Tasmania – Day 5

Today was our first full day in Hobart. We left our accommodation and drove to the Cadbury Factory but decided that we didn’t want to pay the $7.50 entrance fee just to enter the shop (we didn’t have time to stick around and do the tour). After that we drove to Mount Wellington, which was shrouded in cloud. We drove to the summit and spent a few minutes up in the clouds – very cold and wet… we didn’t see much, either  

Our next stop was the Cascade Brewery and I spent a while walking around the gardens. Some of the flowers they had were quite beautiful – the honey bees here are huge and much fatter than the ones at home. I want to plant some of the plants in my garden at home… the colours were stunning.

After the Brewery, we drove to Hobart and into the commercial district for lunch at Constitution Dock. I don’t eat fish, so I ate plain potato wedges with sour cream. We separated after that; Dad went to take photos, my sister went shopping on her own and mum and I went together.

Tonight we went out to dinner at the Casino. We went to a buffet restaurant. It was nice – very small but the food was lovely and the service was quite good too. Now we are back watching the football – go Port Adelaide!

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Photos

I am spending the Easter weekend cleaning, importing music to iTunes and eating chocolate. I went outside yesterday and took some photos in the garden – the first is one of our Chinese Lantern plants, the second is my mum’s water pump and the last is my herb garden, which is situated in an old bathtub. I used my new tripod to take the photos and I am very happy with the results so far. I have also done a little bit of writing although most of my time has been spent reading through to catch up to where I am in the editing process.

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Playing Catch Up

Holidays are over and it’s back to work. I wrote a post on the weekend but either my computer chewed it up or WordPress was having hiccups because it promptly disappeared and I couldn’t get it back.

I had a pretty eventful last week of holidays. The first two days were reasonably restful. On the Monday, I stayed home and worked on SR, trying to get as much as possible finished. My sister was also home all day, sick. On Tuesday, I went out with my friend K. We went driving through the Adelaide Hills, climbed  one of the King of the Mountain climbs for the Tour Down Under in my zippy yellow car, saw some young thoroughbreds at Lindsay Park Stud and then had lunch at a nice pub.

Wednesday morning at 2:46, I woke up feeling very ill… I was sick all of Wednesday with gastro. The only ‘good’ thing about it was that I managed to watch most of the inauguration of Barack Obama, though I missed the swearing in itself.

On Thursday, still feeling a bit under the weather, I went back for my first day of school with the rest of our staff – the students didn’t start back until Tuesday the 27th. I am teaching English, ESL, Australian Studies, Legal Studies and the Personal Learning Plan. Both Thursday and Friday was a rush of gtting things in order for the first day back and in truth I am still getting organised, although most of the hard work is done. I am teaching mainly Grade 10 and my classes have been wonderful so far.

I kept my weekend pretty quiet – I was feeling sick still right up until Monday, although it was mainly loss of appetite, which I could handle. I did a little bit of work in my garden, although a lot of that will probably take a beating – we’ve had three days of HOT weather including two days of 44C weather (114F), so a lot of my younger plants are dead or dying. Because of the water restrictions, I can’t give them another long soaking with my hose until Saturday and I can only carry so many buckets or watering cans of water.

~ Jewel

Monday Musings…

Happy New Year! It seems hard to believe that we are already 5 days into 2009. I know January is going to fly by, especially since I am back at work on January 22. I have been taking the first few days of the year very easily. Our cooler than normal December has morphed into what feels like a normal January. It is quite warm today, especially out in the sun.

I have finally finished reuploading all of my Flickr photos. Now I just have to sort them properly into Sets and Collections.I have quite a few new photos too – I have spent the past week playing with my camera. There are some nice shots of flowers from my garden, some pictures of horses (the herd at Nyroca I often take photos of, as well as some new horses near Kersbrook) and some photos I took while I was at the beach on Saturday afternoon. I have also decided to attempt to take a photo for each day this year. I am going to chronicle this at my Just Add Ink Photoblog. I will also put a button on the sidebar.

On Thursday and Friday I spent quite a bit of time in my new garden. I now have two flower gardens, a wheelbarrow that I have planted with flowers and I will soon have a herb garden in an old bath that we are recycling. I also have a mini herb pot with mint, chocolate mint, basil and coriander. I am slowly putting peastraw down on the garden beds and tonight will have to water because the plants are looking thirsty.

I have also spent some time working on SR while waiting for my photos to upload. I am supposed to be working on Chapters Seven and Eight but while I was going back over Chapter One, I realised that I had a few major problems with the plotline early in the novel. I was going to use an entirely new beginning to Chapter One that I had already written as an alternate beginning but I think I’ve come up with a solution now (and besides, I love the current version). I have also attempted to ‘even out’ my chapters, as I had some that were 13 pages alongside others of 30 pages. I’m still working on that, as I am planning to add one or two new scenes earlier on.

~Jewel