If nightmares in any way predict reality, I’d like to suggest steering clear of four-wheeler motorbikes, underground earth caverns, and singing ghouls that turn up during storms and if you hear their song it kills you and turns your soul into part of their undead cohort.

In other news, Spring has sprung. My plum tree has dropped its blossoms, my poppies are blooming, the roses have come out in leaves, and the nights are warm enough to change the sheets back to cotton. Transformations are taking place! Yesterday Rose and I packed down the studio and brought it home. A sad, failed venture. Business, like life, is full of so many of these. Rose and I did a lot of talking about the structure of our households and family. I culled half a wheelie bin of worn out clothes, made room for the studio things, and re-organised drawers of clothes and art supplies. I’m eyeing my bookshelves next for a cull. If I’m going to fit Rose, and her preposterously large furniture, into this unit, I’m going to have to make a lot of space. I’ve lived in a caravan and the upgrade to the size of a unit was huge for me. Rose has come from house-sharing massive places with two lounge-rooms, a shed to store things in, and entire rooms set aside for formal dining areas or kids play spaces. o.O Merging households is going to be challenging, to say the least. We’re moving very slowly and doing lots of groundwork.

There’s a shift in me that’s making this process easier. I’m filtering everything through the eyes of a parent. Some things I needed as a single, childless person are not important anymore. Other things are very important, such as having an art studio, but something has to give so I’m having to be creative about the use of space and resources. The psychological and physical preparations are also progressing. I have one more big fertility test to undergo, and I’m waiting on the results of another one I’ve had recently. So far there’s mostly highly positive results, with some questions about a possible condition that’s been missed. That’ll be ruled in or out shortly and I’ll know where to go from here. I’m still waiting to be rescheduled for my sinus surgery and there’s been no news. I chased up the cost to have it done privately, but it’s $7,500. There’s no guarantees when the public system will catch up with the backlog. Rose and I keep brainstorming ways of raising the money to do it privately – there’s no way I can try to get pregnant until I’ve had the surgery, but at the moment it looks like we’re stuck waiting. In the meantime we’re adding to our stocks of baby clothes and supplies. On our recent holiday we collected this little gem – a baby hammock. I used a makeshift one of these with much success when I was caring for a disabled gosling. Crazy as it sounds, the needs of human and goose infants are not that dissimilar. We’re going to have a couple of ceiling hooks put in at strategic places in the unit so we don’t need to set up the stand.

It’s Spring. It’s a good time for cleaning and clearing out and nesting. 🙂