Life at Corner Cottage, Braidwood
Call me butter 'cause I’m on a roll . . . The bird-feeder project that started a few days ago as a swift piece of DIY using odds and ends of this and that found here and there is now assuming the epic proportions of an Amish barn-raising. Once again, the rabbit-hole principle rears its …
I’ve never been much of a petrolhead. In the past, the idea of subscribing to the polluting, expensive, city-clogging race of ‘cagers’ (as cycling activists call them) was anathema. Sure, motorbikes and Anglia 105Es have done their damndest to weave their tempting spell, but the purity of human-powered transport tended to win out. As a …
Seems our celebrating the arrival of spring over the weekend was a few days premature – yes, the weather is still full-bore spring, but today is the official first day of the season. So what does it all mean? To be honest, for my first quarter-century or so, I didn’t really have much of an …
You know, through the long, sweaty Singapore years, cooped up in our high-rise apartment, we often talked in a misty-eyed fashion about a golden future in which we’d have a garden. It would be an elegant, well-groomed, peaceful place, with gently tinkling rills, shady trees, lush lawns and rank upon rank of fragrant roses, peonies, …
As your faithful narrator has probably mentioned, the urge to tinker with stuff and maybe dismantle it is a lifetime one, especially when stuff doesn’t work (and dismantling stuff usually guarantees it will never work again). As youths, my group of mates were always building, making, destroying, repurposing and generally getting in where we shouldn’t …
It wouldn’t be surprising if, unlike me, you aren’t familiar with the finer points of the first Muppet Movie. Maybe it’s a generational thing, or maybe we were starved of sophisticated entertainment in sanctions-bound 1979 Zimbabwe, but be that as it may, for some reason this jolly musical romp remains vivid in the old memory …
One of the thought processes that inevitably strays through my mind at some point while jotting down these posts is the temptation to turn whatever activity I’m going on about into a metaphor for writing. It’s probably inevitable for the out-of-work freelance wordsmith to see his obsession in everything he does -- as in those …
Consider the pig: intelligent mammals with advanced reasoning faculties -- or machines for turning leftovers into yummy bacon, ham, pork and sausages? We've looked at hogs, but what of your common or garden oinker? Like so many of the random thoughts that make their way into this blog, there’s no way we can conduct a …
I think I may have mentioned a passion for cycling at some point in this saga. It’s something that goes back a long way, with short interruptions for loveless dalliances with motorcycles, Ford Anglias and utes. Like the archetypical beardy hipster, I’m claiming I was into it before it was trendy. The thing is, it's …
It rained all day yesterday – waves of driving droplets borne on strong gusts of chilly wind, ceasing for short periods and then whipping back through with a vengeance. It started early the previous evening and there was little respite for about 36 hours. Of course, this was a good thing for a region parched …
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