Tag: nature

The Ice Rink That Used to Be My Yard

Right. Hello. I’m alive. Just — hibernating, basically.

I’m not going to pretend I have a good excuse for going quiet. The truth is it’s been cold and grey and relentlessly, insistently wet here in Tasmania, and I have discovered that when the weather is sufficiently miserable, my entire personality collapses into approximately three-metre radius around the fireplace. If it’s not within that radius, it doesn’t exist and I have no opinions about it. The outside world? Theoretical. The writing? Getting done, somehow. Leaving the house? A concept for bolder souls.

The animals have, as a group, been coping poorly with this arrangement.

The chickens have become a roving disaster. The yard is so slippery that they’re basically surfing between the garden beds, absolutely soaked, wildly offended that the sky keeps doing that wet thing, refusing to go inside and shelter, and loudly blaming me personally. The ducks, characteristically, are having the time of their lives. Geese are somewhere in between — philosophical about the rain, opinionated about the mud, unhelpful in every situation.

Then there are the sheep.

We’ve been hosting seven of them while they mow the lawn, which has been working out extremely well, right up until the afternoon I needed to get the car out of the driveway. I opened the gate just enough to squeeze through, which one sheep immediately interpreted as a personal invitation. Out he went. Fine — I thought — I’ll just circle around and push him back in. Logical. Sensible. What happened instead is that the remaining six, who had been watching this development with great interest, collectively decided that this was the moment. All of them. Through the gate. Down the street.

Which is how my neighbour and her five-year-old daughter ended up rounding up seven entrepreneurial sheep as they made their way through the main street of the village. They were absolutely magnificent about it, both of them. The sheep made a brief detour through the neighbour’s yard — seemed to feel it warranted inspection — and then, miraculously, the whole situation resolved itself much faster than it had any right to. Everyone back in. Gate secured. The five-year-old was thoroughly impressed by the entire performance and has since asked when it will happen again.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’m doing my absolute best to make sure it doesn’t.

Yesterday was partly sunny. Today is actually sunny. The ice rink is slowly becoming a yard again, which is good news for everyone involved, including the chickens, who remain very angry about the whole season.

On the writing front, because things have quietly been happening even while I was crouching by the fire pretending to be a comfortable medieval peasant: the developmental edits and line edits are done on the first three books in both the Pioneers and the Compass Point series. I’m half through the first draft of the magical realism and the first rural romance. Which means the first three books in each series are down to final proofreading only — and then it’s just the remaining forty-five and thirty-seven respectively to see through. Only. Only. Artwork is happening too, which means things are genuinely, really, actually moving, even if I’ve been doing it from the general vicinity of the hearth rug.

Jo went back to Queensland on Saturday and is reportedly finding it considerably warmer. Given that I watched her leave into the horizontal rain, I can only imagine.

The fire and I are doing fine.

More soon. 🖤

Small Steps Forward

The house is still sad. There’s no other way to put it — Miss Mu left a Mumu-shaped hole that we’re all navigating around in our own ways, human and feline alike. Some days that’s fine. Some days you turn around expecting to see her and the missing her lands fresh all over again.

But life, as it tends to, has been happening anyway.

First, the practical: our internet has been absolutely abysmal, which has made everything approximately three times harder than it needed to be and my patience approximately three times thinner. Luke is back tomorrow, and I am choosing to believe with my whole heart that this will be remedied. I’m sure Luke is a perfectly lovely person in all other respects but right now I am thinking of him primarily as the man who is going to fix my internet, and I will not apologise for that.

Now. The Pusheen situation.

For those playing along at home, there is a Pusheen in this house that is apparently up for grabs, and we have reached a diplomatic resolution of sorts. Our two littlest girls — Hopalong and Pretty — are going to share it. I use the word share loosely. What appears to be happening is that Pretty has decided this is happening and Hopalong is coming to terms with that reality on her own timeline.

Hopalong’s participation, I suspect, is reluctant at best. She has the energy of someone who has been voluntarily annexed and is still working out whether to file a formal objection. Pretty, meanwhile, has apparently decided that the answer to everything is overwhelming affection, and is pursuing this strategy with considerable commitment.

It makes a certain kind of sense. Pretty was Mu’s little wingman — always nearby, always orbiting. She knew her role and she was good at it, and now there’s a Mu-shaped gap where that role used to live. It seems she’s decided Hopalong is the logical candidate to redirect all that devotion toward. Hopalong may not have been consulted on this decision.

In other diplomatic news, Hopalong appears to be slowly, cautiously, with great dignity and absolutely zero acknowledgement that anything has changed, warming to her similarly sized adversary. No formal statement has been issued. Progress is being made.

And then there is the weekend’s great reshuffling of the flock.

Six of our geese are heading off on Saturday to a truffle farm belonging to friends of ours, which is honestly a retirement story befitting their personalities. I wish them well and I suspect the truffles do not yet know what is coming. In their place — because this is how things work around here, nature abhors a vacuum and apparently so do we — we are welcoming two Sebastapol geese, which will bring the goose flock to a very respectable four.

And also arriving at the same time, because why do one thing when you can do several simultaneously, is the foundation of our Cochin flock. One hen, one rooster. The rooster is Columbian variant. The pullet is Partridge variant. They are, by all accounts, extraordinarily fluffy and I am choosing to lead with optimism on the subject of how the existing residents will receive them.

We are, in our own chaotic way, finding our feet again. The farm turns over, the cats negotiate their new arrangements, and somewhere in all of it there is something that feels, cautiously, like forward motion.

🖤 🏒

Procrastination Nation (Population: Me)

Today was not the productive marketing blitz I had planned. I had a list. I had intentions. I had a book that is about to launch into the world and approximately one million things I should be doing to make sure people actually know it exists before it arrives.

I am going to be honest with you.

I did not do those things.

I watched lawn mowing videos on the internet. I cannot explain this to you. I cannot explain it to myself. There is something deeply, specifically soothing about watching someone mow a lawn in neat stripes and I refuse to apologise for it.

BUT. And this is a significant but.

Today also brought Brian and Sandra.

Brian and Sandra are a new addition to my life and I am very glad about that. They are in their seventies, they are delightful, and they came out to the property today with their ferrets to help deal with the rabbit situation. We have a lot of wild rabbits here. A lot. They are chaotic and destructive and an absolute pain in the bum, and I say that with the full awareness that they are also quite cute, which makes the whole thing morally complicated in a very Tasmanian way.

Brian and Sandra, however, have no such complications. They know exactly what they’re about.

The ferrets did their thing. Brian and Sandra did their thing. I stood around feeling mildly useful.

Here is the part that made my whole day: they are both in their seventies, and every few minutes one of them would lunge for a rabbit with a very confident “I’ve got it, I’ve got it—” and the other one would also lunge for the same rabbit with equal confidence, and then they would both release it at exactly the same time. The same rabbit. Multiple times. The rabbit, for its part, seemed genuinely baffled by its own continued freedom.

They caught four. The other six were released back to continue their campaign of horticultural destruction, presumably wiser for the experience. The four that were caught go home with Brian and Sandra, get skinned, and end up as meals for elderly people in their community who need them. There is something quietly wonderful about that. A whole little ecosystem of care, running entirely outside of anything official or organised, just because two people in their seventies decided to be useful with a pair of ferrets and a Saturday afternoon.

I loved them immediately.

On the actual author front — baby steps, but steps. I set up a BookFunnel account today and released Almost Yours Again as an ARC. It is out there in the hands of early readers, which is terrifying and necessary and probably the most genuinely useful thing I did all day, lawn mowing videos notwithstanding.

Tomorrow I am getting my act together. Deloraine Market in the morning — because some things are non-negotiable and a good market is one of them — and then I am sitting down and whipping the websites into something resembling a functional shape. The garden also needs attention and I have been saying that for longer than I care to admit.

Oh. And I’ve lost my garlic.

I had it yesterday. I was literally filling the garden bed in preparation for planting it, and now it has vanished completely. I have looked in the sensible places. I have looked in the completely illogical places. The garlic is gone and I do not know what to do with myself or, apparently, with a bulb of garlic.

I have given this some thought and I believe the solution is to staple them to my forehead when I find them. Is this practical? No. Will it cause problems? Almost certainly. Will I lose them again? Absolutely not, and that is the whole point.

Baby steps.

But tomorrow, slightly bigger ones. With garlic attached to my face.