What's not to like

Christmas was a very happy affair in my corner of the world. It started on Christmas Eve, when we had the first feast with my sister in-law, her husband and three sons. My oldest nephew - just turned ten - made excellent biscuits that he served us with coffee after his mother had fed us a beautiful meal of pork and vegetables.

This young man is promising to be a great cook as well as a prudent housekeeper. Here he demonstrates a perfect use for the leftover chocolate ganache that filled the biscuits:

As always we celebrated Christmas Day at our house with many portions of both our families. It was bright and sunny but not too hot to make quaffing kilos of roasted meats and plum pudding difficult.

The highlight of Christmas for all of us is my mother-in-law's pudding. My brothers start inquiring about the pudding from about September onwards.

You have to be quick to see the pudding in all its glory. It doesn't last long.

If you look closely you'll see the washing up piling up in the sink in the background. Here's where I make my Christmas confession: I actually enjoy the clean up.

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas in what ever way you chose to mark the day. Tomorrow's post will be about the gifts Santa left; as always he met and exceeded my expectations.

Did you have a lovely Christmas? What happened?

There's a pawnshop on the corner in King Street east of Petersham

I have always wanted a gold toe ring but the few I have seen are garish, ugly, too overpriced or not really gold. To compensate for this tiny gap in my life I often have my toenails painted gold, especially in summer. I once read a woman describing gold polish as making her toes "into ten little jewels".

Last week I had my toes gilded and later, hurrying to meet my spouse, stopped short at the window of a pawn shop. I've passed this store many times but have never been charmed by the jewellery in the window. To be fair, they've never displayed a gold toe ring.

It was twenty five dollars. I thought it was worth that alone for perfect match it made with my toenails.

And grateful too for sunlight on the garden

To describe the last couple of weeks as hellish would be to call the Titanic a boating accident. Suffice to say I am very glad to have a few quiet days ahead of me.

There will be tea, at least three books and an assortment of magazines that feature little text and many coloured pictures:

I expect the occasional visitor too.
This chap showed up in the bathroom last night. Several minutes' discussion ensued as to his heritage. In the end we agreed that neither of us have a clue what kind of spider he is. Mr Multilegs was escorted gently from the premises and introduced to the enormous tree up the yard.

My only other task during this lovely holiday period is to re-educate Kate about sleeping on clean washing or on my clothes. This effort is working out great for her ...

Not so much for me.

When tunnels meet beneath the mountains

This time of year is gorgeous. If only all my current circumstances matched the weather.

I worked yesterday (is there anything more drear than watching Sunday slip by through your office window) and today I faced the consequences of some bad decisions not once, not twice but three times. I ask you: is it better to say sorry too late than never say it all?

I'm not certain there is a right answer for that. There is, however, the remnants of a rather wonderful Saturday to consider:

Milk, no sugar.
My new silver pendant from Etsy. I love Etsy so much that I sometimes fantasise it's a country I might emigrate to one day.

The skirt I wore on Sunday as compensation for having to spend a glorious day at work. I love the colours.

It was a $4 find at the Buddhist op shop. I only bought it for the colour, because the shape didn't suit me - at least not until it occurred to me that I should just have the skirt hemmed. Sometimes the truth is hidden, but when it comes to cute vintage skirts I believe the bleeding obvious is the often the right answer.

My hydrangea, which has survived some of the most awful attacks from my over-zealous gardening brother. (One of my brothers makes random visits to my house when I am at work and tidies my garden for me. He has nearly killed this plant three times. Each time it manages to right itself and goes on to bloom like this, although lately I fancy that it stares at me from under its leaves, muttering "You people are PEASANTS.") (But yes, my brother is fabulous.)

And I started a new journal. It was supposed to filled with sharp, tender, wry and entirely original observations and yet today - six pages in - I find it filled only with the poems I swore I was never going to write again. I don't know how that happened; I keep thinking I should file a report about it with someone.

But seriously - is it better to say sorry too late than never at all?

So many miles before I get to sleep

The holiday period is approaching. I can't quite see it in the distance but I can hear it. It sounds like a clean house, decidedly un-suitlike clothes and impractical handbags covered in roses.

I love needlepoint purses so badly that a while ago a few of my friends planned to stage an intervention. It would have made no difference. This one is a particular favourite. The woman who sold it to me insisted the original owner/maker was an airline pilot in the Second World War. Sometimes the thought thrills, other times it seems unlikely.

No matter. It is a wonderful purse.

These grand old purses frequently include a small coin purse of matching taffeta tucked inside. Not this one. I like to think the owner stared defiantly at her needleworking mates, squeezed her mouth very tight and declared, "The hell with your taffeta! My coin purse will have roses too!"

And it does.

The kind you hope for

This is my new boxy black blazer from the Cat Protection Society Op Shop. It is made from a lovely dense wool, is fully lined and features real buttoning cuffs and patch pockets for handkerchiefs and emergency liquorice all sorts. I would dissolve into a small gelatinous mass if I were to wear it in this current weather so it's on ice, so to speak, until at least next May.

I buy something from the Cat Protection Society Op Shop whenever I can, partly because they have good loot but mostly because they do a sterling job in caring for cats. For many years I was the chief carer of Chloe, a lovely talkative calico cat who was also entirely deranged. She once took up residence in the wood cooker and could be rarely persuaded to step outside. At the height of that particular bout of madness she even took to taking her meals in the oven.

Once she moved into a disused factory nearby and no amount of coaxing, fish snacks or warm cosy beds could keep her home. She seemed to adopt a strange new homeless cat persona and would take off, back to her cardboard box in the factory, as soon as my back was turned. Eventually some nearby workers, unaware of my efforts to keep my cat in her own home, assumed the mental cat was a stray and took Chloe to the Cat Protection Society. I didn't know where she was for two frantic days. I called vets, some entirely uninterested police stations and a lost cat service. I tried the Cat Protection Society in desperation. The lady who answered was very kind. "Yes, I think we have your cat," she said. "We certainly have one who talks a lot! !" When I arrived to collect Ms Fruitcake I found her in a very swank top floor cage apartment, laying back and smiling like Lana Turner might if someone turned her into a cat.

"She's treating it like a spa holiday," another nice volunteer said. Chloe greeted me with mild condescension, as if I was a service worker she might have employed years ago but could could barely remember.

For all Chloe's lunacy, I was grateful for her safety, and grateful too that she had been cared by people who liked and understood her so well. As discussed yesterday, Mr Zucchini has a new home but here are others who are in need of some assistance:

It saddens me that I can't gather up all the Darias and Soda Pops and rush them all home to live with me, but it's nice to know that they are being cared for with patience and kindness.

And here's Chloe in the early stages of her mind-over-matter phase, sleeping on rocks.

Devils, rocks, deep blue seas and hardplaces

My apologies for the delay - I was trying so hard to post regularly. Sadly my day job was dishing up twelve flavours of stress and unhappiness for a few days; happily it is mostly resolved now.

In my last post I said I'd talk about kindness and I intended to hinge this on Mr Zucchini, the optically challenged homeless cat. Mr Zucchini was in need of kindness soon.

I've have been the recipient of a lot of kindness this week - nice friends who excused me when I wasn't' able to make dinner, sweet colleagues who called with genuine concern in their voice to help with an ugly workload. It makes a difference. Today my boss kindly gave me the day off so set about issuing my own forms of kindness in the form of some comfort food
and a bit of human contact.
Summer has started in earnest so while I ate my body weight in Vegemite toast, I sorted out the clothes that afford the most comfort in Sydney summer humidity. So tomorrow I'll be wear this
.. a polished cotton Jigsaw shirt dress the colour of rockmelons, fresh from the dry cleaner's plastic. Shoes undecided but I'm hoping for something that mismatches my angel-wing toes completely.

And this afternoon, I went to check on Mr Zucchini and to my horror his photo had been taken from the window. My fear was short lived - the nice woman at the Cat Protection Society told me Mr Zucchini went to his new home on Saturday. He was very taken with his new owner and jumped from his cage straight to the their neck. It sounds like the start of a beautiful relationship.