Meet the girls!

I'm pleased to introduce Joyce, Maud and Betty - the newest members of our sharehouse, which is living up to its nickname of The Fitzroy Farmhouse more and more each day! See their little bums sticking up in the air amongst the silverbeet?


This is Joyce, who rules the roost:


This is Maud:


And Betty refused to stay still for a photo, so she can be introduced at a later date.

It's lovely to have little companions clucking around the garden, although they do wreak havoc at times and they're not really laying very many eggs. Luckily we got them for free from a friend, and we got seven tons (!) of barley for free so it hasn't exacty been a difficult equation in terms of money spent vs eggs gained. They love banana, silverbeet, warrigal greens and porridge, but turn up their noses at silverbeet stems and pears. Definitely fussy urban chooks. We still like them though!

Weekend away

We had a really lovely weekend down at the beach recently. Isn't this pattern on seaweed amazing?


My friend Mat came down with Tom and me. He's always fantastic to hang out with because he's wonderfully friendly and positive, and he's made some inspiring choices. He and his partner Kim recently moved to Tasmania to try and live more sustainably. I really admire their choice to get out of the rat-race and work in jobs they find inspiring as part of their lifestyle. Mat does beautiful work shaping surfboards and taking photographs, you can check out some of his work at his website, Flow State.

When I'm not living my life...

...I'm pretending to live one of these ones:

My Scandinavian Retreat - which has beautiful photos of all things Scandinavian cabin-ish, I think my favourite posts are the one where you get to see their deck cut perfectly to fit the surrounding rocks, and the one where you get a sense of how beautiful the view from their place is, even the one right from their bed!

bigBANG studio - which just makes me want to move to the desert and meet amazing people, attend parties in off-the-grid houses, get diggity-down desert style, and live in beautiful scenery. And Lily's moving to India later this year - I'm looking forward to it!

I think one of my favourite things about blogs is that you can have such an insight into someone else's life, and you can find someone, somewhere doing something you'd love to do. These blogs were each recommendations from two of my favourite other blogs, which I also wish I were living in!

The first was a recommendation from Pia Jane Bijkerk, an Australian living on a houseboat in Amsterdam, the second came from Kate of for me, for you, of New York.

New music

One pretty nifty thing about having my radio show has been that it has forced me to find half an hour of music to play each week. Yeah, that doesn't sound so hard, does it? But I'm one of those people who never remembers the names of bands and can't sing to save their life, so whenever I try to choose music to buy it involves a conversation of random words that may or may not be related to the band's name, and then a horrendously out-of-tune rendition missing almost all the words of the song I'm trying to remember the name of. Pretty painful for everyone involved. But I've been very diligent and have really enjoyed actually buying music for the first time in a long time, as well as taking recommendations from friends. The show has a bit of a rootsy, folksy, alternative country feel to it, which has been a fun genre to explore. Lots of Calexico, Sime Nugent, The Waifs, and the fantastic Dirt Music soundtrack created by Tim Winton to match the mood of his novel of the same title - cool concept eh?

One band in this genre that I'm loving at the moment is Power and Greig. A good friend is the slide guitarist extraordinaire in this band, but friendliness aside, I'm really digging their stuff! I think my favourite song (this week) is one called Dancer, but I also love De-burg Days.

I also find their 'sounds like' description from their myspace page a pretty humourously accurate description of our backyard at times (although perhaps minus the band-inspired epiphany!):
"Drinking boutique beers (or more likely cheap longnecks) in your friends backyard in the northern suburbs on a sunny afternoon. Still wearing the clothes you had on last night, talking about how you'd like to move to the country...again. You hear sunday drivers, a bird twittering, a banjo in the distance. Suddenly you realise that power & greig somehow encapsulate your prosaically humble yet poetically fascinating day to day existence in a three minute s(ingal)ong. What wonder! What beauty!"

On your bike!

I love my bike, so I couldn't resist this pendant made from recycled timber. Bought at the Rose St Artists' market. The artist is Neil Thomas.


A week or two ago I saw someone wearing a badge version of this on their jacket lapel, and I thought it would make a great gift for my brother. So that's now winging its way to Boston, and my one's staying here!