Life Hack

By Maryanna Gabriel

Life Hack: give yourself twelve hours alone in the garden first thing in the morning. Ha ha. I didn't write that - I saw it somewhere while doom-scrolling. Today I started early. It sets the tone for the hours that follow.

Mornings in the garden are the best. I wander about with my coffee and the hose, taking it all in.
I have been amusing myself by making two little fountains, one solar, one electric and along with them a story diarama involving frog miniatures. So much fun. The birds are really curious.

The manic feeling of getting everything into the garden is starting to subside despite the strange heat. Everything is planted and now trimmed with lovely surprises along the way like the Lily of the Valley bloomed, and oh wow - a radish, or holy-moly look at the Calla Lilly, then my goodness is that a flower on the olive tree? So you see the garden news is much more appealing than the global. 

Garden news. 

Low Altitude

 By Maryanna Gabriel


Speaking of Travels In A Different Sort Of Way and the news, for all kinds of reasons it is more enticing to stay at home. Locally it is the unprecedented heat, the forest fires, the crowds, the expense. And internationally, what was once assured is precarious with flight cancellations, upped fees, and impossible line-ups (complete with fainting mothers) due to new European regulations for cross border travel.  

It's funny. I had a feeling (you know how one does), about flying last March and I said naaah....my back is bad right now, I'll do it later. Later! Ha. The intuition and the why is obvious now. My. 

Who would have thunk? So much change in the last two months and none of them comfortable or even pleasant. Like why throw oneself into the frey? It sounds disastrous out there. 

However, just in case, I got a new passport. What a thing of beauty. So pretty with all the nice pictures. And the "I'm being sentenced to Alcatrez" personal photo that perennially graces such documentation is now tiny. The opening page is a digitalized piece of pastic with a micro window so who knows how it looks when scanned. Who would have thought? 

Low altitude air travel... 

More future. There is a car in China being developed, well it is already created, that flies - low altitude air travel. I'm not kidding. Just like in all the prediction models of what is to come. Except it's here. Now you're talking. Maybe I'll get one of those.

So many changes happening. Sometimes I feel like I'm time travelling. 

Without The Buzz

 By Maryanna Gabriel 

    Making silly rhymes (as in my last post) may be a strategy to lighten the mood, but I’m not the only one. The ladies at the local café were dead set against discussing the shifts going on globally. However, the news gets through eventually, and one must be mature about it.

    But not today. I don’t mean the mature part; I mean the news part.

    It is an intensely hot Saturday, as in wilting, and for no apparent reason, as I write, we are in the middle of a power failure. As a result, the neighbourhood is uncannily quiet, which I’m really enjoying. I swear there is a buzz that vanishes when the grid goes down. I don’t even know it’s there, but when it's  gone, it feels so much more relaxing in a subtle sort of way. Less of an energy drain. Maybe it's the fact that the internet is off enabling the inner news broadcast more noticeable.

    The energy that was our world in childhood feels closer, when a Saturday morning meant comics, bikes, and popsicles. Funny how you don’t know what you have so much of the time until it’s gone.