Excuses

Has it really been six months since I posted a Blog? No excuses. We are all busy, all side tracked etc etc.

What I've been doing is sewing, (making quilts actually), working for money, travelling, hosting interstate relatives and gardening of course. That never stops unless you wish to be over powered by weeds. Those of you following the weather will know that the eastern coast of Australia, or at least parts of it, has had some decent falls of rain in the past six months. So we've had the rain, floods, pestilence but not yet the famine, here on my block, though that may follow if the areas where food is grown in Australia don't have some rain as well.

In my little patch we have had lots of rain and the bush has responded with the most amazing outpouring of flowers. I've have taken hundreds of photographs, spent hours poring over books and on the internet trying to name them all, and have catalogued the lot, all in plant families. Hours and hours have been spent prowling around the bush photographing every bit of colour, every nuance of leaf change and of course anything that moves.

The more of that sort of thing you do the more you learn how little you know. Factor in computer crashes, lost files and maddeningly inefficient systems and suddenly not just hours have gone by but months too. I now have a huge catalogue of photographs of all the native plants in my little patch of rainforest, and many of my street and neighbourhood as well. Many of them I can now recognise from a leaf or a seedpod, which impresses my husband no end, but alas no one else is much interested.

Australian native flowers are often very small and here on the east coast often white as well. If I were to publish a blog of photographs of native flowers, which are tiny and white, that would not be very interesting viewing, but as I've been doing all the photographing and labelling and simply knowing the names of things for my own sake that doesn't matter I suppose.

It would be really nice to be able to make some money from one's hobbies - but I haven't yet figured out how.