I did it (but it almost did me!)

Here's where my troubles began! Well, recent back troubles anyway. I should have tried harder to find someone to take on the job of moving aside all the little stones covering this messy parking space alongside my garage. Previous owners used it to park their caravan; I used to keep my trailer there before I gave it away. For the past few years the car-size space has just been a throughway from the front of the house to the back garden - not used for much except a few pots of plants. 

The whole area consisted of river gravel laid down over sheets of black plastic. Trouble is, the layer of stones wasn't thick enough to prevent the weathering of the plastic, which had never been secured to the ground beneath. Round stones never settle on slippery plastic. And dirt from areas where the plastic lifted had mixed with stones - it was an unsightly mess. 

The only solution: move aside the stones, rip up the old plastic piece by piece, lay down and fasten in place proper weed matting, then clean the stones of accumulated dirt and put them down over the new matting, maybe topping up with extra stones to make a good thick covering.

I thought about leaving some areas of soil exposed for planting ground cover plants, since I don't use this area for vehicles. And on the very rare occasion when I might need to let a service vehicle through to the back yard for some reason, it's easy enough to dodge ground covers (or move pots). But as soon as I began the work, I realised that the whole area has a vigorous set of roots criss-crossing the ground, coming from the neighbour's very healthy row of small trees planted as a hedge along the fenceline on his side. So rather than compete with all the roots, it made sense to create a weed-free surface and plant things in large pots here and there. (The neighbour and I did remove the largest of these surface roots though, and so far at least his hedge plants haven't seemed to mind.)

I had contacted a few handymen to quote for this work, but I no one wanted to do it. (I should have realised then what a slog it would be.) No doubt a landscape company would have taken it on - but at what cost! And I could well imagine the mess they might make of it - they'd want to strip the whole area clean to start with, which meant moving all the stones and piling them up somewhere. But where? I would have stones scattered in nearby lawn for months. So I decided if I could get it done before the hotter weather arrived to make outdoor work too onerous, I would do the job myself. 

And so I did - section by section, one barrowload of stones at a time. It took me four weeks, working 4 or 5 days a week, 5 or 6 hours each day. About halfway through I began to think it was all just too difficult. And I made another attempt to employ someone to help. But I couldn't find anyone. So I pressed on. 

At the end of it all I did hire a nice young man with a truck (thank you, Airtasker!) to pick up, deliver and unload a trailer-load of additional stones to finish the job. 

I'm very happy with the result, but can hardly believe I got through it. It's taken weeks for my body to recover. Not surprised that I came down with a terrible bout of winter flu shortly after finishing. I think I had no reserved energy to fight off germs. But I've learned one thing: my days of heavy labour are over. This Amazon lady is hanging up the workboots. Only garden-variety stuff for me from here on. 

Moving on (and in)

This is the sort of day it has been.

My mood all day has been much the same, influenced no doubt by the tail end of a debilitating flu or cold. But I've been at my desk anyway, preparing for the final of ten tutorials I will have presented in as many weeks for two first-year groups of teacher-trainees at the local university. I was pleased to be offered this semester of part-time work. It was one of several new pastimes that I hoped would help me learn to live alone and begin to 'move on', whatever that means!

So ten weeks ago, I moved my office out of its former temporary location in the second bedroom, into the small galley room that had been Allen's office ever since we moved here in 1996. My own larger office used to be in a separate studio building, now a second guest bedroom. But I had to give up that larger space when it became impossible for me to be that far away from Allen for any length of time. I could have returned to the studio-office, now that my caregiving duties are no more. But several things dissuaded me from doing that.

First was the attraction of not having to vacate my office whenever I have visitors. The studio has the double bed for visiting couples; the second bedroom has a single bed (which is where my grand-daughter sleeps on her frequent visits). But Allen's little end-room office - once a verandah - is too small to accommodate a bed. So it is always free, no matter how many people are sleeping in the house for the weekend or longer.

Then, too, the distance from the house to the studio meant my laptop inevitably ended up in the house, perched on the dining-cum-sewing table. That's because going out to the studio to check emails and do my banking and other routine tasks is just too much of a nuisance late at night or when it's raining. Giving up the larger studio space seems a price worth paying for the convenience of having all my office things just a few steps away from my bedroom.

What really settled me in my decision to make Allen's office my own was just that: the fact that it had been his. Until I moved in here, this room off our bedroom was a furious empty space that screamed his absence every time I looked into it. I could hardly bear to enter it. So I moved in and made it mine, which meant going through all his shelves and papers first, of course. But that was relatively easy. Allen had been doing it himself for years before he lost the ability to read and write. He was always a well-organised man - socks rolled in his drawer, suitcase nicely packed, paperwork all in order. He had long ago sorted everything he wanted to keep or pass on, and discarded just about everything else.

I moved my things in and found, to my surprise, there is plenty of space. First I discarded several wheelie-bins of old paperwork - things from my university degrees and old freelance jobs going back decades. All the books and other curriculum materials we produced during my ten years as manager of the state's educational publishing facility have gone to our regional university's library. Dozens of other books are going here and there. It's a very liberating feeling, as I remember Allen assuring me when he did the same with his theatre library and paperwork a long time ago - a move which horrified me at the time. 

My new little office has been quite pleasant during the warmer weather - even though it's the only part of the house that doesn't have access to air conditioning. But we rarely used the aircons in the rest of the house anyway, thanks to good insulation throughout and a perfect aspect in all living areas. This office has both eastern and northern-facing windows, so the winter sun streams in but there's no exposure to the hot western summer sun. I've been amazed how cosy the room stays now that our cooler winter weather has arrived. Since it's small and has good windows, the tiniest bit of sun heats it up nicely. I can't help chuckling when I remember now that even after he could barely do anything constructive in the way or reading or writing, Allen still disappeared into this enclave after breakfast every day, sliding shut the glass door connecting it to our adjacent bedroom. In his last months, I would put an opera on his computer for him to watch. I now realise that because his tiny frame could no longer regulate his body temperature very well, he was probably mainly enjoying the room's warmth. - probably just one of hundreds of things Allen could no longer express.

Right outside one window here a beautiful golden penda is growing, a tree I planted in 2009 when I painted the room for Allen and had tiles laid down. As I was closing the blinds this afternoon, I looked out to see the first of the golden penda's new season's flowers had just opened. The light was fading, but I photographed it anyway. I need reminders that life goes on.

You can't take it with you

Honestly, I would like to write deeper, more meaningful blogs. But then I'd have to lie about the pleasure I have found these past four days in emptying out, reorganising and refilling all my cupboards, wardrobes and storage chests!

The excuse was the need to get out our winter woollies. (We may live in the subtropics but the temp does get down to 10 degrees Centigrade on some nights!). Changing seasonal clothes requires me to pack away some of our summer shorts and Ts. Our small house doesn't have enough closet space to allow everything to be out at once. So even though we both have modest wardrobes – and like many stay-at-home retirees we usually only wear a fraction of what we own anyway – I have to pack and unpack a suitcase or two of off-season things twice a year to make room in our closets for all the current season's dags.

Poor Walle gets nervous whenever the cases come out, though. I don't know why because we've never left him home on our weekends away. But he had three years with his previous owners before we adopted him, so maybe his anxiety goes back to some earlier experiences with that former family. We adopted Walle from his original breeder after Walle's first owners returned him to her. (Part of the breeder's standard contract requires all dogs' first owners to let the breeder find a new home for any dog that an owner can't keep for any reason.) And the breeder did say the couple who'd owned Walle had split up in a difficult way. Maybe that entailed someone filling up suitcases and then leaving and not coming back? One can only speculate. Whatever the reason, Walle was taking no chances this time. So he spent much of the past few days occupying whatever open suitcase I left lying around.

My ulterior motive this week, while cleaning and reorganising closets, was simultaneously to prune and/or find new homes for some of the excess possessions I seem to have acquired over the years. I say 'I' because Allen long ago did this type of post-retirement pruning. Indeed, when he began discarding and giving away things, I remember being a bit miffed. I guess I was still in acquisition mode myself. And I felt he was somehow taking value away from our home. Not monetary value, but some other kind of value – sentimental value, perhaps. Now that I've reached that stage myself, with just a few exceptions (my first wedding veil, the nightie I wore when delivering my daughter, the outfit I made for taking her home from hospital and a few of her very favourite first toys) I don't find sentiment to be a suitable reason for retaining things. Sooner or later we are going to have to move from this 'acreage' to a more easily maintained environment. And our next (maybe final) home will probably be a two-bedroom unit or townhouse somewhere, with even less storage space. So every time I unpack and pack away a season's clothes and clean out closets and drawers, I keep an eye out for things I no longer need. (Truth be told, often these are things I never really needed in the first place, but at the time didn't realise that.)

I now get more pleasure from a sparsely stocked fridge or freezer than I once got from a laden pantry. I was about to buy a super-sized container of ketchup at the supermarket today, thinking how I could fill and refill my current bottle. But something stopped me. That would have made sense when we had one or two teenagers living at home still and ketchup was poured onto all sorts of meals in great dollops. But now the few cents I'd save by buying in bulk is nowhere near enough consolation for cluttering up my pantry with large containers that take months to use up. 'Less is best.' That's my new motto in shopping as in storage. (Olive oil is an exception, of course! We do use enough of that to warrant bulk buying.)

Last week I cleaned out my gardening bench and threw away all sorts of bits and pieces I'd been hording 'just in case' they could be useful. Out went the previous set of pruning and trimming utensils, not used for years since they were replaced with new ones. Out went assorted handles and even crooked old forks whose handles had broken off. I have two good forks and a few good shovels left. I don't need to keep the broken pieces of misshapen old ones, 'just in case'. I've got at least four broken wheelbarrows that need to go, too. Past attempts to grow flowers or plants in them have never been successful, as regular hand-watering no longer holds any appeal.

Buying just enough for us two (and knowing I'll use it all) – that gives me more pleasure now than bringing home mounds of extra foodstuff (and probably seeing 20 per cent or more go bad in the fridge). It's all quite a revolution in my thinking and acting. I was a pretty full-on consumer in my past lives. I still sometimes spend my fortnightly half-day-off-caring in a shopping centre. But now it's more for entertainment than anything else, except when I'm shopping for my new little grand-daughter (e.g. a one-metre toddlers' sleeping bag and several warm fleecy sleeping suits at Kathmandu last week, reduced by something like 75 per cent). But I rarely see things I'd like to buy for myself. And I don't look forward to receiving gifts any more either, as these are too likely to upset the balance in my plan for discarding frills and paring down to essentials. 

Hardest of all to prune are books! Allen got the ball rolling years ago by donating all his theatre books and his play collection to various individuals whom he thought would enjoy them. Now we are always on the look-out for similar opportunities. Knowing a book you've enjoyed will give someone else pleasure makes it easier to relinquish it. But as far as I'm concerned now, the only reasons that justify holding on to books are (1) you haven't found the right person to pass on an especially well-loved book to, (2) you think you might enjoy reading the book again – this holds for most of our small quality fiction collection (see photo), or (3) the book is too valuable to give away, so you feel you should sell it but you haven't found a buyer yet (or a really deserving fellow reader – back to (1) above!). Everything else is going OUT eventually. All the education books I kept from university days are right now sitting in a big bag in my car, about to be donated to the op-shop nearest the local teacher-training college. Or I might just drop them off in the college's entrance, with a sign saying: "Help youself to free books!" But are today's pragmatic teacher-trainees interested in reading Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich, John Holt, Frank Smith, Jerome Bruner, Denys Thompson et al.? I doubt it.

Even more amazing than letting go the education books I read and studied, I'm about to donate 1.5 shelf-metres of educational publications I either edited or supervised as manager of this state's education department publishing unit for 10 years. The local university library has said they'd welcome this collection, as it represents a decade of syllabi, teachers' guides and other publications issued to our state's primary and secondary schools over a tumultuous period during which the curricula for most subjects were totally revised. I once thought it would be hard to let these go. But beautiful as many of the publications are – and our unit was probably the country's best and most prolific state educational publishing unit at that time – the fact is few of these books have any meaning for me any more. A couple of exceptions I'll keep, either because the content or the experience of developing and producing them was somehow out of the ordinary. But so much in education changes so fast, even if you're still interested in the subject (which, frankly, I'm not), publications from the 80s and 90s are now mainly of historical interest.



My mother (r.) says goodbye to her sister Viola
the day before Mum came to Australia.
The sisters never saw each other again.

Well, there you are. I think I always felt in some ways that my possessions told the story of my life. That feeling is gone now. Maybe my time as a volunteer in a nursing home had something to do with making me realise what few things we'll bother with once life gets reduced to the limits of a small room, as most of our lives probably will. I remember, too, my aged mother walking out of her apartment in America to come to Australia with me, taking only two suitcases and leaving my brother and sister to dispose of everything else. She knew she'd never see any of her things again, no matter what happened, as she could no longer live alone. I found that hard at the time to witness, but she said she no longer cared about 'things', and only cared about being with family. I am only now beginning to understand what she meant. "You can't take it with you" may sound trite. The fact is, we probably won't want to take it, or much of it, with us anyway. I'm pretty sure I won't.

Keepsakes or junk? Is there a difference?

Take a look at my studio and tell me if you can believe that I'm on a mission to de-clutter my living spaces!



And that's only one side of the room. Here's the other side.

Am I a hoarder? I never used to think I was. And I do live in a relatively small house, so most rooms probably contain more than would be necessary if we had four bedrooms and heaps of closets. But let's see what kinds of things I hold on to in this room only – things that aren't strictly necessary for the editing of books (my former trade) or the kind of writing I now do on this blog and for other purposes.

In the top row picture, at left:

1. Two Laotian sticky-rice baskets (only two of a dozen I have in different sizes).
2. About 20 years of tax records under the desk! (You never know.)
3. On a shelf above (just out of view), about 35 travel books featuring places I've visited, places I intended to visit but didn't, and places I just like reading about.
4. Behind one rice basket, a glass paperweight given to me as a Christmas present by........I can't remember who, but it was important at the time.  
5. Four CD cases containing 10 years of backup files.

In the top row picture, at right:

1. Yet another sticky-rice basket - this one home to a small electric jug so visitors (and I) can make a cup of tea in the afternoon. And a fridge-top tray of smoked cane from the Philippines.
2. Never mind what's in the bar fridge. (You can never have too much home-grown citrus or homemade jam.)
3. On the wall, handwoven silk shawl from Laos. On the bed, handwoven cotton bedspread from the Philippines.
4. Pillowcases featuring embroidered Lao cloth (black), printed canvas made from a former Philippine shower curtain (white) and heavy African cloth (red).
5. A set of prints on the wall, the early work of a dear printmaking friend with whom I've lost touch.
6. In another friend's old black sea chest that doubles as a bedside table, all the Christmas decorations, my first marriage wedding veil, the outfit I made to take home my newborn (now 39-year-old) daughter from hospital plus the bloodstained nightie I wore to deliver her, several of her most important first dolls, and an old chenille bedspread from Tasmanian days.

In the second row picture, at left:

1. Bottom two shelves contain copies of many of the publications produced by Qld Dept of Education while I was in charge of the publishing unit there (1987-98). I need to donate these to an education library somewhere.
2. Third shelf from bottom has two silk-covered boxes containing a seal with my name in Chinese characters and a small porcelain container of sealing wax. A gift while in the Philippines.
3. Fourth shelf up has name card holders bought in Vietnam and a clock which was a gift, and which has Thai numbers on its face. (Why do I have two of these clocks!)
4. Fifth shelf up has mementos of my mother: little cloth-covered birdcage she made years ago as an ornament, and a metal box with some of her old Singer sewing machine bits and pieces. I also have the old brush she used to sweep thread dust off the machine's working bits. It's great on my keyboard.
5. Top two shelves have my collection of classic feminist books plus other writings and journals by women – waiting to find a good home (any takers?)
6. Third shelf down has publishing and editing references I no longer use.
7. Fourth shelf down has education and development books I'd also like to give away.

In the second row picture, at right:

1. The old Tasmanian table (pine top, blackwood legs) came from a neighbour's greenhouse 30+ years ago, after I told him we were looking for a patio table. (He tossed it over the fence to us, as I recall, and then we refinished it! His wife was not happy once she saw it done up.)
2. Hanging above the table: a Hmong baby carrier I bought from a woman who made it on an old Singer treadle machine. It's thickly embroidered in heavy cotton on a modern fluorescent fabric that Hmong mothers prefer instead of their traditional navy blue handwoven cotton fabric. (I have an embroidered Hmong skirt in that fabric.)
3. See the horseshoe on the notice board? It's on a piece of wood carved with '1991' – the year our predecessors at this place built the cedar-walled garage that I transformed into this studio. It used to hang above the door.
4. Also on the notice board, a little framed photograph of tiny Hotel Esmeralda, Paris – given to me by a dear friend who stayed there on my recommendation during her first of many trips to Paris.
5. White wire baskets hold my collection of Lao shawls and other Lao handwoven cloth.
6. Little Huon pine pots on the table date back to Tassie days.
7. And standing at the back of the table, a piece of calligraphy by my late Great Uncle, a Canadian priest who was also organist at the cathedral in Montreal. When I visited there long after he died, the archivist presented me with a box of my uncle's possessions, such as family photos, examples of my uncle's artwork and musical compositions and his old paintbox.
8. In back of the printer/fax and only the top edge visible here: one of the little slates distributed to Lao schoolchildren along with chalk, on which they learned to write in the absence of paper and pencils (this in the 1990s).
9. Standing at the end of the table and not quite visible, my old croquet mallet in its cover. I may use it again quite soon.
10. A wooden sign saying 'Massachusetts' which I bought while visiting my folks there many years ago.
11. And above the window, a pair of carved temple-guarding creatures from Laos.

I wasn't even going to mention any of the things inside desk drawers or filing cabinet draweres, but then I came across this little box of paperclips from the Philippines, handmade from pieces of bamboo and string. These are definitely too precious not to be featured here – and not to be kept!

So you tell me. Am I a hoarder? And if so, how can I break the habit?

Household tidbits for my sister!

As noted this morning on Facebook (which my sister refuses to join!) I am about to begin making slipcovers for (or perhaps reupholster - I haven't yet decided which) our big living-room couch with a grey-on-grey damask-like print that should go well with the cushions I will make from some of the many Lao fabrics I am holding in hues of black and red. Maybe because I'm in this uphostering mood, I couldn't help but notice in today's Australian that an expensive couch featured in a full-page ad should have had the left and right seat cushions reversed, so that the vertically running stripes on each cushion front would match the stripes on the couch base. (After all, it was once my job to notice these things for magazine shoots!)

Here's the lightweight tapestry-like fabric I bought for my couch covers. The colour is grey-on-grey, with a sprig-like pattern in subtle tones of dusty-pink and a lighter grey – just enough of a print to help disguise future stains and spills, but still match up nicely with the beautiful patterns in the Lao woven fabrics I will use for cushions. This cloth is of indeterminate genesis (perhaps some cotton, some polyester, and/or something else), and was on a 'specials' table. I had intended to buy just a small sample to test for washability, but when I brought it up to the counter the ticket was scanned and the price quoted at one-third the marked ticket price – so I bought 13m on the spot. Since then I have washed and dried a swatch, and it's come up fine. I never could resist a bargain, but anyway it's exactly what I was looking for.

The expensive couch I referred to above (a copy of which is reproduced here –  and it looks very much like my own much less expensive model, I just realised) was the focal point today in a full page advertisement for a high-end furniture salesroom, and even the sale price was in the thousands of dollars. But really, the advertising agency should have sent along someone who knows about soft furnishings when staging the shoot. Then maybe the left and right cushions would have been set down in the right place – so that each cushion's stripes would match up with the stripes on the couch base below. At this price, a woeful mismatch as shown here would be grounds for a refund, surely. Is it because I'm immersed in planning slipcovers that I notice such things? Or is it just a leftover from my days of supervising Women's Weekly photo shoots for fashion and food pages (where steam had somehow to be generated to accompany hot dishes, no matter how long the photographer took to get his shot)? Or is it just that I'm hopelessly addicted to petty details? (If so, that's probably what made me a good editor.) Now before I segue into even more diabolical non sequiturs, I shall return to my sewing machine.

Shitty news this week!

This post is a jumble, just to get me back in the swing. Lots has been happening around here since I last visited...some good things (e.g. J's wedding which I'll talk about elsewhere), and some (e.g. septic problems) not so good. The problems are gradually righting themselves, with quite a lot of help from me and various tradesmen (no fewer than five different sets of contractors got stuck into the sewerage problem – some literally so!) First, a plumber 'looked into' the problem. Next, a couple of incredibly cheerful young men pumped out the holding tank. And I was reminded what a pleasure it is (and how unusual) to find young adult male strangers who are not only polite, but actually friendly to a couple of old wrinklies like us. A's Blue Care carer was still here when these boys arrived. One of the guys had had a bad motorbike accident a few years ago. During his recovery Blue Care nurses had helped him a lot, and he was particularly keen to express his appreciation of that. Maybe that early brush with near-death left a big impression, but for whatever reason he really was an unusually happy-go-lucky young man, given the rather unpleasant nature of his work.

Next came a rather morose giant who sent a camera down the outflow drain to check for blockages there. Then another plumber came in to interpret all the findings. This guy, provided by the lovely people at Home Assist, who have helped to provide various special facilities that Allen has needed, concluded the old trench could be rehabilitated. Not only does this save us thousands of dollars, it also means we don't have to undertake trench work that would also almost certainly attract the attention of a troublesome neighbour, whose complaints to Council could result in our having to bankroll an even more expensive solution. So instead of digging a new trench, a pair of young men in very short shorts arrived with a big truck-mounted pump, and did unspeakable things to the old trench using high-pressure jets of water. Finally, we went out and bought a new water-wise front-loading washing machine that will not strain the drainage trench as much as the 22-year-old top-loading monster did. And as a result of all that, we hope our waste management system is once again functional, though only time will tell.

Remembering this week's contacts with tradespeople reminds me: I must ask the library to find a copy of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, by Matthew B Crawford. It's reviewed in this week's Weekend Australian, and sounds tantalising. "Crawford's aim is to extol the worth of skilled labour, the practice of a trade....The work they [tradesmen] do requires 'practical wisdom'....Above all, their work genuinely benefits society because it produces tangible, readily assessable results." How many of us public servants have occasionally been tempted to throw in careers in "the most ghostly kinds of work", by which Crawford means "phony, ill-defined, ephemeral" work! How many have thought, sometimes very seriously, about tossing it all in and retraining in something like landscape gardening or cooking! I certainly have. At such times, we probably felt we were doing what reviewer Roy Williams in this article describes as "jobs that don't require doing anything extremely well", in what author Crawford calls 'the world of white-collar bullshit". Coincidentally, last night I began reading Adrift on the Nile by Naguib Mahfouz and in the first paragraph I came across this: "On the shelves the files enjoy an easeful death. How diverting they must find the civil servant at work, carrying out, with utterly serious mien, utterly trivial tasks." I was immediately propelled back in time into my literally and figuratively grey office at Education Queensland.

Well, pumping out septic tanks probably isn't the kind of "skilled labour" Crawford had in mind in writing that book. But if my contact this week with tradespeople provided that one embodiment of Crawford's hypothesis, "that most of the people who perform these jobs are personally fulfilled", another guy I dealt with followed a life path in a totally different direction. He is an ex-builder who is currently erecting a new balustrade and mini-pergola atop our 40,000 litre concrete rainwater tank (that's a 10,000-gallon storage tank, for US friends). The only reason he is doing this work for me is that he doesn't have enough work in the field that he left building to pursue! Obviously unfulfilled as a tradesman and not content with performing "skilled labour", he retrained as a counsellor. But however good he may be in his new role (and I suspect from the interesting discussions we've had during coffee breaks he may be quite good at it, and of course he'd bring to the table practical experience of working in the 'real world'), he hasn't got sufficient academic qualifications to enable him to benefit from the newly introduced Medicare subsidies available for consultations with fully qualified psychologists. Apparently, counselling work, however fulfilling, just isn't paying the bills. So he's resorting to occasional little projects like my balustrade to do that. Personally, if I had to choose between having sufficient skills to erect a nice cypress-pine construction and the ability to listen to other people's problems with the hope of helping them find resolution, right now, in my 60s, I'd definitely opt for the woodworking skills. Maybe in my 20s or 30s, when idealism wielded more power over my will, I might have chosen differently. (Incidentally, the balustrade is not yet finished; more photos will follow later.)

Be all of that as it may, I was talking about what's been going on around here. And the other recent achievement is the laying down of a new path from the bottom of the stairway over to the pool on the left, and down toward the vegetable garden level on the right. My post of 4 September 2009, “Sharing the load”, described preparations for this paving work. And about 10 days ago, P (who has mowed our paddock for more than 10 years) came and laid the pavers. And as we had some left over, he also made a 'ramp' off the back verandah, to help Allen get around that part of the garden a bit more safely.

And to close, here's a photo of this week's visitors – a pair of white cockatoos who have made the contents

 of this particular feeder tray a part of their daily menu. I had to move the bird feeders off to either side of the water tank because of the work going on to build a new balustrade. But now I've decided to keep the feeders there, among the bushes and trees, so visitors' droppings are less likely to mess up our lovely new cypress timberwork. And so this post ends where it began – with waste management.