Moving on

In a weak moment some time back I volunteered to sew some curtains for upstairs.  Following my fall, the bloody bits on my hands and knees had healed, but then my attention became focused on pain in my right shoulder/arm.  I had a couple of visits to a physiotherapist, but still found it difficult to make certain movements with my arm, which meant, of course, that I couldn't do the curtains.  So, for weeks on end, five lengths of material and five lengths of thermal lining lay on the living room floor and the sewing machine sat on a card table:

Eventually I struggled manfully - womanfully or personfully - to finish the job and had my home back again!  


Thanks to Olga and Michael for articles and translations about Tolstoy and the teaching of reading in Russia and Germany last century.  I'm preparing a talk to a grammar school in Victoria at the beginning of term in 2012 and this information will be part of it.  This school is going to use Sounds of Reading (my reading scheme).

While still reading 'The Life of Tolstoy' I ordered Steven Pinker's 'The Better Angels of our Nature' from Amazon US and it arrived in a blink and now I'm just as obsessed with this book (nearly 800 pages) as I am with the Tolstoy one (more than 900 pages).  The trouble with Angels is it is hardback and I can hardly lift it!!!  I need to look up every second word as I go, so either have a dictionary nearby (and all of mine are HUGE) or use dictionary.com on one of my two computers.

And one morning I was listening to a radio interview with an American author, Anita Shreve, so rushed off to the library and borrowed three of her novels.  The one I read first, 'The Pilot's Wife' is yet another story about betrayal by a husband, oh so sad!!!!


Several friends have visited lately, which is lovely.  I'm trying to keep the house tidy by putting things away the minute I finish with them.  My darling Muffy is such a delightful companion, never far away.  I took this pic just a few minutes ago:

For those of you in the northern hemisphere, here in Sydney we are experiencing our coldest and wettest summer for 50 years!  I'm still wearing winter pyjamas and sleeping under two doonas.  I haven't been in the pool once this season.  I don't really mind, as anything is better than 40 degree heat with high humidity, which is what we usually have at this time of year.