Sunday Selections- New Chapter Edition

Today I am linking up with Kim from Frog Ponds Rock for Sunday Selections.
As photographs, there is nothing special about this week's pictures, and they don't seem to go together, even though I do like to have a theme for Sunday Selections.
There is a theme here, although it's a little hard to see: My father is currently undergoing treatment for cancer.  All of these pictures were taken on the day he had his last ever dose of chemo.  Now we move on to the next chapter of his recovery.
I took ninety photos that day, and I love them all.  I thought ninety would be a lot for you to look through, and so, with much deliberation and a little heartache, I narrowed it down to twenty-three, and tried to avoid including pictures that were too similar to each other.  I hope you enjoy them!

~~~

I needed to get a photo of these colours together!

I liked the shadow of my sleeves, so I took this picture of my shadow thinking about something.

This pier, Urangan Pier, (which you can't see all of) is 868 metres long.  Makes for a very nice, but quite windy walk, when you can be bothered.

Someone lost a hat.  If I wasn't wearing such a nice dress, I'd have a new hat, now.

Seagulls. I had no idea they still knew how to look for food in the water...

 I liked this whole tree/shop perspective.  I find it very colourful.  That fish & chip shop there does good baked spuds.

Broken in a storm.

Bird's nest!  This makes me very happy.

You can see the whole pier here, and, um, other things.  I was actually taking the picture of that sole bird in flight...

What bug is that?  I don't know.

One day, when I'm not in a nice dress, I want to sit in that tree.

I must eat at this table!  I don't think I ever have, but I know this area is alive with animals, so it would be a wonderful adventure!

Nobody lives in here, I checked.  Thought about moving in myself...

Can't help but wonder if this happened when the pine cone tried to hold on to the tree when it started to fall.  My other ideas include faeries did it.

Is it that hard to take your rubbish with you?  Really?!

Rocks at the palm tree garden.  I don't even know why there is a palm tree garden, but it's very green and has nice rocks.

Delightfully artsy photo of some leaves at the place I bought hot chips from.

This is a shot of the patio railing at the same place.  You can see my dress at the edge there.

Colours.

Standard low-tide beach shot.

I love how the dog that ran through this concrete seems to have turned around and gone the other way almost as soon.

This picture is actually of the ants...

Close up on a gladiolus in the hospital grounds, when we went to take dad home.

I hope you have enjoyed your time with my many, many pictures.  Do pop over to Kim's to see what everyone else is linking up!

Love to you all,

Cassandra Louise.

WORMS!

Alright, so I'm a little excited about my worms.  I mean earthworms.  Beautiful wriggly little garden friends!

I always find worms when I harvest potatoes, even though I grow my potatoes in pots.  The earthworms seem to absolutely love potatoes, which is why potato dirt (dirt that's had a crop of potatoes in it) is fantastic soil for growing anything at all, and doesn't even need refreshing.  I think the dirt-to-worm-poop ratio shifts almost entirely, but that's a good thing.  Honestly, I'm not sure how it works.  I have a friend who knows, and she tries to explain it to me sometimes, but I'm all like, "OMG there's worms!  Let me hold them!  They're so wriggly!" so I still don't know.  Something about poop.  Anyhow, worms are good.  Am I rambling?  I do hope so, I love a good ramble.

I hadn't expected to be harvesting potatoes when I went into my garden, but I saw they were ready, and so I thought I should.
When I harvest potatoes, I consider every one over the amount I planted to be pure bonus, and since this was one of my surprise potato plants, every single one is a bonus!  There were only five potatoes, but when I was harvesting, as always, I got just as excited every time I found a grub or an earthworm as I did when I found a potato.
I found a lot of earthworms, and each one I found, I scooped up in a little mound of dirt and put it in one of my pots, glad to have them, but not thinking much of them... until I found him (worms are both male and female, so either set of pronouns are correct.  I didn't ask this worm's name, so we'll just call it "him").  He was easily five inches long, and quite thick.  I knew I just had to get a photograph of him to show you guys, but my camera was upstairs in the house.  I put the worm in my hand and piled some dirt on him, I made my way towards the house.  The poor worm was confused, and burrowed down between my fingers.  I caught him in my other hand, put the dirt back on him and repeat... and repeat... and repeat.
By now, I'm not even half-way to the house, and I already feel sorry for him, so I turned around and put him in a pot.  I was absolutely fascinated watching his strong little body shifting the dirt as he dug his way down.  The worm had gone quite deep and I could still see powerful ripples in the soil.
But I'd lost my chance for a photo.
Then I found her (yes, this worm is "her", now we can tell them apart in our heads).  She was almost the same size as him, and this time I had an idea.  I was scooping the soil with an ice cream container, so I put her in the ice cream container with some dirt, and took her upstairs for her photo shoot like that.

These are the two best photos I got.  They're very blurry- you try taking photos of a worm in a bucket- but they'll give you an idea of my lovely big worms.

Aren't they just so beautiful?!  :-D

Love you all, I really do,

Cassandra Louise.

Reduce, Reuse, Etcetera and So Forth...

Hey internet, do you know what the best thing about this fridge magnet is?

It's not that I made it myself, nor is it my delightfully simplistic cityscape (taken from a vivid memory of my childhood) although those are both really awesome qualities.

The best thing about this fridge magnet is that it started it's life as some newspaper and one of these:

I stopped one day and thought about how many plastic gift cards and the like I throw out in a year, because they aren't recyclable, regular rubbish is the only place for them.  I figured I must throw out about twenty cards every year, just on my own.  I know that's a high number, but I basically buy as much as I can with gift cards, which I usually win or earn by clicking things or doing other menial things online.

The awesomeness that is free groceries gave way in my heart to overwhelming plastic guilt and I decided that something beautiful must be made from these cards.

What's flat and gift-card-sized?  Magnets!  That's what!  And I already quite enjoy making fridge magnets, and have lots of magnetic strips.  Another plus to using gift cards as the base to my magnets is that I won't be buying sheets of plastic and sheets of canvas anymore (at least not for these) so there's even less waste, as all those materials come in plastic packaging.

I've put a shout out to my family and friends to send me their empty, expired, whatever plastic cards, and as I finish each magnet I will be putting it in my Etsy shop, here.

I would love to here about some of your reduce, reuse, recycle art and craft ideas, too!

Lots of Love,

Cassandra Louise.

You may have noticed I haven't been here...

And I'm actually still not here, but I will be back!  I've had a lot to juggle recently, and actually haven't felt up to writing.  I know there's an unspoken rule that we don't write about not being up to writing, but I am.  I do have some part-posts written, and I will be finishing them off in the coming weeks.

Thanks everyone for your support so far.
Lots of love,

Cassandra Louise.

Sunday Selections- Flights of Fancy

Today I am linking up with Frog Ponds Rock for Sunday Selections, and giving an outing to some photos which would otherwise be trapped inside my camera for all eternity.

...

There are always birds in and around the garden here, one or two birds, sometimes ten or so, and I'm always excited to see them.  I love all kinds of birds.  I love colourful birds and plain birds, and I even love that awful squawking racket they make when a huge flock get together.  When I see a bird, I will try to take a photograph, and as such, my camera is full of bird pictures.  All of these pictures were taken in one day, one week ago today, actually.

In the morning, I looked outside and saw this pigeon.  It's one of many kinds of native pigeon that sometimes visit the garden, a topknot (crested) pigeon.

From the top of the stairs, not wanting to scare it away, I chased it with the camera for a while, trying to get the "perfect" shot.  This is hard as all native pigeons are fast, what with being afraid of everything and all.

I'd lined up a beautiful, clear shot, in which you could really see all the sparkling colours on the bird's wing, but it must have had the eerie feeling it was being watched by something, because...

This is all I got.

I loved spending time taking pictures of that one bird in the morning, so imagine how I felt when I looked outside and saw this:

And this:

And just off to the right, this:

Short-billed corellas, here seen having the best of times, swinging on wires (if you look closely at the top corella picture, you can see a small green blur flying across the road.  That's also a bird, but I don't know what kind).

Here's some having a chat.

Walking across the road, because it can.

One is taking off, one is landing.

This one isn't a corella, because it's a magpie.

Quite a few rainbow lorikeets came over as well.  This one sat up on the fence, so I thought it must want its portrait taken.  I tried for a closer one, but...

It saw that there was something to eat on the ground, which is much more important than being immortalised.

But the corellas didn't like sharing.

And finally, may I present to you the best corella gymnastics of the day:

If you liked meeting these guys even half as much as I did, that makes me very pleased.

Cassandra Louise.