Onewhero in Autumn
Apr. 19th, 2019 05:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
The eternal renovations are reached several long-planned stages. So the L-shaped attachment to the garage where
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For the first day I would every so often think of going through the house to the outside-room before remembering it isn't there anymore. In its place is a temporarily surreal space: the roof is high, with no ceiling under it. To the Northwest, a table tennis table, and the window out over the vege garden and one of the paddocks; to the Southeast, a bed, bedside lamp, shelves full of clothes; to the Southwest, the door, a foot off the ground; and to the Northeast, a wall currently defined only by structural beams, beyond which is the garage, with roller-door and tool-benches, meat freezer and electric organ (on its way out), an incentive against letting your table tennis shots go long.
The other running renovation -- well, apart from painting the outside of that new garage-rooms complex on some substantial trestles -- is the replacement of the kitchen window. This also feels surreal:

While Tim and Justy and I were lifting the old window down,
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Justy: "Sure. Where?
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Me: "Why do you need lacquer?"
Justy: "Oh, she told me about this -- it's for caramel."
Me: "Caramel?"
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No workable weaving caramel has yet been produced -- it's a design class project -- but experiments continue.
There's also a new bushwalk since I was last here in September: a gate where there was never a gate before, leading to path tacking backward and forward down a slope all over stones, through gorse and barberry and outnumbered native trees. Part of a long project to restore the slope. Tim is chopping it out at a great rate on rare unbusy days. I don't think I'd ever walked on that part of the slope, though
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Then there are all the books from our childhoods which were in the outside-room and are now in the poolhouse on the table. The poolhouse is in one of its 'chock-full of odds and ends' phases, after having been a bedroom again for a while (although even then it had boat mattresses in it). I'm the only one who hasn't looked through the books yet, and I'm going slowly, pausing every time I start to sneeze from the dust of mason-bee cocoons. Many of the books are damaged from much reading, or from damp and bees, or both, but none of the ones I want to keep so far have been. There are lots I'm happy to send on their way, and a few I actually want to keep and read, and only a very few which I have no desire ever to read again yet still want to hang onto. (Karazan Quartet).
The dingy which, on its first outing, sank under me and Tim on the way into a small bay, is now sitting in the middle of the poolhouse lawn, waiting to become a flowerbed. [Edit: no, strawberry patch.] The beehives have moved. The manuka clump on the hillock by the watertank is a little larger.
Now the cats and dog are eating their dinners, Saphira managing very well with her three remaining teeth and Butterscotch eating more than she usually does at a sitting, and Snoopy once again temporarily convinced that dogroll is food. The other cat, Suvine or Mozenrath depending who you asked, has died. I wouldn't necessarily have seen her yet on this visit anyway, she would have been spending almost all this time sitting in the laundry cupboard
There have been easter eggs, chocolate kiwis, hot cross buns, chocolate french toast (successful experiment), the first good pumpkin from the patch down by the creek, short walks, a lot of table tennis, scrabble, shifting trestles, lifting windows. I have been rereading The Claw of the Conciliator, because Gene Wolfe is dead, and I would like to manage to like his writing. I have a cold which has me more of an invalid than most colds do; its symptoms have retreated, except for what usually retreats first: headache and tiredness when I do anything as strenuous as walking up slopes. Hoping this goes away soon. But it is being a fine holiday.