Just Because Flowers

Originally uploaded by purrycat.

Ben brought home these gorgeous flowers for me the other night, not to mention the vase they came in. Thank the gods! A vase is one of those things that you keep meaning to buy, but never get around to it and usually forget until suddenly you need it.

I took heaps of others, but my camera is just completely unable to cope with the shakiness of my hands so they were all blurry. This is the only one that was clear enough. I think there are new ones that will compensate for it though.

Anyway, back to the flowers. Aren’t they pretty? :) Lillies are pretty much my favourite flower, and Ben got them to put in a couple of those purple flowers which I believe are Irises. “Just Because” flowers are awesome; I’ve felt warm and fuzzy all week… which is lucky since winter is having it’s last hurrah down here.

So it seems Channel Ten has finally gotten the hint and are ditching the Australian version of Big Brother . What a relief - the ads were painful, the few times we caught some of it while channel surfing was painful, and I understand that the pain has been ongoing for several seasons now. I watched the first season and quite enjoyed the whole social experiment thing they had going on, but one episode of its second incarnation turned me right off.

Anyway, so long and farewell Big Brother. Feel free to let the door hit you on the way out!

Ack! Why did I willingly go for a walk? Don’t I have any idea how cold it is out there???

My face is frozen. Actually my face was frozen and now that I’m back inside the house I can feel it slowly defrosting. It’s the weirdest feeling to have sensation slowly coming back to your face, one little piece at a time until finally you can feel your nose again. My nose is always the last thing to defrost on account of it being stupidly pointy and long and serves it right for getting cold since it sticks out so far. Stupid nose.

Apart from the cold and the sun going away behind clouds again, it was a good walk. You can see farmland (with some very cold looking sheep) and lots of weird, deformed eucalyptus’ that are what pass for trees in Australia, and I listened to Robert Miles on my iPod since listening to all that traffic kind of breaks any peaceful feelings you might get from gazing at sheep and deformed tree dotted hills.

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go stick my face in a hot drink.

For around about a week now I’ve been feeling increasingly flat, kind of sad, and almost depressed. The only way I can describe it is in very old-fashioned terms. If I was in a Jane Austen novel old ladies would have been tsking sadly about me and whispering to each other that my "spirits were much depressed".

Literally 10 minutes ago (because since my secretarial days my typing has decreased to a snail’s pace), I found out why: It’s been overcast, raining or just plain miserable weather for probably about a week, maybe more. The sun just came out and seeing real bright sunshine again was such a shock that I just stared out the front door for around a minute. Then my mood started to lift, I went outside for a bit, then all around the house opening blinds up wider, and it’s the weirdest thing but my heart feels lighter or something cheesy like that.

I had idly thought that maybe the weather was getting me down a little, but hadn’t put much credence to it. I guess that having lived in Brisbane my whole life with so much sunlight even in winter, that I haven’t been in a situation where I’ve had to go without it for long at all. Let’s face it, our last few years in Brisbane the occurrence of rain was a shock, the sky would go months without even threatening to rain, the term "without a cloud in the sky" was usually met with a groan and "oh again?". I suppose nothing in my life so far could have warned me that persistently overcast skies would really have affected me this much. Guess I should rule out living in England after all!

You know, I think I’m going to embrace the Canberran lifestyle and go outside wearing my tracksuit and to hell with makeup! I have to take advantage of this sunlight before it goes away again. Who knows when it might be back?!