On a hot weekend in March

The Labour Day holiday was less of a holiday for the three of us, and more of a day of labour - but what a great time we had!

A good portion of the weekend was spent by the three of us getting Zoe's room into good working order. This involved throwing out, bagging for the op-shop, rearranging, boxing and creating new displays. We felt both virtuous and successful! Just look at it now:





Zoe and I also helped my uncle and his family on the stall at a couple of farmers' markets. Great fun, and an opportunity to sample the wares of other stalls. It's lovely to talk with the producers of the food, who are all really passionate about what they grow or make. The peaches and nectarines that we were selling were delicious, so they sold out very quickly. We brought home a couple of buckets of fruit, and because it was such a hot weekend some of the fruit just had to be made into something. Greg also picked green tomatoes from our vines, so now we have more peach jam, green tomato chutney and peach and white chocolate muffins. Yum!











Also made were a couple of padded coathangers, as there was nothing good enough to hang Zoe's new knitted coat on.
I have finally finished Virginia Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway" - and I say "finally" because it is not an easy read. It can be hard going to read a book without chapters, that moves seamlessly from the thoughts of one character to another, and particularly when conversations are composed of both the thoughts of the participants and their words. The themes and the plot are wonderfully thought-provoking and timeless, and the characters are beautifully established and developed. It is a jewel of a book but challenging.

Year 8 camp was fantastic - surfing, canoeing, snorkelling, exploring our wonderful Port Philip Bay, seeing dolphins, seals, puffer-fish, cuttlefish and other sea-creatures. The girls were delightful, and even slept well in the enormous dormitories in which they spent the four nights. Movie night watching "She's the Man" was fun (the girls are such romantics). The view over the Heads into the bay from Cottage by the Sea was stunning. But the most fantastic thing about camp was Samry, our Ethiopian refugee scholarship girl, who was never been fully-immersed in water, surfing! Amazing!