The Maroon Diaries

One of my biggest frustrations in the pursuit of blogging is the failure of a photographic image to match up to reality as I perceive it. I see something, and I want to share it with you. So I take a photo, but when I look at the image I have captured, it doesn’t look at all like what I was seeing. And so I can’t share the experience, and I give up on the fledgling blog post. I have tried a few different devices in my search for verisimilitude, and I don’t know if the better camera is producing a ‘better’ image or not, to me, it’s just another version of the image that’s not the one I saw. I went to start doing the dishes a little while ago, (as one must, repeatedly, apparently) and I was struck with one of those moments that I wanted to share with you. Beauty can always be found in the most unexpected and unappealing places, even in the dirty dishes in the sink. There was a bowl. It had been filled with peaches and cream, and then when it was empty, filled with water and left...

Most of the neighbours at my new home are the non-human variety, which is just lovely. A lot of them are cows. The land we live on sits behind the road from another block of land, with a right-of-access road running through it to get to our home. This land is owned by a cow farmer, so we have to pass through a cow paddock to get in and out. I just love it. Unusually, there seem to be a lot of different breeds of cattle all together in one paddock. I wonder if the farmer just really likes cows and wanted to collect lots of different kinds, like I do with vintage crockery and suchlike. I'm not sure when the official cattle breeding season is meant to be but these cows seem to be producing young regularly. Every now and then there will be a new tiny baby cow in the paddock, following its mother and finding its feet. There's always a mixture of the young ones that stick by their mothers, and the older, more sedate and mellow mothers, and some feisty half-grown adolescents that we...

The attentive follower may have noticed that things have been a little quiet lately here at The Maroon Diaries. I am very pleased to report that this lapse in blogging was not due to any health problems or techno-avoidance issues. Rather, I've actually been busy HAVING A LIFE. Yay for Lady Demelza! The Maroon Household made a collective decision to go North for the winter. This is wonderful for me as it means staying with my darling goddessdaughter Littletree , whom I adore more than life itself. The climate is the wonderful thing for Mr. CJ. With many of his health problems being arthritis-related, July and August can be a pretty miserable time for him. Up here, he gets to hang out on a sunny verandah rather than huddle by the fire... while I complain about the unreasonable heat. Yes, I am very sad to be missing out on the winter... but I have lots of happy distractions here to make up for it. I wish I could find a way to explain and express just how awesome and amazing Little...

...see how they wriggle and squirm! Oh, excitement! My worm farm has arrived! I've always been a dedicated composter. I always put together some kind of composting arrangement wherever I lived, even tiny little ones in the grounds of apartment buildings. When we first moved in here, we used the compost bin already in place - right up the very end of the backyard, in a most inconvenient corner of the carport. But then Mr CJ got sick, and by the time I caught up with dealing with that, I developed a prolapsed disc in my back and couldn't walk much at all for a while. Yes, yes, drama drama. One of the sad consequences of these particular difficulties was that I gave up the composting and resorted to the rubbish bin. It was just too much physical labour for us to cope with. And yes, I felt terribly guilty about it ever since. Recently I read this blog post  by a woman who lives in an apartment block and wished she could compost, but was concerned about the neighbours' ...

Recently I posted this short post introducing my local resident possum when I actually thought to get my camera out while he was conveniently positioned in a good viewing area. In trying to answer Ruthie's question in the comments - are they friendly? - I got a bit carried away for the confines of a comments box and thought that a post on the subject was in order, particularly for the edification of international readers. And, if I'm doing another post, I'll want fresh photos for it. So last night I went outside and followed the sound of the possum. I couldn't actually see it, I just held the camera over my head, pointed in the direction of the noise and let the flash do the rest. Out of several random shots I captured these two images. I'm sorry, dear reader, but I do not have good news. The short answer to the question - are they friendly? - is no, they're not really. They are not shy, but brazen and shameless and completely confident in their ...

I'm talking about the possum. But if the possum could blog, he would probably be complaining about me being the unwelcome intruder. It depends on your point of view. This feller here is the current resident of the Possum Hilton, which is a really, really big tree just behind my house. It really is an unusually large and opulent tree for such a densely built-up residential area, standing around 20m high and quite broad too, and makes a damn fine piece of real estate for the modern urban possum. He has a real personality, this cheeky little bugger, he does. He makes it quite clear that the backyard belongs to him, not us, and is the reason why the biodiversity of my vege garden is limited to onions. He loves having his photo taken, and he's also quite good at impersonations. His favourite is the one where he sounds just like a crazed methamphetamine addict who is trying to break into the house by tearing the tin sheeting off the roof.

We went on a long drive through the country, to visit my mother's house. Hours of wide open spaces, the landscape so typical of the Western Districts of Victoria. Endless rolling fields, the wide brown land that Miss Mackellar  loved so much, and a big blue sky that just goes on forever. I'm not sure what it is about this spot that it qualifies as a 'Significant Roadside Area.' It looks pretty standard to me. And this is what it looks like when we're NOT having a drought. Just in case you're thinking that maybe there's something else outside the frame of this picture, I turned around a took a shot of the other side. I admit to experiencing an urge to commit an act of public vandalism, specifically, to efface the last letter of the village named on the lower of these signposts. I can't imagine why. I did manage to restrain myself. The surreal geometry of European trees planted in straight lines. I found this crop of box-cut gum trees, ...