Patchwork #29

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Happy New Year!  

I hope you’ve had a lovely Christmas and New Year.  Ours was quiet but lovely with family and quality time.  I didn’t think I’d do midnight, as with each NY that comes around I have started to think the whole midnight thing is a bit over-rated, but I managed well on the 31st.  

I’m enjoying the quiet roads in our community while people are away with their holiday time elsewhere.  All too soon they will all be back and the drivers will be back with their impatience and speed.  Warwick was a quiet town/small city and largely undiscovered, I think, until the borders reopened last year.  ‘Open it and they will come’…as the legendary line goes (with a bit of tweaking) from the movie ‘Field of Dreams’. 

When the borders opened, Warwick was populated by many who moved up from the South.  I went for a drive this morning as there are a lot of new subdivisions popping up or have popped and now settled communities are here and there.  

Just regrouping, as we head into another year, I want to say thanks for turning up, and popping in to see updates on my site.  The pages are always evolving, staying fresh, crisp, topical, and fun.  

I finally sorted through all those recipes yesterday!  I was going, “Ahh ha! That’s where it is’ and, ‘oh I remember that one!’  from the bag of recipes I have been given or have found over the past 30-plus years.  So you can expect to see a variety of good tasty recipes. going forward.  I haven’t tried all of them, but I have it on very good authority that they all work!  And a big shout out to Karronda Area School, there are so many great family recipes in my cookbook!  

My poetry page is slowly growing, so if you feel like a rhyme in time, check out a variety of ideas that randomly pop into my head from time to time.

Martha, in Martha’s Musings, is starting to strengthen her voice.  If you haven’t met her yet, Martha is entirely fictional, she is of no definitive age but she is ‘old enough to know better but young enough to do it anyway’.

She is sassy, cheeky, and a bit mischievous, but always means well and has a good heart.  She speaks her mind, is never crude, and just gets to the point.  And she is a LOT of fun to work with in my writing! You’ll find her in my Blog Section.

My short stories are often 100 words these days because I follow a weekly photo prompt.  It’s a great challenge, a bit like a hard crossword.  The entire story has to fit into 100 words…or less. Sometimes the idea manifests, then pours out fluidly and fits so neatly into 100 words.  Made to measure.  Other times, it’s like getting an x-large body of words into a size 10 body suit!  If an idea wants to run over, then I write it in another story.

My book page will tell you about the book I’ve published.  Blarney to Bastille is a short, fun read about my first trip to the UK.  As seen through the eyes of a 20yo with 40 years of experience.  I’ve been told many times, the excitement in B2B is palpable.  I had to wait sometime after returning from that trip, to write it so it didn’t have so many ‘wow’s’ in it!  It was a tad gushy.  Much!  Well, when you wait 40 years to go to places you have only dreamed of, and you finally get there, you do a few wows, right?  So it is what it is.  This year, we are going back for more, and I will be writing a sequel!  Four years on, after Covid, it’ll be a hoot.  I won’t be the ‘1st-time traveller’, I’ll be like my salt and Pepper set I got for Christmas…well seasoned!

I’m adding a new, revised page soon, for bird owners…I’m just getting the detail together. So watch out for that one 😉  I’m keeping it under wraps for the big reveal. 🙂

So there we are.  In 2023, let’s have peace, calm, patience, good health, goodwill, and good times.  Look after you, and be kind to others.  I hope you get some giggles and smiles from the content of this site, stay tuned for regular updates!

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Thanks for reading