Gotta love these 3 day long weekends! Although my Friday opshopping was off, I spent the weekend feeling it was Easter, and the garage sales were less than thrilling.  

Today, we took the remnants of the wheelbarrow collection to give to someone who creatively re-uses all sorts of things in her garden.  I took a few photos while I was there.  Who thought geraniums in washing machines would work?

I decided that having a teeny walkway through the veranda to the back door was becoming tiresome, so I went into a fixing sorting moving frenzy (apart from the bits where I drank tea and ate passionfruit sponge cake while reading the new Terry Pratchett).

I decided to finish one simple project - a small table from an old metal stool base and the top of a jarrah lazy susan.  I hate varnish.  It goes cloudy and chips and behaves badly but takes ages to get the bits off which haven't flaked off.  I was very pleased with the result though, the Danish oil gives the wood a much richer look.  

In order to actually get to the bits and the tools I needed, I had to move the old pine meatsafe in the way.  And that meant stabilising the dodgy back leg.  It wasn't all that big a job and I haven't done the cosmetic surgery yet but a bit of a wipedown and some fairly rudimentary archeological carpentry and it is out of the way and being useful.  I think I'll schedule the cosmetic surgery for Xmas holidays, when I have more time.  In the meantime, a friend scored the cute chest of drawers formerly occupying that spot.  See, I do give stuff away.

I also used some of the containers gleaned over the past four weeks for planting, and after watering this evening I snapped some pics in the evening light.  Very gardeny.

 Really, my small Canon camera is still doing OK.  Yesterday, I went with a friend to the Harvey Norman camera sale.  There's two hours of my life I'll never get back.  Still, we met a nice lady in the queue ( I kid you not).  They offered us coffee after waiting for an hour, but were greeted with a cry of damn the coffee, gin and tonic or nothing!  What was frightening was that we, and the nice lady, were the queue.  Still not quite sure why we had to wait 2 hours... and then, the woman at the till didn't want to walk from her till to the other one to accept my friend's (considerable) outlay of cash.  Since I had time to spare, I had time to notice that most of the prices were in fact higher than the local Dick Smith store, where I had been in the morning.  AND got served immediately.

I'm glad the Queen had a nice holiday.  She's had some bad years, and I'm sure she's a nice old lady, she's obviously quite fit and works hard.  Old (German) family, done a lot for the hat industry, and so on and so forth and I think her father was a good man doing a very hard job at a difficult time.

I think that in 2011, however, it's a bit of a stretch to think that anyone would actually expect a woman to curtsy, and the whole bowing and scraping thing really needs some thought.  If we accept that someone is born to be better than just about everyone else, then we accept that all people are not equal and that they don't have the right to be treated equally.  It's a short step in stilettos over the lawn to the bad old days. We can be dignified and respectful without making asses of ourselves.