A Bit of a Catch Up

Well things seem to be settling down finally.  T is home from his month long visit back to the USA and Canada to see relatives.  He's over the jet lag.  My Sydney trip is behind me. Great fun.  Four of the five animals have now recovered from their poison episode and no word from the neighbours who so carelessly left it lying around.  I don't envy the insular life they seem to be developing for themselves. My old guy Wally is still having blood clotting issues but hopefully it will be corrected with this new batch of treatment that ends in 2 weeks time.

I have been putting in native plants to attract more birds to my garden. The back yard is full of birds. We have only recently fenced in the front yard to make a bigger playground for the pets and now I have bird attracting natives around the entire fence line. Will be nice when they grow up in the next couple of years. I have also put in a cherry tree and an apricot tree so looking forward to their future as well.

Our winter weather has been very mild lately which is great and not overly windy. The rains we had were hard and made the ground softer to dig so a good time to put the plants in.

I have found a few new Penguin books (new to me I should say) for the collection and am about to get them catalogued and shelved.

I am also up to date with a bit of book reading.  I finished a fluffy book which is all I could concentrate on when the animals weren't well as I was worried about them. Called The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty.
It was one of those books where chapter I is about one set of characters, then chapter II introduces another set and chapter III another set yet and then finished with chapter IV with yet another dilemma. Then it repeats, gradually integrating the problems of everyone intermingling with each other until the final solutions at the end.  It centred around an old murder of a school girl, a who dunnit, romance, affairs, a disillusioned old woman and strong friendships.  It was an enjoyable read though I think a tad too long. I would have edited it a bit tighter.

But it was something to read in the evenings and I certainly didn't need to concentrate. I got it from the library after reading a review on it somewhere along the line. It was on my list of books I keep on the library website.

Then after that I was ready for something much better and the Fuller's Bookshop August Book club read, Lost Voices by Christopher Koch must be the best book I've read in a very long time. We are going to discuss it at the book group next week so I'll hold off saying much on it now. It deserves a bit more thought than what I can put down here but suffice it to say I LOVED IT.

The ABC's Tuesday book group is going to discuss The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien and The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud next week.  I picked up TWU at the local book shop and could only find The Third Policeman as an audio book (unabridged so that's okay) at the local library. It has 6 CD's and I have listened to 2 of them. I am listening to the second CD again as this is a very interesting story and I have not yet figured out all the symbolism. I need to research the story a bit more because there is so much in it and will do a separate post on it before too long.

I just wanted to get something posted up as I have been a bit slack with my postings mainly because I am just so disorganised with other things going on.  I have no idea if this will improve or not, my organisation skills related to blogging, but at least I am getting some record of my books up and other life events for the fun of it.

I continue to enjoy reading everyone else's blogs and they keep me smiling when things don't always go according to plan. Eventually when I see the regularity of other people's blogs I get motivated.  So stay tuned. Something will be posted again before too long.