Nobody else but me is gonna understand just how ironic this post is (provided it even makes it onto the site) as I type it out in an MS Word file rather than directly into the blog as I would usually do. With a couple of extra hours available to me this morning, I always had it in mind to write a post with the above title. What I hadn’t calculated was just how accurate that it would turn out to be. I was going to write about how 2024 has been nothing like how I had imagined it would…
Courtesy of a great act of kindness, this post is the result of receiving a gifted camera. An old mate read my previous post and generously passed on a camera he had not been using. I took the camera out in the garden this morning and got to snap away. I was very pleased with the results. I’ll need to study more on how to use the Sony NEX-7, having been an almost exclusively Nikon user for the past 35 years. It’s glorious weather today, which helped with taking photos. I turned the camera on some of the critters in…
Magnificent people made 2023 a much better year than I thought it was
It’s raining today, and while that would normally be grounds for disappointment, considering the dryness of the year, the precipitation is actually welcome. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Kangaeroo Corner. The sprinkle made the garden sparkle. The yard always looks nicer after good rainfall, which makes the greenery glisten. I’m still in pretty much full-time panic mode, so I woke before 3 a.m., had brekkie and readied myself to head out on my customary morning ride. After I kitted up and readied, I looked outside in the dark and noticed raindrops falling into the bird bath. I opened…
Winter is probably the worst time of the year to try to grow plants from cuttings, except, like for me, you’re desperately trying to avoid doing something unpleasant and you’ve been handed unseasonably fine weather. So, instead of taking a trial test for a potential new job as I could have done sitting in front of a computer for a couple of hours, I looked up how to propagate a grevillea. It seems the process is pretty easy (at least from the standpoint of the pros giving the advice online), but a lot of the available information was for the…
Summer in Tokyo this year was just how I like it: boiling hot and dry, probably the driest I have experienced in 35 years of living in the Japanese capital. But while I loved the heat, my garden in Kangaeroo Corner had mixed feelings, especially the lawn that went from vibrant green to burned brown. Trees thrived! Most delightedly, the jacaranda we had written off as dead in the spring powered back into life and is now one of the tallest growths on the block. The “branch” silver wattle goes from strength to strength and the golden wattle beside it…
Fortune smiled favorably on me this morning, too, as I got to ride out to a nearby sunflower field and get some awesome photos. There’s not much I can elaborate on, other than to say the field was a spectacular sight. There were lots of people around, even though the dawn had only just broken, so I rushed in and out before I became too much of a nuisance with my bike around, too. Also got blessed with some wonderful spurts of rain that I hope will rehabilitate the lawn at Kangaeroo Corner, but was distressed to discover the first…
Fortune blessed me with lots of wonderful reminders of how lucky I am yesterday, including through a fat-arsed addition to Kangaeroo Corner. We held a garden party for close friends and family, hoping to show off Kangaeroo Corner. A harsh summer, untimely rains and, I think, excessive intervention on my part, have destroyed the lawn, but much of the rest of the garden is thriving. And now, courtesy of a dear mate and former work colleague, there’s a new addition to Kangaeroo Corner in the former of Fatso, the fat-arsed wombat. I don’t know the incredible lengths she went to…
One of the highlights of Kangaeroo Corner is the Fountain of Strewth, which I placed with the hope of attracting birds to the garden, but the role has been served so well, I’m now drawn to the idiom used in the headline (which stems from a passage of Aesop’s fables that says “We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified,” according to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations Sixteenth Edition and as I learned today). Sweltering heat and fierce sunshine has made the Fountain of Strewth a popular part of the neighborhood’s avian residents. And I’ve been delighted by this, sitting in…
Strewth, work and life are bloody busy at the moment, but I can’t let that stop me from looking after things, which resulted this week in a renovation to the Fountain of Strewth. It was nothing major, but I found wooden letters on sale in the local 100 yen shop and decided they could decorate the fountain in Kanageroo Corner. Somewhat harsh weather conditions have got me worried about the garden, with a week of fairly constant rain a few weeks ago followed by largely gloomy conditions where regular rain hasn’t arrived, topped off by blistering heat and stifling humidity.…
