Richard's gone to town. All morning to myself. Should be cleaning the bird verandah, which I will, just later. Doesn't work expand in the time available to do it or some such thing? If it does it will take me all morning and part of the afternoon to do the chores. But that's okay. Feels good to be alone and know my time is my own without interruption. Don't get me wrong. I love Richard and do not wish to live my life without him. At the same time, I believe spending time completely alone is necessary. I breathe more deeply.

I have a pastel painting going that I'm excited about. It's a departure from what I've usually done. It's gone through two metamorphoses already. I'd seen, of half seen, this painting on the wall of a room on a television program. This often happens. I see something or partly see something and it sparks off an idea. In this case I visualized a big big sky, a desert sky with pale blue shading down to a pale sand colour. In the back ground were two somewhat horizontal black slashes of colour, like beetling eyebrows and in the foreground, right near the edge of the paper, was a black sphere. But that painting didn't eventuate. The colour wasn't right to begin with and along the way the impact of that mental image vanished. Then I remembered an intriguing water stain that is on the back of an old horse head sketch. Copied it loosely onto the paper. The big black circle from the previous painting didn't fit so I wiped it out. Now I have this sinuous dreamy painting in greens, yellows and blue with some pink. It's kind of abstract but in it is a woman's anatomically incorrect body and a large face in 3/4 view. Not clearly delineated but they are there. Without intending to I've drawn inspiration from Birgit Erfurt's Karma Tarot. Perhaps in the curvy shapes and shadows but definitely there. Still, I like it. It's a far cry from the meticulously (for me) drawn pencil sketches where I lose myself in the details. This is much looser.

A few years ago I went to the Toowoomba Gallery and saw this painting, totally abstract, that was filled with light. It was almost spiritual this light. I kept returning to have aother look. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the artist. That painting has stayed with me. This last work has the merest touch of that painting. A glow, a sense of things unseen. Admittedly, it's been fun to work with colour again. Even Natalia is cooperating in not playing with the pastel sticks.

The success of the application to quarry the mountain made for a couple of crappy days. It was as though someone had died. I grieved at the same time as I was angry. Rather than pretend I wasn't feeling those things, as useless as they were, I just let them through. I was mad and sad and that was that. Luckily the feelings passed and I'm my usual cheerful self again. In fact, in the past two days there's been this subtle but pervasive feeling of joy. Perhaps because it is finally over. When living under a shadow for such a long time, one forgets what real sunlight feels like. There's a long hard road ahead. We have to make the house saleable which means painting four rooms and, once the house is ready, cleaning the outside of dust and cobwebs and then keeping it that way. I ceased to worry about the thousands of black house spiders which make their homes under the eaves. There are so many and they are so tenacious that almost as soon as they are removed they return. Richard has to clean out the shed, a mammoth, nay Herculean task. He's been collecting 'stuff' for twenty years in case something might come in handy. There is some concreting to do and some gardening but otherwise just maintenance stuff. I'll have to clean the feed and tack rooms and keep them dust and web free as well.

Then comes the balancing act of putting the house on the market at the same time as we start looking for a place of our own. I've searched for real estate from Tenterfield to Nambour, from Byron Bay to Nanango. I am confident we'll find the right place - then comes the move. Thirteen birds plus two others that must be caught to take with us. Felicity won't survive without supplementary feeding and as Suki is her mate he needs to come too. Moving aviaries and birds will be the most logistically difficult - but not impossible. But first things first and the first thing is to clean the ruddy bird verandah!