Intermission/Impediments

The plastic hinge on my glasses broke yesterday; it sort of tore off over the course of six hours. I never imagined anyone in their right mind making hinges in plastic! I'm blind as a bat without my glasses and currently I don't have a backup/old pair, so it's taped the corner with a piece of masking tape, the first thing I saw. My vision is blurred meanwhile. I have an appointment with Jim the Trusty Eyeglass Guy today; he can fix it as he replaced the hinge with a metal one and soldered onto the frame some years ago, but I hadn't known the original was plastic!! But this frame being almost ten years old and not feeling extremely comfortable with a potentially-disintegrating-at-any-moment pair, I shall order new glasses as well if I can find a good-fit frame.Unluckily this particular frame fit perfectly with no adjustment at the start and that's important for someone who has, ahem, no nasal bridge right around where glasses normally sit.

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I've mentioned enough times here for you all to know we've been having a windy summer. The fig tree outside our study and bedroom has been banging against the house day and night which really bothers Ben. I have to admit I finally became alarmed when I noticed about 2/3 of the tree looked as if it was leaning on the house yesterday morning. The last two days have been slow gale-y I heard sounds my house has never produced before, and felt breezes in parts of the house that has no opening.

Yesterday after work, gale still going strong, Ben hacked off some big branches. It was very scary, and just a little bit funny, watching him perched precariously on branches about as high as our second floor, swinging the sew with arms fully extended.

It's not the fig's fault, but mine, for planting a white banksiae rose to clime up the fig tree many years ago. It's grown tall enough in the last couple of years to receive more sun in the winter when the fig is bare, and started to weave the fig branches together into one clump big enough to fill the gap between the tree and the house. 

The tree has a hacked look; birds look puzzled this morning, and I apologize for doing this before the fruit season. We have been planning to get burly men with appropriate tools to cull our trees in the winter anyway, but honestly we thought there is a chance a big chunk of the tree would come down.  Bad news: the banksia rose will have to go; the great news: Ben's thinking of our outside space. No doubt we'll have different ideas and plans when the time comes for us to get outside and work, but he's asked for a few days off around Easter to get our massive gardening season started.

The big insult has been, as soon as Ben came inside, the wind stopped. Completely. Talk about the deafening silence overnight, we couldn't get to sleep for a long while.

So, not a lot else being made to happen by yours truly; I'm moving slowly around the house, doing endless housework, gazing at old gardening books, dreaming, looking at my enormous yarn stash, dreaming.