Awgh, what a week it's been. Saying goodbye to my big girl as she headed off on her own adventures & getting to spend some quiet time with my little sweetpea Niamh. With William at work all week it was just the two of us girls. Slidng into a lovely routine filled with baking & stories, window watching & knitting, mama's catch up list & nap time. We walked & ate good food, chatted to the birds in the garden & really just had a wonderful slow week together. Looking back at my list of to do's I can say that just about every one of them is crossed off. I didn't get a start on Miss Juniper Kitty but I did cast off Zahra's cardi. It's blocking as we speak. I'm really happy with it. As I was knitting along with Le Tour every evening I would stop occassionally and just look at it, hardly believing that I had knit it. If you had shown me this pattern three years ago, when I seriously decided to give knitting a go, I would have laughed out loud. I would never have thought I'd be able to knit something like that & here I am, still gobsmacked that I was able to follow a lace chart, albeit in complete silence, in a room by myself. It was one of those things I thought was going to be really hard & painful & long, so I put it off & put it off & then it turns out not at all difficult or painful & even...fun. So that's that & now I feel like I can conquer any knitting challenge.
As we drove north we listened to The Silver Brumby audiobook. I loved reading this series as a kid. It fuelled my insatiable appetite for anything remotely horsey. High country, snow, mountains, the bush, wilderness & brumbies all rolled into one. I remember driving over Charlotte's Pass on a family holiday & being completely mesmerised by the mountains and the patchy summer snow, hoping with all my heart that I'd get to see a brumby. There was no brumby that day but years later when I was working up at Thredbo one summer, as we passed over Dead Horse Gap, there in a small clearing just off the road, was a wild horse. Small & dark, long tangled mane & tail, watching us quietly as we drove by. That was a special day.
It rained for most of the drive home, big puffy clouds filling the sky. I've travelled this road north & south more times than I can count over the past fifteen years & every time I come to the same bend in the road or the same hill or the same paddock, where the landscape just opens up before me & I can see the mountains & the last of the southwest slopes, I'm blown away, left quiet by how beautiful it all is. Just sliding over the land completely captivated.
Returning a week later all I could think about was giving my girl a big hug & that vanilla almond cake. It was everything I'd dreamed of & the two cakes that I'd baked were way off the mark. This one I do believe had coconut in it, giving it that denseness that I was craving & making it all chewy & so good. I'm gonna try again & see what I come up with. We had a wonderful birthday lunch for my Mum & me, thirty six! Then it was off again in opposite directions, The Silver Brumby starting up from where we left off. There & back home again.
