Happy Boxing day!

Happy boxing day and congratulation on surviving Christmas. 

We had a full traditional Christmas meal and the temperature was 32 degrees Celsius. I love Boxing day as it comprises of relaxing and eating left overs. It is going to be Gammon and eggs for dinner. 

I spent the whole day stitching.  What bliss. No shopping!!!

Hope all that celebrated Boxing day had a marvelous one!

Have a good one!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to one and all and I hope you get all that you wished for.

This is in my sewing room, which is now the kittens bedroom. I normally take this out and hang it in the lounge. This year however, with the kittens, decorations are at a minimum as they tear around the house like little monsters. 

The older cat is on my bed moaning about the messy children. She has come a long way and no longer just hates the babies. She has been trying to clean them, but they are just too fast. 

The dinner table has it's normal Christmassy cloth on it. The kittens have pulled it off twice so far. At this rate they will need to be in their room, when we serve dinner later.

The kittens found a box and are doing the normal things that cats do when they find boxes. This is one of the pictures where both cats could be seen. The little girl was hiding inside the box, whilst the little boy attacked.

Dishes where being done and the little boy was doing inspections. He really is a lot different from his sister. If anything is opened he jump inside. He is totally exhausted at night whereas his sister is still going strong.

He is also a total boy when he is tired and pathetically  mews that he needs cuddles and he is sore and out of sorts.

 I found these images and they are fun.

Have a good one!

Happy Summer Solstice!

Happy Summer solstice. I hope you have enjoyed summer so far this year and that the temperatures have not been too severe. The summer rainfall in our area is always such a relief. 

The garden is looking amazing, green has kicked in and there are flowers sprinkled around.

Watching the babies playing in the garden

The baby cats are settling in. Our brown and fluffy cat has toned down the hating and only hisses once she has kissed the babies hello. She is 12 years old so I think she has earned the right to be a grumpy old lady. I will share pictured of the babies at the bottom of the post. The little boy is a total character. His antics are hilarious.

I have finished shopping for Christmas, though this year I have tried to keep it low-keyed. I saw a new word on the news, Excessmas. It says so much. It is not that I feel that a religion should celebrate the change of season, but, I have never thought excess was needed either. This may be due to the fact that I live a comfortable life and don't need to wait for major holidays to get the things that I have been denying myself. It may also be due to getting older and wiser.

I have been sewing my Grannies garden. I have sewed the bottom 4 rows together, What a repetitive task. Sewing 1 inch, park the needle, remove the paper, re-position and repeat. There are 203 flowers that I am sewing together and at least 12 planes for sewing. It reminds me of the song..Inchworm inchworm.

I have now spent more than an hour trying to find the song that I could hear in my head. The trouble is either my brain is hearing incorrectly or making up stuff. I really thought is was Super tramp. I did find this song and it is awesome. 

Here are some arb pictures of the kitties.

discovering green stuff

riding the fan

The watering system

climbing the curtains

Have an amazing day!

Invasion of the kittens

I organised my flowers into a random design and have started stitching the flowers together.

But far more exciting news.
On Saturday we went and fetched our two new kittens. They are a brother and sister. They are very diverse in looks and personality. I hope they meld with our family and us with them. 

They have taken over my sewing room. In fact they think it is actually a kitten bedroom. All of the dangerous items have been stowed and no scissors or rotary cutters can be seen. 

Currently their names are Taz and Tabitha. He is living up to his name. Here are some more pickies of the babies.

 First visit to our Bedroom. The power was off so most of the pictures were a tad strange, but at least these two came out fine. There was a whole sequence of pictures of him trying to climb into the lamp.

She really is beautiful. I will persevere until I get a good shot.

Our current cat is a tad pissed off about the babies. I thought she would welcome the company. I was wrong. There has been a whole lot of hissing and hating. I am sure in a week there will be less of the hissing and eventually I hope they can all become family.


Hope you have a good one.

ps some more pickies

electrical s are fun

Chewing the fan

Ready steady attack

Curtains are for climbing

The pen is mightier than the sword.

HO HO HO it is December

Tub of flowers

December is here. 

I can scarcely believe that we have at last reached December. 

This last month was a horror. Testing started on the systems we have been writing all year and will continue for the next 12 days. These systems are between 8 organisations. That level of co-operation is seldom seen. 

Our fridge decided to have a nervous breakdown and needed to of it's thermostat sensors replaced. All of the food needed to be consumed, so some strange meals were produced.

School closes on Wednesday and the adult's Summer holidays will start in two weeks time. Hopefully I can drag my burnt-out brain to the finish line.

I am at 99.01% of making flowers for my granny's garden quilt. I have made 201 out of the 203 flowers that I need. Two more and then the decision of  whether to sew the flowers together or to make the path that is going to be my border. Although November was stressful, I did manage to make 46 flowers. This was mostly due to weekend sewing.  

I have scanned in each of the flowers. This is the first pass of trying to "randomize" the placement of  my flowers.

I tried various randomize functions using excel, but the results were horrid. The reality is that I will probably just sew the flowers together and decide which flower comes next.

The summer rain is making life very pleasant. Although prior to the afternoon storms, the heat can be quite overwhelming. Once the storms break the resultant cool breezes are amazing. The yellow on the grass are flowers from the tree in our front garden.

Hope all a marvelous December.

Have a good one.

99.01% There

2014-11-30

177

201

3

99.01%

2014-11-30

177

201

3

99.01%

This is the number that came up when I added the flowers the I made today for the grannies garden. I have made 201 out of the required 203. 

It feels that almost everything is at the 99% mark. November is there.

The energy level I have for work is almost 99% finished. My patience for the task that I am doing at work is also there. Thank goodness there are only 12 more work days and then summer holidays kick in.

Have an amazing day.

Remember, remember it is now November

Growing up, November was the month when my parents threw  a huge party to celebrate Guy Fawkes. A huge bonfire was built at the back of our property on which an effigy of poor Guy was thrown. There were always at least 20 or 30 children running amok with sparklers and crackers going off. Later in the evening we would have a fireworks display. We were part of the colonies and it amazes me how their traditions followed us. With changing times all of theses activities would now be breaking the law, or at least city ordinances. Burning of leaves and building fires in the suburbs is not allowed. Letting off fireworks is banned, due to the trauma caused to animals. Interestingly I did hear a whole lot of fireworks for Diwali. 

As I said times have changed.

Thinking back though, we were lucky that no serious injuries occurred. I still have a small scar where I was burnt by something at one of these bashes. All the animals that were alive at the time are no more.

It could be the times, or the people but I don't know of any people that throw the sort of parties that my parents did.

It was the sixties so I suppose they were supposed to be wild. Sadly none of the adults of  that generation that I knew actually stayed married to any one of their spouses. Most of them had multiple husbands or wives. This was done in sequence and not at the same time. :D

Time will tell, but hopefully a quieter life will have a quieter outcome.

Well that is it for October, I made 21 flowers. I know this is way lower than the 1 a day that I am supposed to make. But at this point I have 155 flowers, so I am about 75% finished.
The thing about being at a point of needing to dig deep to keep on doing something, is that almost  anything can distract you.

My husband upgraded the operating system on my machine. With the upgrade came a new set of card games. Well here are my stats and maybe an understanding why I only made 21 flowers.

Well have a lovely October with all the tradition from where you or your ancestors come from. Just think 6 weeks and then summer holidays. I think I can hold my breath until then. 

Have a good one. 

Happy Halloween

Have an amazing Halloween; May your visitors all be terrestrial.

October madness

This is not one of those strange sales gimmicks but rather a description of how this month has been. Activities that have been put off for years have finally been done. I have even managed to sew a flower or 2.

We have an outbuilding containing a storage room of 3 metres by 3 metres. This has been a marvelous place to put all of the boxes that inevitably arrive around purchases. As I have mentioned before, we do live in the most crime active country and the reason you don't put empty boxes on the street for garbage collection, is that it is like taking out an ad in a local paper as to what you want stolen by the weekend.

 The other reason for all of the boxes is that we have been robbed so often that we need to keep replacing the items that have been taken and that make life fun. We have inevitably accumulated a large collection. The other things in the back room is accumulated broken items that did not fit into the wheely bins.  So in the back room we had 18 years worth of boxes, broken chairs, bits and pieces of computers that have been upgraded over the years. There we even all of the youngest baby stuff. She is now 16. I went through a phase of making toys and there was a collection of strange creatures that I had made.

The one item that was save and taken away was a 10 foot worm made out of bits of fabric, that my eldest and her cousins played with when they we children.. The eldest is now 30 and when she saw it, it was saved and taken back to her house. And now the point of all of this rambling. I decided that it was about time to do a spring clean on the room. We hired a skip and threw all of the stuff away. It was amazing how much there was to clear. I really did not think it would fit into the skip that we had delivered. It was like one of those clown acts where it seems as if hundreds of clown could fit into a small car. This was a magic skip as it seemed that it would never fill. As stuff was placed in the skip there was a gathering of people who do recycling, that sorted out what they wanted and took the stuff away. There were also municipal workers doing something with the water pipes in the area and I was pleased to see that they had taken most of the baby stuff. The room is now ready for the next 18 years worth of containers. Hopefully it does not get back into the state it was.

My new car was inspected by the insurance people to make sure that it existed. I was amused to see that they took pictures of the inside and outside of the car and even took a picture of the engine. I did wonder if they though I had crafted a great facsimile of a car with craft supplies. I have been having fun with the tracking devise that was installed. I did however turn off the 'harsh breaking' and 'harsh acceleration' alerts that were being sent as emails. I think I drive nicely and being ratted on by a piece of technology is just not on. I have now had my new car for  a month and have almost stopped missing my old one.

The awning that was destroyed by the large hail was replaced. It is lot lighter than the original one we installed, but at least it is nice and fixed up. It was very depressing seeing the destruction so just having the awning all clean and fresh is great.

I surely have jabbered on today, Hope you have all had an awesome October so far.

Have a good one.