Simply Sunday

Posted on January 10, 2021 by TravellinPenguin

I’m not going to go into the events of the U.S. this week as we are all aware of them. But I admit it did take away from reading time as I was glued to the tv for a good couple of days and still checking. Not much is happening over the weekend but Monday over there may well pick up again. Will this presidency ever end??

I did manage to finish the book The Weekend by Charlotte Wood. I also listened to her on a podcast taped from last year’s Sydney Writer’s Festival on line where she talked about this book and a performance she saw at the Sydney Belvoir Theatre about Virginia Woolf. The Sydney Writer’s festival podcasts can be listened to on most podcast apps. I use Podbean.

I enjoyed The Weekend. A quick recap. The story is about three friends in their 70s who meet at the home of a friend, Sylvie who recently died, in order to clean out her house. Wendy who is one of the friends brings her 17 year old dog, Finn, with her which really gets up Jude’s nose. Adele is the third friend. She is mourning old age and her past life as a well known actress and her long term relationship with a married man that just doesn’t add up to what she would like.

The weekend shares the interactions between the women, their pasts, coping with aging, thinking about death all the while as they try and organise the emptying of this house. The dog, Finn, seems to be a metaphor for aging and impending death. The women’s relationship to the dog plays quite a large part of the story.

What I liked the most is the realness of the characters. They all have their strengths and their flaws. They get annoyed with each other yet they still retain their loyalty to each other when needed. At times I disliked all of them individually and other times I admired them. I liked the writing in the book most of the time. I’ve not read anything else by Charlotte Wood but I do have her previous book, The Natural Way of Things which won the 2016 Stella Prize and was long listed for the Miles Franklin award. It is on my shelf unread. I understand it is a much different book to the Weekend.

This week I will begin a library book I picked up on Friday. Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House. I listened to the podcast Divine in that featured Ann Patchett’s books. I enjoy the broadcasts about books by these two friends. They always make me laugh.

I have only ever read State of Wonder by this author and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I am looking forward to this book too.

Next, I will pull a book off my shelves in my TBR – Author Alphabet challenge. I was going to begin with the letter A and work my way to Z, one book at a time but I have decided to now randomly select an author’s initial and select my book that way.

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What else has been happening lately? As if an attempted American coup, a gutted kitchen, builders in the house, a radical surgery and recovery, Christmas and our lovely dog Molly dying wasn’t enough over the past two months…Ollie came down with a very inflamed bowel, some bleeding and a massive ear infection. He was full of beans jumping around one day and suddenly he was off his food and we couldn’t wake him up for much more than a few moments. Of course, like everything, it happened on a weekend but fortunately being Friday night, the vet did get him in Saturday morning, where he spent the day being x-rayed, poked and prodded. He had the first bad day of his lifetime.

We were worried he had swallowed a foreign object and might need surgery. So far that doesn’t seem to be the case and he seems to be responding well to antibiotics and some prescription food he is not too thrilled about. We were worried about him though. His ear is also being treated. If we could only get him to stop eating potting soil, lizard tails, snails and possum poo I think he would be better off. If anyone knows how to do that please leave your message in the comments. below.

On a brighter note I am out of my six weeks of not being able to drive and I actually did a 5 km walk the other day and feel quite good.

I’ve decided the new year for us will begin on the 21 January when the world might change a bit for the better. Now if we could only understand why the Australian Prime Minister won’t condemn what has happened in America.

No, I’ll leave that alone for now.

I hope everyone has been safe and well and doing some things that cause happiness amongst the turmoil of the world. More later….

Simply Sunday

Posted on December 20, 2020 by TravellinPenguin

Although a stock photo, this is what it looked like.

Another week has passed and I can’t believe Christmas is at the end of this week. I have had a quiet week at home though I finally got to get out yesterday for a brief woodland walk with Ollie and my camera and tripod. I have also been reading all week. I have noticed my concentration is returning and I can actually tune into a book now for more than 30 minutes at a time.

Throw in some cooking in our lovely kitchen and the week rounded out nicely.

The range hood was installed over our stove top Friday. We still have the flooring to be installed and the ceiling to be painted. The painting will happen Monday but I think the flooring has to wait until January.

The other night I made a big pan of enchilladas. I used one of those El Paso kits that have the tortillas and two packets of sauce but then added the cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, avocado and sour cream at the end. Splash a little tabasco sauce across the top and it was very good. I cooked the first 25 years of our marriage and Mr. Penguin cooked the last 25 years of our marriage. August will be the 50 year mark. Now we are both cooking. It has been fun. Twenty five years was a good break.

The books I continue to read are The Gifts of Reading, a series of essays about gifting and receiving books. I’ve read one essay a day. I am now heading towards the finish line. Edited by Robert MacFarlane I am enjoying it very much and one essay a day is just right.

I have finally settled into the mystery that is Ann Cleeves “Vera” book called The Darkest Evening. I am loving the snowy setting of the winter scenes around Newcastle, England. I’ve not read a Cleeves book before and I must say I’m enjoying it.

I am also listening to My Life in France by Julia Child read by Kimberly Farr. I would not recommend this book to vegans or vegetarians as Julia Child was a serious carnivore. I can picture her sitting down, tucking into geese, pheasants and all manner of meat, with blood dripping down her chin. She was a very eccentric woman and quite arrogant at times. However she did know her French cooking. There is a great deal of reading recipes in French so if you cannot understand French you miss a bit. She seems to assume almost everyone would know what she is talking about. However I enjoy her recollection of the people she met, the school of Le Cordon Bleu she attended and the many cafes and restaurants with vivid descriptions. Much of her book involves the description of how she wrote her book French Cooking for Americans that took several years and needed to be revised many times over. She recounted one episode where she sat down and cooked two whole geese, two different ways, then sat down and ate both of them in order to write up a correct description of the recipe. Mind you, she was a large woman, height wise and large boned but to eat two geese at one sitting was a bit much for me to comprehend.

I have learned a great deal about her and overall am enjoying it. I should be finished with this book before too long. It is a bit longer than I think it needs be but then I think that about a lot of books.

I will now leave you with some photography I did in the reserve behind our house and finished up in our backyard. Ollie and I were standing deep in brush and leaf litter focusing on a mossy tree that had fallen and suddenly Ollie gave a deep growl. I could only think “snake” and hurried back to the main trail. I still don’t know what he was growling at but I’d had enough and went home. We only have three varieties of snakes in Tasmania but all three are very poisonous.

I hope you enjoy the three photos I did settle on in the end. Until next week.

I hope all of you have a lovely Christmas, whether in lockdown or not. Remember, it won’t always be this way and next year MUST bring better times.

Simply Sunday

A Quiet Simple Sunday

Posted on December 13, 2020 by TravellinPenguin

Photo of cockatoo Kevin is mine. Other three photos are from stock photos.

We have a lovely warm Sunday happening here. It seems quite still. The windows are open and I can hear our local neighbourhood birds twittering quietly away. I know all the pairs of birds around our yard. We have Mr and Mrs Blackbird. They are good workers and always busy doing one thing or another. We had bachelor Wattle Bird but this summer he got married and they can be seen in the birdbath quite often though he also bathes in the eaves of the house over the porch. He sure likes his baths. I haven’t seen her much lately so she may be busy with eggs or chicks. Then we have a new pair of magpies. We’ve never had magpies here before as we are up towards the base of Mt. Wellington and it has been too cold. In 30 plus years I’ve not seen them but they have now moved in. They have spent the past two weeks rolling around on the neighbour’s yard mating. Everyday they are cavorting in the grass. Surely she’ll lay some eggs soon. They moved in on the plovers who had a family of five chicks of which four survived. They are now enjoying an empty nest for awhile.

Then we have Kevin. Kevin is a dorky cockatoo that we believe was an escapee from a backyard aviary at one time and though he does stay with the flock much of the time he’ll often be found on our front porch screaming for a few sunflower seeds if we don’t put them out. He doesn’t get them a lot because I don’t want him to become dependent on us for food as these birds can live well over 100 years. If Kevin sees us in the yard he’ll fly by and give us the “eye”. It is not uncommon for him to sit on our porch railing and look in the lounge room window looking for us.

You can see I have a lot of time on my hands now.

Today I spent some time choosing some books to work my way through. I chose one Audible, one E-book, one Fiction and one Non Fiction. A couple I’ve begun, the others not yet.

I played around with the design of my blog a bit and now I’m sharing the books I chose to dig into. Once again 2021 is the year of the TBR shelves. I didn’t do that well this year so must buckle down next year. Here we go.