Further to a week on one-way emails, messaging, skyping, coming close to tears, and eventually giving up completely, it has been a pleasurable weekend completely off-air.
A swim on the way home on Friday – I had to share a lane for heaven’s sake. I normally swim over the lunch period, and often have the pool to myself, so sharing a lane is quite something. The stresses of the e-world are literally washed away when you are trying to remember how many laps you have done, and to breath all the way out, and to kick properly. It is actually hard to stay in a state of despair I found, as the days wore on with no e-resolution in sight, and determined exercise certainly helps.
Pitiful problem to have anyway, given the shooting down of a commercial airliner, killing 298 people in the blink of an eye. Long enough for the offending weapons to be secreted out of the glare of the world’s media. We can only hope not long enough for the passengers on the plane to have any inkling of what had happened to their travel plans at 30,000ft.
Friday dinner out at a local golf club – not a bar I frequent, but the venue for a prize-giving for a masters swimming club. Swim-freaks, all of them, but you cannot help but feel the love, as it were. A bunch of people who swim a crazy amount – for fun? for fitness? who knows, but they really enjoy each other’s company, as much as they enjoy swimming for miles and miles. It is a tight little group, but within the ranks some world title holders and NZ record holders. One of those groups that go pretty much un-noticed while they quietly get on with over-achieving and looking out for each other.
Up to the beach after dinner, where the stars are just glorious on a clear frosty night.
An early start for our first planting day at our local reserve. Only a small group, and as usual a bit chaotic, but we got the plants in the ground. How lucky we are, to spend a few hours with friends, up the creek, astonished at how the weed clearing we did a year ago has transformed the landscape. It would regenerate all by itself, but we are giving it a helping hand by planting some home-grown plants to speed things along. Giving ourselves a helping hand by working alongside our mates and sharing lunch together. Lots of laughing – “has anyone got a key to the chain?” and as we ponder on this Don walks up and just unhooks it – the padlock is for decoration only, it turns out.
Mobile phone and internet access is pretty wobbly up there and we don’t have a landline, so I don’t even bother checking for messages. Nothing that can’t wait until Monday I am sure.
Time in our own garden – it has been a bit abandoned while we painted the outside of the house, so still in catch-up mode. I grew some sedge from seed, and it desperately needs to be in the ground. That of course supposes the ground is ready. Some serious digging required, and tearing at the tradescantia making a comeback while we have been busy elsewhere.
Dinner with friends to celebrate a 65th birthday. So good to have a meal cooked for you after a day in the garden. And to relax with yet another group of mates, although there is some overlap in a small community. A mixed bunch of dinner guests – one recently bereaved, her husband a good friend of all of us but she can already talk about him in the past tense, and I admire her composure; a couple just returned from Europe including visiting their daughter who is at Cambridge University on a scholarship and whose achievements we all share by association because she is just delightful; the wife whose husband is overseas and she will join him this coming week, but not before driving north for 2 1/2 hours each way to take her Mother to church on Sunday morning, followed by lunch – “Mum really looks forward to it and I love the singing – they are old-fashioned – have about 5 or 6 hymns.” The extraordinary things of ordinary lives. The birthday girl having 3 separate birthday events, but I guess when you have recovered from breast cancer you do what you want.
Tawharanui Sunday morning, sorting out the planting by the lagoon that needs a bit more care and attention than the revegetation planting on the slopes and hills. It has become my project by default. I don’t really want to be weeding it for the rest of my life, but for now I need to get it knocked into shape while it is prime planting season. We managed to dodge that rain, have hot soup for lunch, a quick pack-up and home via a cafe for coffee and cake.
No time then to ponder too much about errant computer links. No time to stress too much about anything, flopping into bed dog-tired with aching bones from digging and chopping and lugging weeds and talking to the fantail that seems to have taken up residence in our garden. I saw a bellbird today as well, still fairly rare in the Auckland area outside of the sanctuaries. And a pair of kakariki, identifiable from their chatter that is quite distinct from their Australian cousin rosellas. And I heard the kookaburras, a remnant population from Governor Gray’s menagerie on Kawau Island.
Who cares whether your email is working? Life is working in the meantime.
This little guy seems to be my constant companion in our garden. I’m sure it’s a bloke, he likes to show off his lovely tail feathers a lot.
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