Thursday, April 5, 2012

Old friend, more flowers, and origami

I spent the morning in the city with an old friend whom I haven't seen in ages (despite us both always saying as we part ways that "we should do this more often"). We didn't have any particular destination but we ended up visiting the magnificent La Trobe Reading Room at the State Library.

While we were there I made sure, as I always do, to visit the Midget Library, the smallest exhibit in the Mirror of the World Exhibition, and Audubon's Birds of America, which is a massive book, and also quite rare (there's only 120 known copies in the world).

Then we wandered to the Docklands in the glorious autumn sunshine and then back into the city for lunch before going our separate ways. 


At the end of Waterfront City there's a 
high wall, and this is what's on the other side
 - where Docklands meets the old docks 

Afterwards my friend sent me a text message thanking me for a lovely morning and saying I had lifted her spirits and made a crap week feel a whole lot better. That gave me a warm inner glow.

I bought my first pair of Doc Martins boots today. Metallic purple ones. They're pretty cool. One day I will grow up...Maybe! After I got them home I noted the writing on the tab on the back of the boot. 'With bouncing soles'...or is it 'With soles bouncing'? I kinda like the latter.



I walked through the Botanic Gardens yet again on my way home. 

Does anyone know what this flower is? It smells divine.
(It's smaller than it looks)

While  I'm testing your botany knowledge, do you know what this flower is from? 


OK, I'll tell you. It's from a South American tree called Bombacaceae - quite a tall tree with a sizeable canopy, so unless it suddenly burst into flower since my visit yesterday, I'm not sure how I didn't notice it before now. I must have been looking for flowers closer to the ground to photograph. 

Yesterday I finally got out the origami book I bought  last August and had a crack at making a few things.  I was pretty pleased with my first efforts, especially the ones (probably three of the four I made) where I got stumped and couldn't figure out how to finish them off. Persistence paid off. 


The blue one is a water lily, the green one is a tato (a paper purse), the orange one is a butterfly and the one that looks like a mouth with teeth is a Spanish box. I confess that the puffy star got the better of me though, but I just found a video tutorial which will probably   be easier to follow. 

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