floating world

merry christmas

Done.

Presents are wrapped, biscuits are baked and now I am going to watch carols on TV, eat lasagne, chat to Mark, cuddle the cat, have a glass of wine and enjoy the Christmas tree lights. Such a change from last year, when I was up until all hours making pavlova and sewing presents like a mad woman.

I must say, I like this version of Christmas eve better.

(Having a baby who sleeps for more than 2 hours at a time, and is not breastfeeding anymore helps tremendously).

Wishing you all a wonderful day tomorrow, wherever you are and however you spend it.

xx

stockings

This is another project that was hanging around from 2007 and is finally finished - such a good feeling. I cut the red stocking shapes out before last Christmas and then ran out of time so shelved them, but the embroidery and sewing together hardly took any time once I fished them out of the WIP pile. I was thinking of natural linen stockings but Mark insisted that Christmas is no time for minimalism and they had to be red. Luckily I had a big chunk of red cotton from Ikea lurking in the study, in fact I made all three stockings from stuff I had already, which is kind of scary and satisfying all at once.

definitely not a last minute gift

Finally finished, 1 year on.

a glimpse of 1979

My brother gave me a very cool birthday present - a copy of the Australian Women's Weekly from the year I was born. It was published on April 4, 1979, and features an attractive shot of our future monarch in his cossie on the front cover.

The articles inside are great - "Why pregnant women shouldn't drink", "Is 30 too late for your first baby?" and a three page spread on how to "Add glamour to a meal" with garnishes. I plan to try the Radish Rose and Tomato Lily at the first possible opportunity.

There's also an advertorial from Telecom on "The Future" - which is fascinating. It talks about developments that will soon reach Australia, like cordless phones, car phones and teletext.

I love looking at the clothes and hairstyles.

The fashion features are great - look at all those hats -

and the interior decorating section is amazing too.

And the whole magazine is full of cigarette ads, which makes it feel quite foreign.

In some ways it makes me feel very old (can the world really have changed so much in my lifetime?) but it is brilliant to have a glimpse at what life in Australia was like 29 years ago.

29

It's my birthday today. I am getting dangerously close to thirty.

But it has been a lovely day - lots of nice calls and messages from friends and family, and then barbeque dinner on the balcony on a sticky summer evening, with a rainbow and flashes of lightning to make it feel dramatic. And my mum made me a super-dense chocolate birthday cake, yum. I feel very lucky.

harvest

Homegrown tomatoes, picked today. They taste really good.

guerilla gardening in annandale

A new sculpture and garden have sprung up near where I live, on a little triangle of land carved out by two roads and under some train tracks. It suddenly appeared on the weekend, so I walked down today to have a closer look. It is so cool - the garden has been done properly, with stones and edging and trees and plants, and then the sculpture is of a big fibreglass troll with a sign that looks like the official RTA signs except it says "Have you paid your troll?" - very apt, since it sits under the bridge and Sydney has been taken over by toll roads in recent years.

I met some baffled contractors who had arrived to put posters up on the walls, which are now obscured by the troll and brick-printed paper. They knew nothing about the garden, and the troll had "Guerilla Gardeners" written on one side, so it didn't seem to be a council-sanctioned project... but I wondered who could afford to pay for such a big garden on a guerilla budget. I was very excited by the thought of independent guerilla artist / gardeners operating undercover in my suburb, and slightly deflated when a bit of googling revealed that Guerilla Gardeners is a new show that will be on Channel Ten in the new year. I can't quite imagine what this show will be like (Will it involve Jamie Durie? Will the least popular garden be eliminated each week?) - but I was very impressed with the garden. I hope that it stays, and that the plants survive.

the annual christmas gocco session

Ticking each item off the pre-Christmas to-do list makes me gleeful. One of my favourite jobs is making Christmas cards and gift tags with the gocco. This is the 8th year I've done it, so it is well and truly a Christmas tradition.

And my inner secretary takes great delight in doing a ginormous mail merge to make all the address labels. I knew those years of admin work had to be good for something.

Cards are now winging their way around the world, and tags are tied to the slowly-growing pile of presents under the tree.

festivity

We bought this squat little Christmas tree on the weekend and now the house smells deliciously of pine. It has been decorated to be cat and toddler proof - luckily most of our decorations are fabric or paper anyway. And I've hung up the much-loved Christmas mobile  - I bought it when we lived in Tokyo and didn't have room for a tree. Candles are lit, and the Sufjan Stevens Christmas songs are on repeat.

I'm much more excited about Christmas this year than I have been for ages. I think this is because:
- Mark is taking 2 weeks off, so we will get to have lots of family time
- Ali is old enough to enjoy things, and he is getting very excited by the tree and all the decorations
- In 2006 we were in the middle of an international move and in 2007 I had a baby who woke to be fed every 2.5 hours, so felt like a complete zombie. In comparison this year is a breeze.
- Unlike in previous years, I haven't set myself a ridiculously ambitious list of homemade presents. Some are going to be bought and that is fine. There are a few things that I would like to finish off, but I think this year I'll have time to relax and enjoy the holiday with my family.

Apart from Christmas, there are lots of other good things making me happy right now:
- Summer fruit
- Homemade Christmas cake courtesy of my mum.
- A lazy picnic brunch at Neilsen Park with friends on the weekend
- Watching ridiculous Bollywood movies (Main Hoon Na is utter genius)
- Japanese bento dinner and then film festival
- Fabulous CDs from the swap Sooz organized
- it's my birthday next week!

wall daisies

It cheers me up to see these daisies clinging to cracks in the wall. Seeing them grow and flower out of almost nothing is encouraging, somehow.