One of the joys...

of getting older, (received a missive the other day from the Labor party inviting me to a workshop on issues confronting the elderly, I was only momentarily insulted and then started to stare reality in the face!), I digress.  As I was saying it is nice to be retired and have more time (or less whatever way you look at it) and I got to thinking that now I do have more time for my friends, no longer tied down and busy, busy, busy. Looking back however that busyness was sometimes just an excuse for laziness.
So as usual I have made a postcard using a carved dragonfly stamp to remind myself that friends are all.

And on that note we are off tonight to a Scottish friend's house to eat...Haggis and work our way through his extensive whiskey collection....just wee sips mind you...(makes funny Scottish noise approximating throat clearing).

The Devil makes work for idle hands....

so, just in case he is lurking around I try to keep busy while doing mindless things such as watching TV or listening to trashy audiobooks. Hence, my ongoing obsession with knitting. Not the useful,"oh what a beautiful sweater, did you make it yourself?" kind of knitting, but fun knitting. In order to do this I trawl the internet looking for patterns such as this one; http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/dog-tea-cosy, by Rian Anderson, a Grommit lookalike.

So while the Universe dictates that I spend a lot of time sitting around, the least I can do is clutter it up with silly stuff like this.

If my heart had wings...

It would fly a million miles and deliver my valentine etegami personally to all of my wonderful online friends in the Etegami Fun Club.
It would make an extra special delivery to our etegami "mother" DosankoDebbie who is currently snowed under (literally) in Sapporo. It is Debbie who has opened up a great wide world of friends through her Facebook page and her gentle guidance in the mysteriesof of Japanese "picture letters", all the while tolerating our individual interpretations of the "rules".
It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words and in many cases that is true for a lot of us, Japanese, and westerners who do not speak the other's language. Sometimes the picture is enough and at other times Debbie will help by translating Japanese to English and vice versa, it is no surprise that she has spent a lifetime in Japan and made her career being a translator.

So a big Happy Valentine to you Debbie for opening up a world of friends for me and many others who cannot easily go out into the world as we would like.

These beans are not for throwing!

This season in Japan is called Setsubun and householders traditionally throw roasted soybeans across their doorstep in order to scare away monsters and the ill fortune that may have accumulated over the previous year. It also marks the day before the official start to spring but here we are going into autumn and my soybeans are  ripening into yummy crunchy edamame my favourite part of a Japanese meal. I certainly won't be throwing them anywhere but down my greedy throat!

Wild wet weather has almost destroyed the veggie garden so today is a day of cleaning up and replanting for the winter season, I'm thinking nice sweet round Japanese turnips, heaps of coriander (cilantro) and nice tender "pick as you go" lettuce.

A short break

in transmission (laziness) and a short break in Sydney explain my absence from blogging.
I find it awfully dispiriting and engendering of a nasty shade of green around my gills when I open up a blog to be confronted with "the reason I haven't been blogging is..." and  it goes on to describe their journey from the base camp at Everest to the summit or a fabulous holiday in some previously unspoiled corner of the earth (until they arrived with a hoard of other tourists). Well dear folks, I too have been on a fabulous short break! Two glorious days in Sydney sharing a hotel with our overseas based son and taking in the best of dining and sightseeing Sydney offers.
Our hotel was the fabulous Park Hyatt which is situated almost underneath the Sydney Harbour Bridge and which gives fabulous views of the harbour and the Opera House across the water.
Australia day on the harbour was wonderful and the crowds of people were well behaved and enjoying the sunshine. We hopped on a ferryboat and for the princely sum of $2.50 each (Seniors discount, the only consolation for growing old) were in the thick of the activity, tall ships, ferryboat races and the enormous flotilla out that day.

 At Rockpool. Happy face!

 Our room at the Park Hyatt (can you tell I was impressed? that is the biggest bed I have ever seen!)

 How I felt about my holiday (the entrance to Luna Park).

 A sentimental response to seeing my old "stamping ground". An etegami of the Opera House.


The high point of the trip was eating at the three hatted Rockpool restaurant, truly beautifully presented  memorable food but being nouvelle cuisine it did leave us space in our tummies for a sneaky ice cream on the way back to the hotel. Yum Cha lunch on Saturday was a world away from the quiet ambience of the Rockpool but we gorged ourselves on chicken's feet and wonton, to some ill effect I must confess but it was simply lovely going down! 
The rains have come since we returned home and our thoughts turn to the disastrous flood we suffered in 2007 so we are wishing hard that the rain eases and we can relax again, life is back to nearly normal!

Ode to a peach.

Well not an ode really, more of a glutton's rant. Of all the peaches that I have eaten in my long life my favourite kind is the white fleshed peach.
Once upon a time in the dark old days it was rare to eat a peach that hadn't been home grown, living as we did in the far arid reaches of the state. To compare a store bought, gassed, stored, transported and probably predigested peach with the glorious ones of memory is to compare a "like" with a passion.
BUT, yesterday the impossible happened, a peach (a white fleshed peach moreover) in all of it's peachy perfection landed in my shopping trolley and more than lived up to my (usually disappointed) expectations.
I brought that beauty home, meaning to paint it before I ate it and this sad etegami is the proof of what happened next.

Back to blogging.

Well, having survived the Christmas/New Year celebrations and the heat wave conditions we are experiencing I decided it was time to burst onto the blogging scene once again.
Life is a bit of a struggle at the moment, drinking lots of water to keep my lousy lungs hydrated.  I used to love summer but find it increasingly difficult to stay well in the heat and humidity.
I have been doing a few constructive things while confined to the cool of the aircon, weeding out cupboards, removing a few of the cobwebs and relocating the spiders that love our high ceilings where they are safely out of reach of my regular but cursory cleaning attempts. I did remember this very relevant Haiku by Issa while I was wielding the broom and apologizing to the spiders, reminding them that they had a had a good run or "a fair suck of the sauce bottle" as we usually say!

Another (the last I promise) Year of the Snake etegami.

Lastly an etegami to thank a neighbour for the wonderful chilli peppers she gave me.

Follow your star.

Happy Christmas everyone.

The postman always rings...oops!,sorry wrong title,

Yep my life is not nearly as exciting as Lana Turner's in the movie of that name and my dear Prof can rest easy as I have no plans to bump him off unless........
When the mail arrives at our house there is not the usual reluctance to take the long walk to the box to collect it, bills are outnumbered by etegami these days. What a joy to open it and see that someone, whom you know only online, somewhere, it could be anywhere, (try Iceland for instance) has thought of you and sent their precious work to you. Doesn't get any better than that!
I try to acknowledge the cards in my other blog, Etegami Inbox but I thought it would be nice to show some of them here.
Quite a few of the cards are still hanging in the exhibition at John Hunter Hospital, they have been there six months, longer than most pictures hang. The curator explained to me that they provide a welcome distraction to patients and visitors who stop to read the captions and enjoy the colourful painting.
Here I am with Buster, (he thought this photo was for Facebook and he doesn't approve of FB. so he covered his  eyes) surrounded by my riches.

Happy (and safe) Christmas everybody.

Life gets in the way of blogging.

Which is as it should be I suppose. Friends often chide me for "wasting time" on the internet but they don't know my secret! The secret is that I have  MORE friends on the internet than in the real "world" and they never, ever chide me for anything, so there!
Second son came from Singapore and went last weekend, all in the space of a few hours as he made his way to see his favourite band (Devo) twice.
Today was my last visit to the hospital to have my porta cath 'tuned' up until the new year, I am very grateful that I have not had to have it accessed for over 8 months, i.e. no hospital admissions. The year got off to a shaky start with three admissions but by following a strict regime of inhaling antibiotics, hypertonic saline and using my various machines, all of which takes up hours of my day, I can be thankful that the inevitable has been delayed!
The garden is riotous, the pests are thriving,  the first few goodies are being harvested and I have been busy sending out etegami to my online friends to wish them a happy holiday season.

This etegami is the last one I will share on the theme of the Year of the Snake which is coming up all too soon.

I know, bad puns, what can I say?