Two good things on Friday

image courtesy of www.bemindful.com.au

1. Another great yoga session today. I am so enjoying it. During that one-and-a-half hours, there are just tiny, tiny, fleeting moments when I catch just a glimpse of the calm, together person I could be...I just have to keep practicing.

2. So enjoying too picking up little mid-century pieces to add to my slowly retroising house. One great declutter tip I picked up during the week - don't bring anything into your house before you know where you'll put it. And I did just that with these thrifted bits and pieces.

One good thing on Thursday

I must admit I've stolen this idea from Jane Brocket over at www.yarnstorm.blogs.com/ but it does fit quite well with other thoughts I've had of late of being grateful for and enjoying what is around me instead of looking to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing...and all the things that aren't here quite yet. Also, I'm thinking it might just build up to some ramshackle 12-days-of-Christmas type countdown (build up to a countdown...hmmm)

So today - one good thing on Thursday - is this beautiful, peaceful Buddha which I have just bought and which is taking pride of place on the sideboard in the living room, catching your eye as soon as you come in the door.

Preparing for Summer

Image courtesy of http://marcopoloni.com

As a part of our home improvements week, we're ordering some Japanese Noren curtains for our front porch. There's no point putting in another door as such, because it leads in a very short step straight to the front door, but I'm hoping to make this little space just a bit cooler during the coming summer months. I also want to make it more of an 'anteroom' rather than being so much an extension of the outside space as you come in from the front garden so some dreamy, floating Noren curtains seemed like the answer. And once again through the wonder that is the Internet, I have found a local shop which will make them to custom fit our slightly irregularly shaped doorway. They will fit across more of the doorway than those pictured above, and with a little more emphasis on the practical rather than the purely decrorative, but I think it'll work out to be a nice solution. I like to see the house make these seasonal changes - it seems like more of an organic being that way!

Sunday's Fun Day, Charlie Brown

A lovely winter's Sunday spent cruising around the Yarra Valley with my dear Fellow Traveller. We had lunch in Healesville (an excellent Chicken Parmigiana - is this an exclusively Australian dish, I wonder?), bought some beautifully scenty, fresh apples, mandarins, quinces and pears from a roadside produce store and some other local produce (a very nice pinot noir) from the wine outlet at the TarraWarra Museum of Art (http://www.twma.com.au/) The view above was taken just outside of the Museum. Still lots of evidence of February's awful fires in the area, but heartwarming to see little green shoots on the charred tree trunks - signs that the Wheel continues to turn.