Early Autumn, what a joy . . .

The nights are starting to cool down at last.  This morning is so clear and fresh that I feel really inspired to get out in the garden as quick as I can, even if it is just to pull out weeds!

My walking friend called round one afternoon last week, to see if I wanted to go for a walk.  Well, she walks, I hobble.  While I got my shoes on, she wandered along the path at the front of the house to the roses on the western side.  As I came back out the front door, she said "How come your roses are flowering so well when your garden is such a mess and uncared for?"  OUCH!!!

I must admit that they are all flowering well at the moment.  All the rain we got came later this year than last and it seems to have suited them.

Crepuscule on the archway at the side gate.

The Icebergs outside the lounge room window.

Here is the 'uncared for' western rose bed!  You know, she's absolutely right!!

Here is one of my Mum's hanging baskets.  For some time now, I've watched a wasp construct this elaborate looking nest -

Not really fond of wasps, but I can cope with the mud nest ones much better than the paper wasps which are evil critters with very foul tempers.

Speaking of evil critters, Mike was using the whipper snipper on long grass near the western rose bed the weekend before last and saw something fly out from under the blade.  It was another brown snake, only about 12 inches long, just a baby!  I guess enough venom to kill a few hundred people or so.  Rotten uncared for garden!!!

And here's my last critter story for today!  We have a number of Orb Weaving spiders in the garden at this time of the year - huge webs of the most sticky thread you could imagine.  

Here's a photo of an Orb Weaver web from a year or so ago

Lately, there's been a web hanging quite high above the ground on the western end of the house, between the window awnings and the guava tree.  Yesterday evening, while talking on the phone, I happened to glance out the window and there hanging in the web was a baby flying fox!  They are also one of my least favourite forms of wildlife but I had to rescue it.  I used the long pole from the pool broom to break the web a few inches above where it's feet were entangled and here's a good indication of the strength of the web, I carried it suspended by the web all the way round the house, through the side gate and across the front to the wattle tree where I did my best to get it hanging from a reasonably sized branch.  The web was still on it's feet so I kind of draped it across the wattle foliage.  Got up this morning and went out to see if it was still there.  The web is still there but the little critter has gone.  Maybe its mum came and picked it up.  Maybe Grandpa, Grandma, Mum and Dad and all the other little brown snakes came and got it!!

Good grief, I need to get out there and get working!!

David Austin 'Charlotte' - again.  Lovely rose!

Why . . . ?

Do you remember when we used to have to line up at the bank to do our banking?  When we used to write out a cheque and post it off to pay our bills?  Now there is 'Internet Banking'.  Well, there's internet everything else so there may as well be internet banking.

Remember when we didn't have credit cards?  When there was absolutely no such thing?  You saw something you wanted and you saved up your money by any method you fancied and when you had enough, you went and bought the thing you wanted.  Now that internet shopping has created the need for internet banking, the credit card is in everyone's pocket and is a seemingly essential part of everyday life.

I broke my own rule of alternate gardening days this morning and spent a couple of hours pulling out nut grass.  Such an easy, mindless thing to do - and just as well because it is a job in my garden that will NEVER END.  All the learned experts tell me, once nut grass is in your garden, it will be always in your garden.  I'd like to think that if I pulled it all out six million times, that by the time six million and one times came around, there would be nothing left to pull out.  That's my theory and I'll have to go with it, otherwise the reality will get me down too much.

After my stint with the nut grass, I made a coffee and sat down at the computer to do my 'Internet Banking'.  Paid the Council rates, paid the Community Association levies, transferred money to my credit card and checked the balance - WHAT THE . . . . !!!!!!!!

A quick check of the transactions on my credit card shows me that this very morning, two amounts, both in excess of $1600, were added to my credit card.  A quick call to the bank and the young chap there tells me the names of the two companies that now have the money, neither of which I have ever heard of in my life, let alone spent money at.  He says the purchases have yet to be authorised and that if, by some chance, it is a case of wrong digits or glitch of some sort, then the amounts will indeed disappear off my account.  Somehow, I feel that is unlikely.  Some nasty person has taken advantage of the fact that I have a credit card.  Not content to have their own credit card, they would prefer to defraud ordinary people out of extraordinary amounts of money.

I was most upset, more cranky than anything.  How dare they!

My next job was to go to the supermarket.  The pantry was looking bare and the fridge not much better.  My stint in the garden this morning served the purpose of making my busted ankle a little more dodgy, to the point where, when I got to the shop and managed to score a shopping trolley that went every which way but straight, I had the greatest difficulty in walking at all.  The ankle just refused to be even slightly flexible and I hobbled my way up the aisles, fighting the rotten trolley and feeling more miserable by the minute until by the time I made it to the dairy section, I had found an old raggedy tissue in my handbag which I surreptitiously used to mop up the tears that insisted on seeping out of my eyes.

Would it be easy to go back to not having these trappings of the 21st century?  Could we survive without our credit cards?  And our internet banking?  We could certainly survive without the scoundrels who have no conscience and think nothing of making our lives miserable.

Catching up on the news . . .

With my extended absence from blogging, I have missed recording some important news - I am a Grandma again.  My daughter and her husband were expecting last year with a due date of Christmas Eve, which kind of threw Christmas arrangements into a bit of a spin.

However, good things sometimes arrive early and their son was born on 20 December.  An auspicious birthdate - twenty - twelve - twenty twelve.  He is just gorgeous and she has settled in nicely to being a stay at home mum.

My other Grandson is now almost nine months old and is also just gorgeous.  My daughter in law has just recently gone back to work part time and so he is having three days a week at a local day care centre.

I could just eat him!

With all the rain we've had lately, the weeds in the garden have gone ahead in leaps and bounds.  A few weeks ago, I started weeding the rose bed on the western side of the house and at that stage, the summer grass was sprouting and was up to here (hand at about shin height).  Now, with the rain and the warm, oh so humid weather, the summer grass has gone to seed and is up to here (hand at chin height)!  Atrocious stuff!  I have so lost my gardening fitness - a few hours out there and I am so knackered.  And the next day, I have such sore and stiff muscles that gardening at the moment is done on alternate days only.

The roses are putting on heaps of new growth after the rain.  The dreadfully hot weather we had in January, getting up to 45 degrees C on a few occasions, combined with the lack of water and lack of care with me holed up inside the house meant that they had been looking decidedly seedy.  We had a few casualties of the hot weather, two geraniums in front of the verandah all but expired but have little patches of new growth although thankfully my Johnson's Blue survived okay.  The clematis on the archway near the front door looks like it has totally gone to God.  Strangely, it was just the common Montana which I would have thought was hardier than the other hybrids I have which both survived and are flowering at the moment.

 I can never remember the name of this rose - it is written on a little stake that is planted next to it, one day I must pull in out and read it!  I think it's DA Ambridge Rose - but I may be wrong.

This one is DA Charlotte.  None of these roses got to be pruned last year with me having broken my leg.

The western bed looks like a bit of a jungle - note the trash bag full of summer grass - one of seven I filled on Monday of this week.  Much more needs to be done here!

The last of the flowers on the cut leaf lilac.  This is the first time I've seen many flowers on it.  So sweetly perfumed.

The view along the front of the house with the now bare archway.  The banksia rose growing on the right hand side has been chopped to the barest stump, poisoned with Roundup, had every shoot removed countless times and still it persists in growing.  Maybe I should just let it be.

Mike bought me a new present.  Actually he bought it last July and it was finally delivered last week.

It's an AGA and I think I've wanted one for about a hundred years.  Such anticipation - what a pity it arrived damaged, with great chunks broken off the enamel - four new oven doors are in the process of being made over in England and a specialist repairman will be visiting me within the next few weeks to see if he can repair the damage to the body of the stove.  I was so disappointed.

New doors for the resized cupboards at the sides of the stove are being ordered and then with any luck, the whole of the kitchen, including the cupboards, will be repainted.  I like progress . . . but why does it all have to take so long?

Sadness . . .

A long, long time ago, something very sad happened.  I went to sleep one night and my ability to blog fell out through my ear.

Prior to that, I felt that the life I was leading was somehow worthy of being recorded, even if only for my own benefit - I could look back and remember things that had happened or that I'd done.  Now I read old posts from the Kurrajong Garden Chronicles and I'm just amazed - I can scarely remember the joy I used to get from a good days gardening.  And somewhere, along with the joy of gardening and the rewards it brought me, went my joy of life in general.

I'm nostalgic for the way things used to be and more so for the way I used to be.  I have much to be thankful for and so I am on a mission to get back my old self, to work on my newish lack of mobility and find the old joy that I once had.

Now if only it would stop raining, I could go out into the garden and begin. . . .

On being held to ransom . . . .

Mike is a worrier.  For 22 years, he has run his little accountancy practice, doing tax returns for people in the most careful manner.  No 'creative' accountancy gets done in Mike's office, it's all to the letter of the law and strictly by the book.  Still he worries about whether he's getting everything done okay.

He's not a whiz with technology but over the years has managed to acquire a computer system which, whilst not at all sophisticated, serves his needs.  He has a server on which his programs and data are stored, and PCs on his desks at the office connected to the server.  The system is protected by a firewall and virus protection.  He also has a laptop, which he uses at home to connect to the server so that he can continue doing tax returns for people when he gets home.

Approximately two and a half weeks ago, on a Sunday night, he tried to log on to the server from home here.  Once he was connected to the server, he got a strange looking screen which seemed to indicate that there was a problem with the server.  Not to worry, he thought, I'll save it for tomorrow when I get to the office.

His worst nightmare had just begun.

On the following morning, he sat at his desk and watched the program icons on his desktop disappear one by one.  Nothing worked.  His IT guy was called.  The server is not usually connected to a monitor but once this was done, the messages started arriving.

'Your computer has been locked.  Unless you do as instructed, authorities will be informed that we have discovered child pornography on your computer.

Every file on your computer has been encrypted using AES software.  You need a key to decrypt the files.  Don't bother trying to work out the key, it will take you more than a trillion years.

I, of course, have the key that will decrypt your files as I indeed wrote the program that has rendered your computer useless and your files scrambled.  Don't you trust me?  Send me a file, pick any file on your system and email it to me and I guarantee that I will send it straight back to you decrypted.  Because I am such a decent chap.

See, I told you so!  Now, let's talk about the rest of your files.  That key is going to cost you $4000US. It must be sent to me in a totally untraceable method, via Western Union and the criminal's choice, Liberty Reserve.  Email me when you have deposited the money and I will send further instructions so you can watch your money vanish.  By the way, the cost of the key is going to go up by $1000US per week if you dilly-dally.

Okay, I have your money, now here is the key.  (a jumble of approximately 50 letters, numbers, symbols).  Here are a few instructions about how to use the key, but if you have any difficulties, please email me and I will give you lots of assistance'.

That is by no means the exact wording of the ransom request.  Mike has now been effectively out of business for the last two and a half weeks, with 22 years worth of honest work completely jeopardised and no solution offered by anyone except to pay the money.

He has heard that approximately 500,000 computers worldwide have been similarly held to ransom, and that the whole sordid business is expected to get much worse before the charming perpetrator(s) are caught.  Every computer is at risk.

Merry Christmas to us.

And so it continues . . . . .

Two weeks ago today, my sister dropped her little doggie here for a holiday while she and her husband and kids flew to the US of A for the vacation of a lifetime.

This is Buster -

enjoying the sunshine on the back verandah with our Merlin.  He's a little Australian Silky Terrier with a whole load of attitude.  He came feeling very unsociable toward our dogs, as you can tell by the photo, he's greatly improved in that regard.

On the Sunday after Buster arrived, I woke in the morning not feeling great.  Still had my breakfast and tried to ignore my painful belly.  By late morning, I was nauseous.  By early afternoon, no amount of fingers down the throat could make me throw anything up except yucky foamy looking clear stuff.  I had a pain in my chest that went straight through to my back.  Mike kept saying 'I'll take you down to the medical centre' and I kept saying 'no, no, it'll go away, I'm sure'.  By about half three in the afternoon, I was flat on my back in my bed with the electric blanket full bore on my back and a hot wheat bag on my chest.  It was becoming quite difficult to breathe - the time had arrived for action to be taken.  Once in the car on the way to the hospital, the pain really took hold.  We arrived at Accident and Emergency at Windsor and because I had chest pains, I was taken in quite quickly, but not before I had another session of retching in the loo with all the other customers in the waiting room watching on. I was taken in and an ECG quickly ordered.  This action coincided with a young guy who had fallen from his motor bike and knocked himself out arriving in the bed across the room.  As they tried to subdue him, his screamed obscenities deafened out my moans of pain, I could not lie still on the bed but even in the commotion, I could hear my heart beating inside my head and I knew I wasn't having the heart attack they were testing me for.

An injection of morphine was ordered, then another.  I have no idea how long it took but the pain kind of eased.  The same doctor who poked my broken leg and said 'does that hurt?' last time I was there now poked my belly and once again asked the same question.  He could tell by my face what the answer was.  Off I went to the x-ray machine and once back in A&E, I could watch as my pictures were displayed on the light box amid much pointing and discussion.

At about 1.30am I was transferred to the ward, given more painkillers and told that an ultrasound in the morning would probably confirm their suspicions that my gall bladder was playing up.  Surprisingly, I slept quite well.

Monday morning came and the breakfast trolleys went right by my room - I was signposted 'Nil by Mouth'.  The ultrasound was duly done and then I waited for some results.  I was extremely tired, slept on and off all day, then had a visit from a Hospital Doctor who confirmed that, indeed, I had a stone lodged in my gall bladder, and that the surgeon looking after me would be reviewing my ultrasound and a decision would be made.  Some needed to come out quickly, some could be treated with antibiotics until they settled somewhat and an operation performed some time later, usually around 6 weeks after the first attack.  I would have to wait for the decision.

I didn't sleep too well that night, I dreamed of cups of tea, and my mouth was getting drier by the hour. I kept having to donate little tubes of blood which were being extracted from veins which were getting harder and harder to find.

Tuesday morning and the breakfast trolleys went by again.  At about 10am the surgeon came and said that seeing my pain was still quite intense, she thought it best that the offending organ be removed that day.  I was having a great problem with shortness of breath and had developed quite a rattle in my chest.  Coughing was murder.

So they prepped me for the upcoming operation, which entailed giving me a lovely pair of paper undies, a gown which, of course, meant my butt was exposed if I got out of bed and a paper shower cap which I designated as my fascinator seeing that it was Melbourne Cup Day and such things are worn on that day.  Then I waited, and listened as the morning tea trolley went by, and the lunch trolley went by, and the afternoon tea trolley went by, until about 4.30 when I was wheeled out to the operating theatre.  The clock on the wall said one minute to 5 as I was taken in.

I woke in recovery at 6.40.  I was surprisingly in very little pain and felt so much better.  About an hour or two later, the pain relief wore off and I knew I was alive.

Back in the ward, I was offered my long awaited cup of tea, but the gross taste in my mouth didn't let me enjoy it greatly.

Wednesday morning and the breakfast trolley stopped at my door.  Great!  But I could hardly eat a thing.

The surgeon came to see me about 9.30am and said she was very pleased that they hadn't decided to wait as the ultrasound had not shown quite the extent of the problem.  The gall bladder was full of pus, which was leaked out and created a raft of pus sitting under my diaphragm and the gall bladder itself was partially gangrenous.

But I could go home that afternoon, although by the time I got here, I seriously doubted that it was a good idea.  I was just so sore.  My kidneys basically stopped working and over the next three or four days, I swelled up with so much fluid that I could scarcely bend my knees and the skin on my legs was as tight as a drum.  Not a great way to get rid of your cellulite!

Anyway, over the last 6 days or so, I have made much improvement.  Still a little sore.

The surgeon told me the day after the operation that the long term effects of gall bladder removal can be many and varied.  Best case scenario, there may be very little change in what I can eat, worst case scenario, there could be chronic diarrhoea for the rest of life.  I guess even chronic diarrhoea has some semblance of predictability, better than the surprise diarrhoea that I'm suffering from at the minute!

So since June this year, I have had a dose of pneumonia, a broken leg and now removal of my gall bladder.  That'll just about do me for this year, thanks all the same.

Frustration Friday . . .

Okay, so it's only Thursday, but it doesn't go quite as well with 'frustration'.

I am struggling with my mending ankle.  I had my first big day in the garden on Monday, clearing weeds that should have been dealt with weeks and weeks ago.  In the space of 25 minutes or so, I managed to twist over on my ankle twice.  I broke a blood vessel in my finger that is still purple today. So I came back inside and promptly walked into the corner of the dishwasher door.  Which I had left open.   My ankle looks almost normal first thing in the morning, but as the day progresses, it becomes more and more swollen.  I bought an elastic type support which comes a few inches up my shin, and by the evening, I have a veritable balloon of swelling over the top.

Put your foot up as much as you can, they said to me.  While I had the cast on, that was basically all I did, sat in my comfy chair with my foot on a leather footstool kindly lent to me by my son and his wife.  I knitted and sat, and sat and knitted, and my foot swelled.  No! no! they said, you have to have the injury higher than your heart!  I challenge anyone to sit with their ankle higher than their heart and remain looking dignified and sane.  Let alone manage to do anything at the same time.  The mind boggles!

Yesterday, I got sick of the feeling of my leg being so swollen, and I started to research ways and means of reducing same.  Compression stockings!  Wow, those suckers are expensive!  Hang on a minute - they ring a distant bell.  A quick search of the right drawer brought to light a pair of somewhat second hand looking compression knee high socks.  They belonged to my dear old mum.  Look, there's the laundry mark the nursing home wrote around the inside of the top - 'Room 41'.  Mum suffered greatly from chronic oedema in the last few years of her life, really much worse than what I'm going through, and as I struggled to roll the sock onto my leg, I apologised to her for not being more sympathetic.  They are a size larger than I would have bought, but the relief they have given me is quite something.

So today I went off to my physiotherapy appointment, in my new sock, and came home more sore than when I went.  I was quite grumpy and made my frustration at the whole situation quite obvious.  Poor guy, he didn't cause the issue and he's only doing his job.  I expressed my displeasure at having a cankle which is completely unstable, making it very hard for me to walk on any ground that is uneven as it twists from underneath me so quickly and hurts like mad when it does. I demanded to know how long this situation was going to remain and, indeed, if ever it was going to heal completely!  Could be 12 months and short answer, no.

So I shall endeavour to sit more, with my ankle higher than my heart.

There is an old house on the hill across the valley from us.  It was built in 1834, I think, so is surrounded by an old garden.  It's recently been on the market and was described in the real estate blurb as having a potager, amongst other things.  Sigh . . .   It's now sold, and as I sit, I'm watching two guys (and two dogs which look like they've just been released from a courtyard by their enthusiastic activity) clearing out the old garden.  I can see old fences starting to appear from the undergrowth and new retaining walls going in.  Stuff is constantly being delivered and everyone whizzes around busily.  I'd be scared to do that so soon after moving in, in case I was pulling out old treasures, but by the same token, I'm so envious of their progress.  I wish I had an army of gardeners with all the earthmoving equipment under the sun who would come every day and I'd say 'let's build a retaining wall here, and dig a big pond over there, and create a pergola walk of roses across there . . . . .'

. . . . . all while I sat with my ankle higher than my heart.  That should make 'em work hard!