Dearest honey bunches,

How are you feeling? How’s your week been?

I’m really good except I have no clue what I’m going to write about today. Last week I felt a bit like this and then as I sat down and started typing the breast cancer scare story tumbled out of me. I hadn’t intended to tell that tale at that time, but apparently it had to come out and I went with it. I’ve been hoping that today’s blog post would let itself be known in much the same way.

Hello! Are you out there blog fairies? Help? Please.

I know my dad always likes it when I list 10 random things, so let’s go with that, okay?

one - I definitely have to start by thanking you so much for the kindness and warmth you showed me after I shared my lumpy breast story last week. That blog post was such a gift to me on three levels;

The first being the incredible responses I got. There was so much love, so much understanding and empathy, and so many personal stories. Thank you! I was a bit unsure beforehand if my story was worthy of a whole post because in the end nothing really happened. But as I am constantly reminded with this blog, feelings, and experiences, and stories, and health scares are universal and something we all share and all relate to.

The second level is the gift that comes from writing something down and moving through it, and then coming out the other side. After I pressed publish on that post and closed my computer I felt amazing. I felt lighter and brighter and ready to move on. Bringing all that stuff back up was hard on Bren which was terribly upsetting. But for me, ever since I wrote that post it’s starting to feel further away and less acutely painful which can only be a good thing.

And the third level is the record of events. I’m sure that in years to come I’ll be interested in remembering the details of the saga and here they’ll be. All neat and tidy and chronological.

two - Last week, after the benign cancer verdict, I showed you photos of empty shelves as we were in the process of pulling everything down, cleaning them, and then putting everything back up again. I feel like this week we’ve done the same with the house garden. Weeding, and digging up, and planting, and tying up, and harvesting.

three - one of the projects that’s been on our lists for the past few seasons was to pull down the potato planter boxes. I’m not sure exactly how long we’ve had them, but the wood was rotting and they were falling apart and becoming pretty ugly.

After we deconstructed them, tipped the soil in the compost pile, and burnt the wood, we raked the ground flat and sprinkled grass seed over the top.

We had intended to build some new planter boxes in their same places, but now we’re liking the empty space around the bean tee-pee and think we’ll build them next to these boxes instead.

four - It’s funny how sometimes the universe looks after us. About 10 days ago, just after I got my benign verdict back, I told Bren that I felt like my new year was starting from then. I was ready to make some plans and look for some new projects to take on. Very soon after that I got messages from two different people offering me two incredible opportunities. Both of them equally terrify me and excite me, and both of them fill me with high levels of imposter syndrome, but there’s a quote that says something along the lines of - life begins at the end of your comfort zone (I don’t even know if that’s close), and after much deliberation I said yes to both.

Both of them are pretty fresh and the agrreements are so far pretty informal, but as soon as things get locked in tightly, you’ll be the first to know the details.

five - Last Tuesday Pepper came home from a fantastic school trip to Womad only to discover that one of her roommates had tested positive to Covid making Pepper a close household contact. Pepper is sick but so far testing negative. I feel awful for Pepper, it breaks my heart that she’s so sick, but I do have to acknowledge that the amount of extra work we’re getting done when we’d usually be driving to school every day is astounding.

six - the tomatoes have started ripening, Finally. And slowly. But the amount of green tomatoes still to turn red is enormous. We’ve set up some hoops and we’ll cover them with plastic when the nighttime temperature is below 10 to protect them and try to hold onto the heat, but I’m growing impatient and concerned.

seven - Last Saturday my parents, my sisters Emily and Abby and Indi, Bren and I went to a gig at Brunswick Music Festival in Melbourne. It was such a lovely day to support and enjoy local live music, to picnic on the grass in the sunshine, and to marvel at my sister Emily whose talents as the programmer never fail to astound me. She is such a star. And she’s a birthday star this Sunday. Happy birthday Em, I love you endlessly xxxxxxxxxxxxx

This is the only photo I took that day and is of them posing with cucumbers I’d picked and packed that morning.

eight - Yesterday after finding out that one of my friends was sick at home with Covid, I picked a bunch of flowers to drop off on her doorstep. Only to discover as I was tying a band around them that Bren had sprayed the garden with fertiliser that afternoon and they STANK of fish and seaweed. I popped them in a jar and left them to stink out the sunroom but I probably should have asked her if she has the type of Covid where you lose your sense of smell. Oh well, lucky I’ve got a few more days until she’s out of iso.

nine - I think my favourite genre of book to read is historical fiction. I love the concept of taking an event, or a people, or a period in time and creating a story around it. The Book Woman Of Troublesome Creek is a fantastic example of this that follows 19 year old Cussy, a pack horse librarian, who delivers books to people who live in the Appalachian mountains in Kentucky in the 1930’s. Cussy is the last living female of the rare blue people ancestry.

It’s a beautifully told story, more so I think knowing that the blue people truly existed, but heartbreaking for the prejudice and racism they suffered.

ten - another thing that happened last week after I purged myself of the cancer scare story, was that I had a desperate desire to knit. And to knit socks. Afraid that the urge would pass I quickly wound some wool, found a pattern and cast on.

I have never before knitted a sock from the cuff down and it felt rather foreign, but that’s what the pattern called for and I followed.

But now I’ve come to a place somewhere after the heel and I hate it. Not the pattern on the sock but the fit. It’s baggy and the heel doesn’t fit snugly and has strange little holes in it from where it was turned.

After trying it on last night I made the decision to take the photo for proof and then to pull it apart and start again. From the toe up, on smaller needles, with a few less stitches. I generally don’t like knitting the same thing twice, but I’m hoping I can trick my brain into casting them on again because I didn’t actually finish a whole sock.

I did it! I blogged 10 whole things from the past week. Looking towards the next week I think we’re going to tackle the cleaning up of the sunroom, the hot house and then the shed. Watch this space.

And please, say a quiet prayer to Mother Nature for me for a few more weeks of warm sunny days to ripen the tomatoes and stop the flowers from fading or succumbing to too much powdery mildew.

Before you go I’d love you to share a couple of things that have been going on in your world lately. Small things or big things, it doesn’t matter to me.

Sending extra love to those who need it this week.

See you next Friday!

Love,

Kate