Sweet, home - sweet.

This was my longest stay in respite to date, 7 days, and it was a bit different this time.  It's become somewhat of a home away from home, but obviously nothing like home at all.  I was blessed this time with the dying of my neighbour as mentioned a couple of posts back, but beyond that 48 hours or so, I had the whole wing to myself.  Slow times for predictable death in these parts right now, I guess.

And then there was the weather.  Being up higher than home, but more or less ringed with bush, I get a different perspective on the weather there.  One morning we had a beautiful mist (you'd call it fog if it were winter), but the photos don't really do it much justice.

Looking roughly NNW in the early light.  There's an invisible hill back there.

This is such a gorgeous time of year here, it's like a sort of spring (I know I've said this before) but without the mania of growth and blossoms everywhere - gentler, and as it is heading into the cooler weather, it is a different sort of slowing to that inevitable summer lethargic paralysis that is the logical corollary to real springtime in the wheatbelt.  It's a pace I find I can very naturally tune in to.

Down the hill, WSW roughly.  Such great bird country.

Being the only one there, I scored the birdbath for the duration.  There are four hospice rooms, with their little courtyards, and a strip of lawn (upon which I was standing to take these photos) which runs in front of them all.  There's a glazed terracotta birdbath, and one of the volunteers folk moves it about so whoever's in hospice has a turn at having it right outside their courtyard.  I kept taking a book outside to read at the table, but got almost no reading done, as there were just birds galore the whole time.  Perfect.  The iPhone has no zoom on the camera though, and the birds aren't quite that tame.

There are some things I miss when I'm at respite, but surprisingly not many.  Wife and dogs, sure, but a break therefrom is good too.  My bed.  That's a big one, but it must be said that the beds there are pretty good.  What I missed this time was a reliable internet connection.  As I posted previously, my USB modem was causing the computer to freeze, and I could not get assistance with it.  Long and boring details will not follow on my dealings with Telstra and the technical issues, but I will say that I had some great practice with a new way of seeing cleaning.

If you're new here - and possibly if you're not - the concept of cleaning as I mean it might be confusing.  Sorry.  I'm not going to go full-on into explanations here, but rather just tell you my example.  Sometime I'll explain it all a bit more clearly.  Maybe with diagrams.

So.  The modem freezes the laptop, I get annoyed, and do a cold reboot.  Then I remember to clean.  I shower the whole apparatus and myself with blue solar water, and lemon all my messiness back to zero.  Often this means I have lost interest in what I was doing online.  So be it, there's a lesson in itself.  Some time later, I'm back online, it all freezes again, I get annoyed, and.......well, I ask myself what I have done to get myself into this situation.  Invariably it came down to acting from some (hard to describe) unflowing place.  Like maybe I was reading news and judging the Ruddsters' handling of the Henry Tax Review.  Instant freeze-up. 

OK, then.  This little modem has taken it upon itself to be a zen teacher and whack me on the head when I'm getting all caught up in doing and thinking stuff that I'd really rather not be doing.  Very cool.  Alternately very annoying.  But what happened, over time, was that I got to recognise the physical symptoms of my intellectual entrapments.  And sometimes, I could clean them up before the computer froze.  Quite a large post yesterday, and nary a frozen moment, and I was just quietly and gently a bit happy about that.

So thanks, dodgy Telstra equipment and surly 'support' bastards.  Everything I wanted, and more.

Cool night coming now.  Might go fetch an armful of kindling.
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