ipe Daily Bliss

Daily Bliss

Today's lovely moments are tomorrow’s beautiful memories

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Pictorial Update: Week 11, 2010


Family Gathering!


Feeling short!


The Crown Princess


The Living Doll


Angels Afghan by Joan Elliott


Time Out

Happiness & laughter to one and all,

Felicity

posted by Felicity | 7:42 am | 14 comments

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Lá Fhéile Pádraig

We're doing family dinner tonight to celebrate! I'm of 3/4-and-a-bit Irish origin (I have a great grandfather and his ancestors from Yorkshire in England - hence my very English surname - and set of great great grandparents from Newfoundland, so that 'waters me down' a bit). My family was also Catholic, so during my childhood we always celebrated St Paddy's Day bigtime!

The celebrations abruptly stopped when I married my first husband who was of Chinese origin. My celt origins were ignored totally because Chinese seemed so much more 'exotic'. To be fair, I think this partly also because I prefer Chinese cooking to potatoes and sausages. I loathe sausages of any sort and no experimental cooking is ever going to change this fact! Potatoes are more my thing than rice.

The MOTH, like my first husband, ignores that he's probably as much Irish as I am, yet celebrates that he has two ancestors of Welsh origin on his father's side (hence his Welsh surname). Too bad! The 82,425 people of Welsh origin in Australia are of probably of the same origins as St Patrick, anyway.

It's time to start celebrating the Celt in us, again! Tonight's about the Reid, the Duffy, the Hodgkinson, the Collidge and the Griffin in us! I've tried out a few recipes and settled on Guiness stew, stuffed mushrooms, fresh beans and mashed potato and a long walk after it (LOL). The Living Doll is doing her version of something Irish for dessert (which will be interesting considering she works in a British pub). The crown princess and her half English consort (his father was born in England) are looking after the drinks for the evening.

May you never lie, steal, cheat or drink.
But if you must lie, lie in each other's arms.
If you must steal, steal kisses.
If you must cheat, cheat death.
And if you must drink, drink with us, your friends.

Felicity

posted by Felicity | 5:56 am | 5 comments

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Saturday mornings at Castle Bliss

The MOTH & I used to have a Saturday routine of "up early , walk the dogs, get fit, use up calories blah blah..." You know the good intentions. We've done it for years! Fortunately, poor Lucy and Harry have hot spot (skin infections) which mean we cannot take them out for walks at the moment, so we have had to change the routine...

Since our return from France, the Saturday activity has been "wake up as we wake (still about 5.30am in summer when it's light at 4.30am), shower and go to the Powerhouse museum vege markets for mushrooms, stuffed olives and great coffee and 'bugger the the dogs we'll walk them tonight!' " routines. What a life!

Today we followed the new regime & then headed to the south of Brisbane (we live in the way north West) in search of a garden nursery for supplies. What a wonderful and expensive mistake, dear readers. We arrived home with three triangle palms for the pool yard, a golden cane palm to fill a 'dead spot' in the back garden row, a hydranga because it was pretty, an olive tree because 'what the hell, we've spent a fortune, we may as well feed the cat another canary' and receipts for the leather lounge chairs for our family room and the back veranda dining setting which we have been searching for for about five years - all which seem like impulse buys but which are carefully chosen purchases we could never find, if you know what I mean.

As we were sipping champagne on our veranda chair to celebrate (not that we needed an excuse to sip champagne), it crossed my mind to ask you, dear readers, if you have ever had one of those days that seemed to fall into place but when you then analyse the situation you realise that that dream has been carefully planned and organised up to an inch of its life since Adam was was a nipper at Coogee Beach? Today was one of those days, for us.

Special, huh?

Nobody could afford it to happen too often, but goodness it was fun!

Happiness & laughter, one and all,

Felicity

P.S. Yes, I put about a hundred stitches into the 'Seasonal Chairs' project this week, but then frogged them. Let's just say that I was having a van Gogh moment and put them in the wrong place. Waa!

posted by Felicity | 2:16 pm | 3 comments

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Family


9th February 1980

Life's never quite what we expect, is it? Thirty years ago today, I got married for the first time. I was not yet 20 years old. He was 27. We were truly in love, folks, truly in love.

I expected the marriage to last forever. It didn’t. At the time he left, he told me that it was because I didn’t do enough for his career. The truth was that at aged 40, he changed his mind about what was important to him. Marital & family obligations got in the way of work commitments, so he left.

I cried for 2 years. Then I got on with living my life again, not just breathing in and out. I raised the four kids, went to university, then went to Europe & finally went to live in another town where I met The dearly loved MOTH, some time later. The rest is a story for another day.

This long ago marriage was a failure, so why am I celebrating it here on the blog? For me, the most important thing in life is family. The marriage failed but friendship between us & our sense of family prevailed. The ex wasn’t around for most of my 30s nor early 40s, but, for him, somewhere in the early to mid-noughties, family life took front row again. It’s one of those scenarios where you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s really gone (kids grown up, wife married to someone else, everyone living 2000km away). All off-spring, no matter what age or stage need both parents. We made a great team as parents!


July 1991


June 2007

Family, warts and all, is always a fabulous reason to celebrate!

My simple advice is old wisdom:

Don't ever be afraid to try to make things better;
You might be surprised at the results.
Don't ever stop dreaming your dreams.

Happiness & laughter to one and all. I'm enjoying the beautiful flowers he sent this morning.

Felicity

posted by Felicity | 7:47 am | 6 comments

Friday, February 05, 2010

House repairs


Picture taken March 2005

I haven't been doing much stitching since I arrived home. We had more water into the house while we were away, so my primary 'creative' focus has been to organise repairs to the roof.

It's going to be a major job! The builder gave me a list of things that I need to do, so I've organised plumbers to fix blocked downpipes, arranged the chopping of the offending trees (and a couple of others that were termite infested), looked at paint combos (to spruce outside the place up - the worst bits cannot be seen in the picture, but they were last painted when the house was built 16 years ago), made decisions to get a couple of skylights installed at the same time, etc. It's hot work but a lot of fun. We won't know the place when we are done.

I probably went too far with the tree pruning, to be honest. All the shrubs that have offended me over the last 4.5 years got the chop. They are the ones at the back of the veranda that you can see. I've made way for some citrus and mango trees (just one mango tree). I will be off to buy self-cleaning Alexander palms for around the swimming pool, too.

Lucy & Harry don't know what has hit them, either. The house has had a good cleaning, so they are not allowed inside until I have enjoyed (for long enough) the dog-hair free zones. LOL.

Happiness & laughter to one and all,

Felicity

posted by Felicity | 11:36 am | 7 comments

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

OT - Black Lucy

I thought I’d give this little meme a go …

  1. YOUR REAL NAME: Felicity M G D
  2. YOUR GANGSTA NAME (first 3 letters of real name plus -izzle): Felizzle
  3. YOUR DETECTIVE NAME (favorite color and favorite animal): Blue Dog
  4. YOUR SOAP OPERA NAME (middle & street names):Maggie Coburn
  5. STAR WARS NAME (the first 3 letters of your last name, first 2 letters of your first name, first 3 letters of Mom's maiden name): Grafeduf
  6. YOUR SUPERHERO NAME (2nd fave colour, fave drink): Crimson Water.
  7. YOUR WITNESS PROTECTION NAME (Mother's middle name and father's middle: Mary Noel - I think my Witness Protection name is cool, but now that you all know it, I'll be forced to change it. Darn!
  8. YOUR GOTH NAME (black, and the name of one your pets): Black Lucy - the best!

Happiness & laughter to one and all,

Black Lucy

posted by Felicity | 6:02 am

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Australia Day

Thanks to Anne for reminding me of this beautiful Australian poem.

My Country

by Dorothea Mackellar

The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies
I know, but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of drought and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me!
The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops,
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold.
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze…

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand
though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

posted by Felicity | 6:20 am

Copyright © 2007-2023 Bliss Davies.

Last template update: 2nd August 2023