A Bit of Earth

One of the things I told myself I was absolutely going to do once I moved to Dalby, was grow an edible garden. Other things on the list included ‘learn the ukulele’ and ‘write a novel’, so I guess we can say it was a fairly ambitious list. But despite having bought then abandoned a ukulele and lol don’t even talk to me about a novel, I have in fact, been rather successful at cultivating a small garden. And yes, some of it is even edible.

Please don't look too hard at the sad basil on the left, the sad basil and I are working through its issues

I had a few rather disastrous attempts at it, and then suddenly I just got into the groove of it. Every time I go out there, something is a little greener, a little bigger, a little better. I water regularly, I re-pot as necessary and I am always adding little things to it. Unfortunately, my real estate agent is a ruiner of dreams, which means I can only keep things in pots, but despite this hurdle, I really have cultivated my own little corner of Dalby. I grow things I would like to grow, I try things that seem ok. It’s mine, and this one little thing makes me happier than I can possibly express.

I’ll try though, in blog form, no less.

There is a deep satisfaction in making something from nothing. I think it’s one of the reasons I like knitting so much. You start with string, essentially, and you weave that shit together in a complicated little knot over and over and the next thing you know you’ve got something functional. In my case, that’s always a scarf, because I haven’t quite progressed to anything more complicated than that, but shit it’s still something new that didn’t exist before. Writing is much the same. Pulling words out of your brain and twisting them into some kind of story, or even just a sentence… that is some amazing stuff right there. I’m doing it right now, every word I write did not exist in this particular order before I came along and put them here. Isn’t that a truly fantastic thing?

I figure I can just grow the plants *over* the ugly shit in the yard, and pretend its not there

Gardening is that fantastic sensation PLUS the feeling of helping something to grow. It’s not just making something; it’s making something live, it’s creating life, and it’s friggin awesome.  Knowing that I made this thing, and that it wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t applied myself, if I hadn’t tried hard, and persevered, gives me a really big sense of accomplishment. And I know that it’s just a little thing, I didn’t save a rainforest, or grow a whole human inside me or anything, but it’s empowering, it fills me up with a giant ball of happiness.

View out our back door

It’s funny actually, but I’m sure this is the feeling people have when they do make a whole human, except multiplied by about ten thousand. But to be honest, I’m just content with zucchini plants and flowers for now, lol babies seems too much. I’m full of joy and bouncing with happiness about a bunch of plants, can you imagine if I made a baby? I’d be hysterically jumping on the furniture. It seems too much, and I’m very content with my herb babies and my vege babies, and anyway, they are much cheaper to feed, and they don’t poop themselves… and if ants get on them I’m not the worst person ever.

And I won't be sent to jail when I hand pollinate this zucchini plant in Spring.

Country/Girl: A Good Day

Plants, they're a thing.

“Is it very far from your house?”

“Yeah, it’s right on the edge of town, probably about as far from my place as you can get. About a 5 minute drive”

Small town living is still such a new experience to me, but sometimes I do catch myself saying stuff like this, without any trace of humour in my voice. Perspective changes when you move somewhere like Dalby. Once I thought Toowoomba was a tiny, hole of a place, and now it seems like a massive city. Driving through it takes aaaaaaaaaages. Beautifully, I know this must mean that there are people living in even smaller towns who think Dalby is way too big and I have met people who consider those of us that live in town to be ‘townies’, not real country people like those who live on properties in the region.

I am obviously not a real country person, because I’m so new, but I really am loving the small town life. Yesterday was a really good day, let me step you through it.

7:45am – I drag myself out of bed at the earliest time I’ve had to in a long while. Ah, unemployment, you sexy beast. It is way too cold to be alive.

8am – I eat a delicious warm breakfast of porridge with berries and, of course, a cup of tea. This has become so routine for me I find myself going to sleep actually excited about my breakfast in the morning. It’s so delicious. And this is huge for me considering I spent many years not being able to stomach anything before about 10am.

8:15am – I doll myself up all corporate like

8:45am – I leave the house for a job interview. It’s nice and close so I walk.

9am – Job interview. I’ve already been interviewed by this company, and I’m not 100% sure what to expect here.

9:15am – I realise he is offering me a job. Not the job I applied for but one I have absolutely no experience in. He says I have the right attitude/temperament for it and would like to train me. I am chuffed but stunned and ask him if I can think about it, he is more than happy to oblige.

9:30am I am home already and spend some time contemplating the position I have been offered. I also call my mum and drink some tea. I spend some time cultivating my tea tumblr and interacting with humans I know on the internet.

11:30am I call my Nana. We talk for more than an hour about all sorts of things, but specifically we discuss gardening in great detail. She is a master. I describe my little yard to her and she gives me advice on what I can do with it. She spends some time trying to convince me to take furniture from her even though we live quite far away from each other and none of it would fit in my house.

12:45pm – I contemplate the special dinner I might make for my friends when they come up this weekend and write a shopping list.

1pm – At the mall in town, I discover the GLORIOUS news that the deli now sells sushi. It is a brand I know to be actually good. This is the only sushi in town, and I am so excited I order a sandwich instead. The sandwich has Brie on it and I am so excited about the sushi I text my mum to let her know. She calls me again and we have a brief chat.

1:15pm – I look for some people I need to interview for the ABC Open workshops I am doing. There are 2 people in particular I see all the time who I think would be really interesting to talk to. Of course they are nowhere in sight.

1:30pm – I go grocery shopping. Riveting stuff here, people. Oh, also I buy a crotchet needle and some yarn because I’m AWESOME.

2:30 pm – Deciding to take some of my Nana’s advice, I go to the giant Mitre 10 and buy some dirt and a trowel. One of the ladies who works there is super rude for no reason, and this is so out of character with pretty much everyone I’ve ever met here that I am stunned and outraged. They don’t sell plants, but the nice man at the counter tells me where the landscaping place is.

2:40pm – Driving around town to all these little places, I get a sudden and overwhelming rush of love for Dalby. The sun is shining, everyone (except that Mitre 10 lady) is lovely and helpful. The streets are wide and everything is close together. I’m running all these errands and they’re all within spitting distance of each other. I don’t even care that I accidentally scraped my car with the trowel.

2:45pm – THE LANDSCAPING PLACE IS AMAZING. It is beautiful and full of lovely plants and garden things and house things and I want to spend FOREVER there. I manage to only spend about 20 minutes there, and pick out some great little plants that are on sale. I tell the guy I will probably see him again soon because I’ll kill the plants and he encourages me to try not to.

3:15pm – sitting in my backyard, happy as a kid in dirt. Because I am, in fact, a kid in dirt. I pot all my new little plants in pots I stole from my mother’s garden last time I was in Brisbane. I make a little corner of the garden come alive with herbs and lavender and things. There’s a strawberry plant too but I don’t have a lot of hope for that one, it’d be too good to be true to have my own strawberries.

3:45pm – I get the old, ugly hose working and water everything. I also clean the outside walls a bit and fill a plastic bag with crap the last tenant left in the yard; cigarette butts and broken pegs and things. I decide not to despair about just how much crap there is and take it one plastic bag at a time. If I chip at it for a few weeks it should be nice again soon.

4pm – I shower all the dirt off me and contemplate that job some more.

4:30pm – I potter on the internet again.

4:55pm – I get a call from another place I have been interviewed at. He asks me to come in for a THIRD time tomorrow morning at 8:30 and I agree hurriedly before really finding out why.  SPOILER – it’s to offer me the job, which I totally just accepted! Hooray! 

5pm – I wash the dishes and Boyfriend gets home. I regale him with my excellent day (while wearing soap sud gloves) and make him come and stare at herbs, which he says look great.

6pm – I make Shepherd’s Pie while Boyfriend plans his lessons.

7pm – We eat Shepherd’s Pie. Delicious. It’s excellent ABC TV night so we watch Doctor Who (Are you my mummy?), Randling, Seven Dwarves (such a great documentary, I love it) and Laid (although at this point Boyfriend has gone back to planning).

10:30pm – We go to bed and I spend half an hour half sleepily convincing myself that the interview the next day is actually a race and if I get there after the other final applicant (there was no other final applicant in the end of course) then I’ll lose the race and they’ll give me a silver medal but no job. 

33 Week Challenge Week 5: Sunrise over Sea

Challenge no. 15 – Watch a sunrise from Mt. Coot-tha

Well, I’ve seen a few sunrises in my time, but mostly from the wrong end. That is to say, in my youth* (for I am aged and nostalgic now) I stayed up late enough at parties to “shinerun” as some people I knew called it, to celebrate the end of a party with the sunrise. Most of the time, however, we were too drunk or too tired to actually watch the sunrise, and it was more sort of: “ok, the sunlight’s on the street, NOW can I go to bed?” I did once shinerun and watch a sunrise on a New Year’s morning once. That was pretty good.

*actually, I did this last weekend.

Again, in my youth, I worked in a Donut King and later at a coffee shop. Shifts started at 6am so depending on the time of year I may have seen a few sunrises, but a lot of the time I was in the shop before it happened, or on a train, and usually, still asleep anyway.

This Saturday just gone was the first time in my life I got up specifically to watch a sunrise. Now, in my more comfortable years, I have a job that starts at a normal time and a desire to sleep in as much as possible – it really has never occurred to me to *want* to get up for such a thing. I mean, how good can it really be? I’ve seen the sun. It’s all orange and glowy, how good can it really look when it comes up. And that’s the thing, it’s not really an event, we living in these modern times know it isn’t “coming up”, it’s not the gods deciding to let us live for another day by bringing the sun out of the underworld, it’s not a new sun each time. In fact, it’s not even going around us, we’re going around it, and we couldn’t see it earlier because we were facing the other way in our daily rotation. It’s the same sun as yesterday, as every day, it’s the same sun that’s currently weakly shining behind a bunch of clouds and doing nothing to warm my freezing house. Saturday morning wasn’t special, it was just another orbit, another rotation, in a cycle that’s been going on for billions of years. 6:35am was just the time that the sun shone on Brisbane again.

Can you tell I’m an atheist?

Look, the point I think you know I’m trying to make here is that it was still beautiful anyway. That’s what I love about not believing in stuff. I find the very nature of our orbit and our rotation and the sun itself beautiful. I don’t find it beautiful because god made it so; I find it beautiful because it is.

You know what was not beautiful? My face at 5:30am… which is when I woke up. Somehow, even though I knew I was getting up to see a sunrise, my body still couldn’t compute why it was so dark and why I was making it get out of it’s warm blankets, and then, much to it’s horror, outside to get my hoodie off the line. Before 7am my body and brain are two separate entities. This produces what I like to call my ‘zombie face’. It’s a sort of dry, yet drooling face, with whispy hair and a droopy eye. It’s the kind of face that makes my loving and long-term boyfriend say things like “for a pretty girl you really can be really very ugly sometimes”. Boyfriend has seen this face a few times. One time we had a flight to New Zealand that we had to get up at 5:30 for. When he tried to gently wake me, I punched him in the nose. The face had taken over.

This is a photo of me at 5:45 in the morning, I appear to have hidden most of the zombie face by raising my eyebrows and trying really hard, but I can see that it is still there, waiting to scare small children.

So I drank a tea in the dark, donned as much warm clothing as physically possible, and tried to wash the zombie away. Chris, my sunrise companion arrived and drove us to Mt. Coot-tha for my first, deliberate sunrise watching experience.

And yeah, it was beautiful. For those who know the geography, despite Coot-tha being a fairly poor excuse for a ‘Mt.’ we could see all the way out to Moreton Island and the ocean beyond. The sun came up there, and despite (or perhaps due to) the thick cloud cover, we saw massive beams of sunlight hitting the long white dunes out there. It looked a lot, as Connor, another sunrise buddy said, like Jesus was walking on the water out there. Unfortunately, he chose the wrong side of Moreton Island to stage his second coming, so no one will ever know. There was a mist over Ipswich and out to the Dividing Range that slowly lifted as we watched and a reflection of the sun’s light on clouds out to the West. It was genuinely, well worth the effort of getting up and subjecting others to the zomb.

Here are some photos I took on my phone:

And here are some actually good ones Chris took:

 this one is amazing

Connor and I looking at the thing

wow, right?

Good Morning!

An amazing added bonus was that I then had a whole day in front of me. We ate breakfast at the café at 7:30am and I was home by 8. I was so very awake for my karate class at 10 and by midday decided I would use the time to watch the entire Eccleston season of Doctor Who.

Which, I think, leads me into a couple of quick updates about some other challenges I have recently started.

Becoming a Doctor Who fan is coming along nicely. Ok, I’m fanatical to the point of being dangerous to myself. Since my last blog post I have watched the entire 5^th season. Here is my reaction to the final episode:

Episode 13: The Big Bang

Tiny Amy – hello!

If there’s no stars, is there a sun?

Time travel is fun!

Seriously, fuck off Dalek.

Ooooh, Sun explained. Thank you.

“It’s a fez, I wear a fez now.”

Ooooooooooooohhh

*cough* the bride’s gone crazy

Doctor in tails!!

I think that was the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

After this, I fought with myself about going on to the 6^th, made the decision to instead go back to the start, watched the whole first and half of the second seasons. At this point, I sort of don’t want to do anything else and am wondering if there is some way to get paid for watching Doctor Who. I had to use significant will power to write this post instead of continue watching. I’m not too worried though, this sort of obsession is normal in me, the need to watch it at all the time will fade, as it did with videos of Neil Patrick Harris, Paul McDermott, The Doug Anthony All Stars and Harry Potter (the books, don’t worry). I’m still a massive fan of all those things, I just need to O.D. for a while and then it will become a part of me, like those things did.

Yes, I know.

Growing and looking after a herb garden nearly fell apart when I discovered that something had eaten all the tops off my seedlings. Seriously, the looking after part is so much more difficult than the planting them part. Like children, really. I put off dealing with this for a few days and then went to the hardware store. I wasn’t sure if it was bugs or possums/rodents but it seemed easier to try killing bugs first, so I got bug spray. Spraying this on my herbs led to the surprising discovery that there were a bunch of, now rather unhappy, bugs hiding in the dirt. The herbs are doing ok, but I keep forgetting to water them so we’ll see how they go.

Writing a blog every Monday for the NYWM is going fine; this is the second of four that I need to do in June, so half way there! I feel sometimes as though I’m cheating, as some people are doing things like writing 1000 words a day or finishing their novels. But at the end of the day, I actually love writing this blog, and this challenge thing has been really excellent for me. Making the commitment to NYWM has helped me stay on track and the Monday deadline makes me feel like I’m a real writer who has to produce material every week…. Even if it is about my zombie face and the earth’s rotation around the sun. I hope you’re enjoying it too.

Stay classy, bloggeroos, stay classy.