AAAHHHH Spring!

Well spring has arrived so Poppy and I have been enjoying as much time outside as we can. Fortunately, this has amounted to quite a bit of time as I have mostly been at home this week and the days are now longer. So much better than in winter.

This is a little screeny sort of thing that I made (with John's help) to hide some of the workings below the electricity meter- never a very pretty place. I'm actually considering painting the actual front of the meter box in chalkboard paint so I can write some more of my favourite quotes on it as it is in the area of my new loveseat. What do you think?

I will gradually add more things to the screen as appropriate and I'm sure that it will soon be just right.

Happy Spring and Autumn, Angela.

Spending Time in Boxes

Isn't it nice to have one of those weekends when nothing is planned and you just let it unfold and take it as it comes? Sometimes I think that we are making our lives far too busy and tend to miss these sorts of times. It seems so very easy to clutter lives without even trying and to nurture a feeling of, "I MUST be doing something." I often feel that too many things are planned for children and then their lives are totally consumed by it. We have tried so very hard not to clutter our lives too much. Kids need to be able to spend time playing, lying on blanket under a tree, sitting staring into space....they need alone time. They need to be able to spend time in a box if they want to for no good reason at all other than it's fun. Sam did just that for a couple of hours this weekend. Oh he wasn't just completely idle in the box. He was hand fed cereal, consumed a small bottle of milk and had a much needed sing-a long to his favourite requests that his very patient mother played on the computer.

The hole in the box that I had to feed him through was not this big- I WISH! It was about the size of a letter box slot! This was just before he had exploded out of the box like the incredible hulk!

The best thing about this box as far as I was concerned is that it had an iron love seat in it. On dusk about a week ago, I opened the back door only to find a sheepish looking John with a very large box. He was about to hide it when I caught him in the act. What a nice surprise!

Now I have something else to play with in the garden.
I've always wanted a loveseat.
I have decided to have a "love"theme in this area of the garden and I found this wonderful idea on another blog....if only I could remember where I was at the time. They had painted a terracotta pot with chalkboard paint and written the name of the plant on it. I have used mine to write a verse from Shakespeare's' "Romeo and Juliet",

Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight!

For I ne're saw true beauty till this night.

A happy week to everyone, Angela.

Who are the People in Your Neighbourhood?

My lovely neighbour Sonja stopped by the other day with this beautiful bunch of roses for me in appreciation for taking care of one of her little ones (she has five) for a couple of hours. How nice is that?!

Our neighbours are some of the nicest and most interesting people that you will ever come across. We all get on like a house on fire. You know, one of those neighbourhoods where it's not unusual to get a phone call asking for a cup of sugar, or "do you have sage growing in your garden?"and the occasional, "I think I just saw your little Timmy (our Shetland) in Jay-Jays paddock....is he supposed to be there?".

I think because we are all on five acre lots out of town we all seem to be "doing" people who have come to the same conclusions about how life should be....raising a family on the edge of the bush with plenty of space to do things for kids and adults alike.

There's a fitter and turner and an engineer who are forever inventing and actually making whatever they dream up and want to have a go at. They are very successful at what they do. There's a physiotherapist, a retired English professor (I had better spell that correctly) and a retired panel beater who does up old cars and racing cars and is so fastidious that you could eat off his shed floor.....if you wanted to that is.
Then there are the gardeners. Almost everyone along our end of the street love gardening on a grand scale and so were drawn to the size of our blocks. The soil is friable and volcanic and the climate is quite mild. We often get more rain along this range than places just 10 kilometres either side of us. AND we get fog which also helps to keep the place wetter.

It's a quiet road where families meet up for barbeques or tennis and bike riding on the road. A place where happy memories are made. And its name? What else but....HAPPY VALLEY ROAD.