, hawks, foxes; council trap.  The thought of my marvellous, timid cat alone, hurt, frightened & wondering why his people didn't come for him was excruciating.  I walked all over our point calling for him for hours. The MOTH, with his nice big voice, joined me.  The whole neighbourhood must have known we had a missing animal!

It got dark.  The boys dinner time had come & gone ~ no Marlow.  Marlow is the cat whose mind is constantly on his belly.  For him not to arrive early for his food has never happened.  He starts an hour or so before he knows it's dinner time in an effort to persuade me he is literally starving to death & how could I be so cruel as to deny him food? 

I shot off an email to the council pound.  I prayed.  I went out in the dark & called again ~ & again.  No Marlow.  It was heartbreaking.  There was nothing else I could do but the thought of shutting down the house for the night & trying to sleep without knowing where my cat was was agonizing.

I know some people would say: It's just a cat...an attitude I do not understand.  Our cats are family.  We are responsible for their care & well being. Taking good care of our animals is not only the right thing to do, it is the godly thing to do, so it was with a very heavy heart I began turning off all the lights.  It was then I heard a thump on the verandah.  A very skittish Marlow was slinking towards the door, tail down, belly to the ground, anxious to reach me & be let inside before he was shut out for the night.

I don't know where he was hiding.  Somewhere close, too frightened to come out, but he must have heard us calling & calling. We are so relieved to have him home!  So very grateful for God's care & provision for him ~ but I never want to have another day like that. Ever.

Yo~Yo Land.

It is being one of those years ~ you know the ones: too much happening; too many changes; up & down, round & round like a yo~yo.

Raising 5 kids was chaotic.  I must have been mad a lot of the time.  Having 5 adults is insane.  They are multiplying like rabbits.

We did our first wedding a couple of years ago & our first grandchild shortly after ~ & we are sort of managing that.  Sort of.  We live where we do & have the lives that we have so grandparenting is not always easy, though I am lucky.  My son wishes I could be round more, which is heaps better than being the unwanted meddling grandparent.

Now baby number 2 is on its way & should be here come October. They may even land on my birthday.  What am I supposed to think about that?

My lot are not only late bloomers; none of them were ever all that interested in the whole marriage, kids, family thing & they all have occupations the Lord has called them into that have taken priority.  Now, suddenly, OT has announced his engagement & a wedding date & Chile Girl is agitating to be home for it only she is on the mission field & had her long furlough last year.  Her time in Chile may be drawing to an end.  She has found the last year really, really hard ~ not because the work has grown more difficult or burnout but quite simply because much has happened in the family in the interim & she has not been here for it.  Skyping with mummy or getting the FB message update is not the same as being here, being involved, being able to help.

I call CG my B&W child.  There are no shades of grey, no nuances.  A thing is, or it isn't. And so not being able to say goodbye to her grandfather, not being here for the funeral, not being around for her Gran, Ma's reiterated wish for her to come home, new babies arriving that it will be months [or even years] before she meets, have taken their toll & no reminders that she spent quality time with all her grandparents while she was here makes up for that.

And so we are planning for CG's return [temporary, or otherwise]. A new baby.  A new DIL. A house upgrade. New neighbours ~ because Gran's house is now on the Market. The cats are in meltdown.  They do not like change either.

It has begun.

When the Postal Vote returned a yes majority & our gutless government abandoned morality for popularity &, quite frankly, the peer pressure of other western nations, some of us knew that wasn't the end of it.  It was only the thin edge of the wedge. Seriously?  All your friends are jumping off the Harbour Bridge so you gotta go join them too? Adults are supposed to be beyond the schoolyard stuff, but apparently not.

I was appalled @ the vitriol Margaret Court coped for stating the conservative Christian position on everything LGBT. The woman is a tennis legend & a Rhema Pastor. As a pastor not only is she entitled to state the Church's position, she is required to! Now it is a man named Folau, who is, apparently, a Christian first & Rugby legend after that. Ok, so I wouldn't go on Twitter & say something along the lines of  *All homosexuals are going to HELL unless they repent & turn to God* ~ but that is certainly the conclusion I would draw from the scriptures. However... he is  entitled to state his beliefs without condemnation.  You don't have to agree with him.  That is your right, but you are required, in a civilised & egalitarian society, to tolerate his beliefs in the same way he is forced to tolerate others beliefs. And please, learn the meaning of homophobic before you use it to slander someone!  Homo = man; Phobia=fear ~ fear of man. *sigh* Not fear of homosexuals. And yes, these are journalists, who should certainly know better & how to use their mother tongue properly!

I know there is a quite large segment of Christianity who disagree with the traditional Conservative Christian viewpoint but I think they have misunderstood the scriptures & are now misrepresenting them to others ~ which would not matter except the wages of sin is death, homosexuality is a sin [yes, you can help it; it is a choice] & it will result in spiritual death. God doesn't want to see anyone in hell, so warning people is actually an act of love, not hate.

I am tired of hearing people justify their sin with excuses like: God made me this way. No, God did not!  When God created the world He declared everything *good*.  The Hebrew word is *tov* & it means *functioning in the way it was meant to.* Male/female is *tov* because the first command was to *Go forth & multiply*.  Anything else is dysfunctional & part of satan's great deception & man's rebellion.

What's more, There is no scientific or biological evidence to support the *I was born this way* belief but there is both scientific & biblical evidence to suggest that we train our brains in certain ways & they can be retrained.  I hear California has now made it illegal to help someone retrain their brain. *sigh*  So now even homosexuals don't get to choose either?

We have lost the art of civilised debate, of being able to state a philosophical position without reverting to slander or vilification. Robust debate is necessary to a healthy society.  When one segment of society seeks to shut down dissent in the name of *tolerance* [whereby it justifies intolerance in the name of tolerance], we are much sicker than we think we are ~ & baby, we are a very, very sick nation.  Gender Bender philosophy for kids who are still learning girl bits & boy bits are different; unisex toilets; men who think they are women & women who want to be men; gender neutral parenting; gender neutral language... This is relativism gone mad. May God forgive us; we know not what we do.

Another One Bites the Dust.

My children like giving me plenty of prior warning ~ not. So it was no surprise that OT should ring as the MOTH & I were headed to the mainland on Friday to ask if we were free for Saturday lunch @ Sirromet.

Sirromet is the local winery, & like most wineries in Australia also hosts a restaurant ~ in Sirromet's case 3! What Sirromet is notorious  for in this house is being the very first venue ODD performed at on a rock concert sized stage as the opening act for the Ten Tenors, a performance I never saw as I refused to pay $80 to sit on the grass without food or water amongst a crowd that was rock concert size! So I had never done more than drive round the circuit to abandon & collect my child.

I had looked @ the Lurleen restaurant menu several times but it never had something I was prepared to eat @ a time I wanted, so being shouted for lunch @ any of the alternatives was certainly going to be novel.

We ended up @ the Cellar Door, not really sure why we were there but not adverse to a free feed either.  Ostensibly we were there to spend time getting to know OT's fiance ~ but we have meet her several times & like her very much indeed. However we are becoming a bit of a licorice all sorts family.  T1 is married to a Zimbabwean, The Chile Girl has a Chile Boy & now OT has an AngloIndian ~ not that we care about her ancestry but, as she pointed out, we do have to deal with her culture & honouring parents [yes, her husband's as well as her own] is very important & she wanted to make absolutely sure we were happy to have her in the family & saw no impediment to a successful union.  We don't & are wildly happy!

We had a lovely lunch & as a bonus saw heaps of the small fawn wallabies that graze between the grape vines.

Walking's the Thing.

They grow so fast @ this age!  Each time I visit our Little Man has a new skill, is achieving different milestones, has grown up just that little bit more. 

Despite not being either particularly energetic or sporting myself, what the Little Man & I do together is walk to the park.  The Little Man knows I'm good for the swing & the  peddle see~saw ~ & no, his little legs can't reach.  I hold him & run till I'm out of puff. And we do the slide.  I used to climb up & sit him in my lap to go down.  Then I lifted him up & we did the whole *sit & slide* thing but last time he was determined to haul himself up the ladder all by himself but of course he is tiny & it was exhausting. Now mummy is suffering from morning sickness we have extended the walk bit by going from park to park ~ only I exhausted the Little Man @ the first one so we just walked.

 The shire is weird in that there are still farms interspersed amongst the neat suburban lawns & where there are farms there is bush & where there is bush there is wildlife. Just before our regular park is a rather scraggly farm with a dirty bit of swampy creek & horses, chickens running amok, & either egrets or ibis perched on the rails & up the trees.  These are ibis, world renowned scavengers!

The other way is even stranger. Beside the scraggy farm is the best park with loads of different things for the kiddies to do, including a half court with a hoop, but the area is full of rentals & tradies ~ not upper crust.  The other way is definitely upper class. Every back yard has a pool. The front yards are immaculate grass oasis & the cars are posh ~ so posh I have no idea what they are but obviously new, undinted & gleaming bright.  Here the park is hidden between 2 cul de sacs ~ but what a sad dreary little park, all uncut grass with a lone swing & a sad little slide.  Even the seat sits forlorn in sweltering sunlight rather than under the dappled shade of a gum tree.

However...

If you walk to the end of the park by the right~of~way & through to the back streets it is a different world again.  Here lie the big houses & the old gardens.

 I know they are old established gardens because  even  the elkhorn in the tree has some size about it.  We have an absolutely enormous one but it has taken 30 years to grow it to the size it is. This isn't quite so big but it is a lovely garden.

At the end of the street someone else has gone all tropical, which must be lovely in the summer heat but there is always that one neighbour who doesn't seem to know which country & period they are in...

 Elizabethan England with pines & palms???

Oh, & the Golden Pendas are flowering just now.  Aren't they super?!