{This Moment}

The brave gardener!!!

All the rain that has turned south Queensland into a lagoon made my backyard a rather scary place to be!!!

It's an entomophobic's worst nightmare

 I can tell you right now that in the past a GIANT spider has jumped out of that rather large sage bush! However since I haven't been in the garden for several weeks due to the rain everything was crazy. Poor Fredrick has some weird caterpillars on him.

 I mean what on EARTH is that thing? There were two, poor Fredrick. I took a deep breath, put on gardening gloves and squished them into oblivion (with a wad of paper towel). Then I covered EVERYTHING with Dipel to hopefully kill any more that come my way. He has only just started growing new leaves since the hail storm ripped him to shreds. Furthermore there were spiders curled up in his leaves and just bugs everywhere. My skin crawls just thinking about it. Why on earth did I start this garden??? However my two readers will be ever proud to note that I didn't cry and/or didn't wait till Vaughan was home to deal with it. I held onto my breath and dove in ... because when you hold your breath bugs obviously leave you alone.

To my great joy I discovered that my garden is not just home to lots of icky bugs (which are a very good sign) but also home to 4 lady beetles!!!! The most I have ever seen. When I was weeding my sweet alice (shown on the left) when something flew out of it in a mad panic and landed on my shoulder. I looked down and saw a beautiful red lady beetle!!! Which is fantastic because that's exactly why I planted it. It is meant to attract the good bugs, like lady beetle's and bees into your garden that kill pests and pollinate flowers.


As I weeded and chopped my way into the garden, I found something fantastic!!

CUCUMBERS!!!!!!!!

Look at that guy!!! That's totally a cucumber!!!!! After the hail storm I had to wait ages for the plants to recover. It's taken a month for them to grow back. I've spent ages trying to hand pollinate my zucchini plant only to realise today that I've been pollinating male zuchinni flowers with other male flowers. * blushes*

I had started to worry that I should have been pollinating my cucumber vine only to discover that there are TOTALLY cucumbers on it. Furthermore - I'm also growing carrots!!

You see those spikey leaves - they're carrots.

 The larger leaves are radishes. My mother gave me a great tip. You mix the seeds of radishes and carrots together. The radishes grow super quickly and let you know where the carrots have been planted, which take much longer to grow.

Overall - today I feel accomplished :)

{This Moment}

Extinction of Libraries

I've been working on a conference paper with some colleagues about using engagement and play in the workplace, particularly as a way to re-invent Libraries. I think it's started to rub off on me when I included this in an ALIA survey:

I think the most important issue facing our profession is that we are not moving fast enough with the times. We spend too long talking to each other about how important and necessary we are, and not enough time looking to our users to improve services based on their desires. I don't think the solution often touted by Librarians is promotion of our current services. I believe the solution is change. There are a lot of libraries doing this, but perhaps not enough.

They just wanted to know why I was a non-member. Maybe a little too heavy?

Ha!

Freedom to fail

Sometimes you just need a bowl of citrus.

Couldn't sleep last night from worrying that my work on this conference paper wouldn't be what my colleagues wanted. That they would scoff and would need to do extra work to make up for my poor efforts.

Part of what we're saying in the conference paper is that in order to be creative / innovative you must take risks and allow yourself the freedom to fail.

... maybe I need to add a disclaimer "This is harder then you might think."

#FURIOUSLYHAPPY

Oh The Bloggess how I love you.

I was having one of those days. Actually I've been having one of those days since July. It's been a fun filled 4 months of complicated parental illness, crazy software and printing problems at work resulting in some serious student complaints, a crashed car and a temporary brain injury, piles of project work that I'm struggling through and yesterday I arrived home to discover that that natural poison I sprayed to get rid of the caterpillars on my amazing vegie garden has burned their little leaves. My garden was one of the things that has held me together. It was just so amazing and green and and and... perfect. I cried. I missed Vaughan. It was quite literally a grey day. Then I read The Bloggess. Jenny you are brilliant. Bugger this! I too am going to be #FURIOUSLYHAPPY. Begining with The lonely planet...