Bobble Muncher

This is the face of a naughty cat.  He enjoys sleeping on our bed, and more so since I crocheted this blanket for our bed, it's nice and snuggly.  There is quite a bit of textured crochet in the blanket, and for the most part Neo is very respectful of it.  However, there is a section just in front of his rear end that has bobbles on it, and he can't quite resist those.  He stares them down, knowing he is not allowed to be bad to the blanket,  but eventually he can't resist any more, and attacks those bobbles.  They are looking a bit fluffy from their beating.  This morning while we were in bed with a cuppa, I told him off for being a bobble muncher, and to his credit he did stop.  But Neo doesn't like to back down, so instead he decided to lick them.  Neo the bobble licker, he's a dag :-)

 We had company at the front door this morning, Lucy came right up to say hello and ask please can I have some breakfast?  She is a smart cookie is Lucy, we often find her undercover on the verandah when it's raining. 

 Here's this morning's breakfast club, having a munch on some lucerne chaff and wheat.

 Here's the chickens and Spuddles the duck.  They are thoroughly enjoying eating cabbages at present, I cut them in half and leave them in the yard, and they have a lovely time tearing it to pieces.  The yolks of their eggs are so beautifully dark because of their extra diet of cabbage.  Steve has broccolini growing in the vegie patch, and I pull off the lower leaves for the girls, they love those too, any brassica family foliage is much appreciated by the girls.

 These galahs are very cute but they are also a pain in the arse.  My goodness there are so many of them around here, most days we have 40-50 and they make quite a racket.  One thing I will say in their favour though, is that they dethatch our grass magnificently, no need to do any vertimowing on our grass!

 We finally got around to pruning the fruit trees.  This is a very respectable looking almond tree now, it was probably three times the size of this before I got to it with the cutters.  This is an odd tree, it grows rampantly in spring,  the branches grow really long, the foliage is lush and it sets loads of fruit.  But it can't seem to sustain what it has grown, and by the end of summer we find the ends of the branches die back and a lot of the fruit and foliage goes dry and falls off.  It gives the impression of perhaps not having enough water, although all the trees are irrigated and they all get the same amount.  This year we decided to prune it back really hard so it wont have quite so much of itself to maintain, if that makes sense.  If you are wondering why there is a pile of old wood under the tree, we do that to stop the chicken from digging huge holes.  They are very tenacious with their digging, to the point of exposing roots sometimes! 

I toddled off to Bunnings the other day and invested in a not too heavy, not too light  cordless hedge trimmer to make the work of pruning shrubs a little easier.  I have some osteoarthritis in my right hand these days and find using hand pruners rather painful after a while.  So I think this will be good.  I was hoping to play with it yesterday, BUT, the bloody thing wouldn't start!  We suspect there is a fault in the battery or the charger that came with it, as the battery didn't seem to charge, so I will have to take it back and get it swapped.  Oh well, I can look forward to playing with it next week instead.  :-)

 While I was in town, I popped into Spotlight and stashed up.  This particular yarn, Lionbrand Heartland is one of my absolute favourites but it's expensive so I rarely buy it.  Yesterday it was half price...happy dance!  I want to have a try at crocheting myself a cardigan with the blue yarn, I've never made an item of clothing before and would like to give it a go.  I love the colour, which is more turquoisy than the photo shows, so it's something to look forward to.

 I've been gathering up a healthy collection of non-plastic grocery bags.  I already had a few of the green shopping bags from Coles, but I also crocheted a couple and sewed another one.  As I only shop once a week or a fortnight, I need to have quite a few bags stashed up ready for all my groceries. 
I am a person who believes strongly in reusing things and thus was very pleased with my light bulb moment when I realised that I had a pile of about 10 used calico flour bags.  We buy our Lauke bread mix in 10kg bags, and these calico bags come with handles and a drawstring - perfect!  I've been testing them out at Coles the last few weeks, they are longer and skinnier than the standard grocery bags and thus wont fit on the frame thing they use to pack groceries, but I've been happily offering to pack my own groceries and its been fine.  I feel so virtuous reusing the bread mix bags.  :-)  
Now of course, the biggest problem to overcome is to remember the take the bags into Coles with me, and not leave them in the car!  I suspect we will all do this to begin with :-)

 On the embroidery front, I've been making a couple more oven cloths.  My first one, the light one bottom right, is usually very grubby because I don't have enough cloths to wash it regularly, so I cut some denim from my stash of old jeans in the sewing room, and started prettying it up. 

 Denim matches my kitchen tiles really well, so the old jeans are a great, free resource for sewing bits and pieces. Plus it's thick so I don't have to stuff it with too much more weight to avoid burning my hands.

 When I arrived at our embroidery group last Tuesday, I was very taken with this scene looking over the water towards Albany town.  There was a break in the heavy cloud bank, and the sun was shining through directly onto one tiny little cloud low in the sky.  I thought it looked really pretty.

 And then there is this magnificent sunset, looking through towards Denmark, with the red light shining onto the waters of Wilson's Inlet.  Breathtaking.

Until next time....xx