The World Keeps Turning

Disclaimer: This post is not really about lunchboxes at all. If you have found your way here hoping for a fun bento post, just look at the pictures. This post is mostly a somewhat morose reflection on what it is like to be alive in the world.

Here we go.

I don't know if it's the third-quarter phenomenon of COVID (please let it be, because then we are nearly done-ish, right?), or if it's just lots of life getting to me right now, but I'm feeling lots of heart break. Really feeling it.

I feel like you might think I'm rehashing something I've mentioned before. Maybe I am. But there is more to it than my usual "This is hard and bad stuff has happened, let's keep going" mindset. It's hard. I'm feeling it. I'm in it.

All around are people struggling with relationships. Wrestling with changed lives. Jobs being changed, or made redundant. Plans cancelled altogether. There is so much unknown. We don't know what's coming next. We can't plan. We don't know how to deal with what is happening now. We are all just making things up as a we go. Or making things a big mess as we go.

And yet, the world is still spinning. The seasons are still changing. I get up in the morning and I make yet another lunch for the girls because they are going to school, just like any ordinary day.

This has been the hardest thing for me. To know that people are hurting. Struggling. Wanting answers to things that are so unknown. The heartbreak is real. And life is going on.

Passages from Ecclesiastes are resonating with me. There are so many things under the sun that are falling apart, unfair, or unjust. What are we do to, but to eat, work and be happy with what God has given us.

I don't have answers. I'm not wondering why this is all happening. I'm not trying to ignore it, or pretend it's not real. There is no gloss shine I can apply to make all that is broken appear smooth and fine. It is broken. The ache is real.

And there is seemingly nothing I can do but pray, and make lunches. 

T Shirt Quilt Phase One

This is something I started earlier in the year, and am no where near finishing. I had been going through the wardrobes, as you do, and sorting out the shirts that were getting too old for wear, stained or had holes appearing in them. Time for them to go. 

But some of these shirts were just so fun. We have great memories of wearing these shirts. Of the way that the girls slowly got the jokes on Steve's and would ask repeatedly for him to explain it to them so they could laugh over and over again. It seemed a shame to just throw them away. 

Of course, there was a sewing soloution available: why not take these well worn and comfy fun shirts and give them new life in a quilt? It's been ages since I made a quilt, and I recently aquired a walking foot to really level up my quilting game. It was time. 

So I carefully cut out the cool parts of the shirts and did lots of maths. Seriously, there is so much maths in sewing. Every shirt had a logo that was a different size, so after cutting them out as large as possible, grouping them, measuring, rearranging, cutting some down and then starting the whole process again, I was begining to see how a quilt of these random shirts might actually come together. 

In that above photo you can see how I'm starting to pull together the pieces into three coloums that kind of match in size. There was still some padding to add in and rearranging so the colours went better, but overall, I was liking where this was going. 

So much maths though. People really have no idea all the maths that you need when you are sewing. I work in inches when I'm sewing a quilt, because that's how I learnt to quilt. I sew with a quarter inch seam. So whatever I'm making is going to lose a half an inch in seams. 

Now, if everything is cut the same size, you have the same number of pieces in each row/coloum and they are all going to lose the same amount, that's fine. But if you are working with random sizes, and one row has more pieces, it also means it's going to have more seams and thus, lose more fabric in the long run. So it needs to start out longer to compensate. Complicated. 

I did cut out lots of padding bits of t-shirt fabric (from the backs of the shirts, and other random shirts that had prints on them, rather than a logo), but when I lay it all down on the floor, I didn't like it. I don't know if it was the mix of the extra bits, or the way it was laid out, but something just seemed wrong. 

I think another thing that has stopped me from going ahead with it is that some of the shirts that we are still currently wearing, are also really cool. Some of them would fit super well with this quilt. I don't really want to end up with two T-shirt quilts, so it's probabaly better to just wait for the current shirts to wear out a bit more so I can add them to the others and just make one mega quilt. 

So I've put aside the coloums and all the extra fabric that I spent four or five hours cutting out, and more hours sewing together and thinking about and doing maths for. They are sitting in a bag. One day, I suppose, I'll get around to finishing this quilt. 

But not today. 

Nature Break

2020 has really thrown us all a curve ball. In more ways than I can say. People have had a lot of plans rescheduled or just cancelled outright, and we were among them. While we were bearing the changes fairly well, we were also feeling the need for a shake-up of sorts. Steve especially, I think. I've been working from home for seven years now, but he's only been doing it since March, and it can really start to send you a bit mad to see the same four walls every day. 

With the Ekka cancelled and the usual holiday changed to a Friday, we had a bit of a chance for some time away. We hadn't been planning anything, but a week before, we suddenly decided it would be great to do a few bush walks; get out into nature as it were. We wanted to keep things pretty chilled out, not stress about stuff too much, so we just booked a night at an AirBnB down at the coast and figured we could go where ever from there. 

In the end we actually covered a lot of ground, but it didn't feel like too much. We started on the Friday, having breakfast at Macca's and then driving down to the Gold Coast Botanical Gardens for a picnic lunch with my parents who also had Hugo that day too. It wasn't particularly amazing, but it was nice to be somewhere new, see some wildlife, and let the kids run around at a different park. 

Then we went further along over to Springbrook and took the girls on the Twin Falls waterfall hike. The girls loved it. Even saying that feels like an understatement. They thought they were going on the best adventure and were just so happy to be bushwalking along. Rachel ran along like a surefooted deer, giving us quite a few heart attacks when we were close to the edge of a sheer drop. Even when we tried to explain the danger, she was just so unaware and excited about being out in the wild that she didn't really take it in. 

Since they took the Twin Falls walk so easily, we ended up continuing on and doing another loop as well. The fog descended while we were on the Blackfellow Falls loop, so the views disappeared, but it was still fun.

We ended up back out at the Gold Coast for dinner, before we headed to our AirBnB for the night. Not all smooth sailing, as Rachel was car sick on the way, and when we ended up where we wanted to have dinner, they were booked out, but you roll with the punches, wash out the puke and have dinner somewhere else. It’s all good.

The next morning, we had a quick breakfast and then set off for Mt Tamborine.

There we did the Cedar Creek Falls circuit, which was pretty short. I think we would have liked to do another longer walk, but it was raining on and off, which kind of dampened the mood. Instead, we did something Steve had spontaneously suggested the day before and took the girls to the Tree Top Challenge at Thunderbird Park.

They have done this before, nearly two years ago when we went camping at Cedar Creek Falls with our friends, the Pans. I didn't blog about it, but it was a lot of fun. The Tree Top Challenge have two areas, a 3 years to 7 years, and an 8 years to adult course. Our girls will be too big for the kids course next year, so we thought we'd let them have another go on it before then.

They had a great time, spending nearly two hours going over and over each of the four courses. The loved the flying foxes at the end, and were not phased by the heights at all. Looking forward to when we can all do a high ropes course, even though that's a few years away yet.

After this, we began our trek home. It wasn't particularly late in the day, but we didn't feel like there was anything else we really wanted to do before going home, and for the girls, nothing could top the Tree Top Challenge. We went home with a stop at Yatala Pies, where we actually just got chips for a snack and a cold pie for dinner.

We made it home by about 3 in the arvo, so Steve and the girls had some chill time on the couch while I got to do all the unpacking and two loads of washing. It sounds bad, but that kind of thing makes me happy. I'm weird; it's ok. That evening, we had our low fuss dinner of pie and salad and relaxed knowing we still had a full day of weekend left before I needed to think about getting the house ready for another week of work.

Our little nature break was unexpected and fun. We did lots, but not too much. At the time, it was just what we needed to shake out of our little bubble of existence and venture into the world again. Now it seems like a pretty distant memory, and I'm glad I'm taking the time to blog about it so that I remember it when I need to.

Hopefully you are able to take a break in our beautiful world too and remember even though it’s 2020, it's not all bad.