When I’m kicking about, doing my homesteady thing, I often play with concepts in my head; puzzling, pondering, and percolating. I don’t for a moment think this is remotely irregular or endearingly quirky and I certainly don’t expend my contemplation on anything to challenge Aristotle or Einstein but actively mull I do and this week it seemed I spent a great deal of my time perusing the concept of time.

While undeniably finite, time can be more elastic than one of those mesh shopping bags; you can shove all manner of things into a day. We could use a day to fly from here to Los Angeles or maybe just while it away with a good book and multiple cups of coffee, it can go by in a flash or drag like a lead weight, cost you money or, conversely, earn it. But at the end of that day, it’s still exactly the same, tick-tick-tick, exact unit of measurement however voluminous or constrictive we perceive it to be. It’s all so bewildering wonderful!

What started all this pontification was me pausing at 6.27.05 on Monday morning to hurriedly, blearily unspectacled eyed-ly, take this terribly executed photo with y’all in mind.

We often spend Sunday evenings at the Urban Homestead necessitating an early start. If Colin stays with us rather than hanging out with Tiny Housers, this also means a quick comfort-jaunt around a block not that much larger than the Homestead before heading back down State Highway 73. I like this practice; it’s a kick start to my week and adds a bit of spice and difference – and I never fail to be amazed that, just under 2 hours later,

there we are, feeding out the animals (and, in Colin’s case, inquiring about his morning egg) with a huge hunk of the chores already ticked off and the day barely started. It feels very virtuous.

This is how we spent this weeks time allotment.

While one of us finally accepted the bug baton change and took some time to just be ill

the sheep lost their coats,

Farm Girl’s school year moved ever more quickly towards information cramming and scary, big exams and The Engineer spent her working hours doing mind-blowing, big picture, innovative (and sometimes scary) stuff while the Tiny Houser’s week passed in a swirl of really big and lots of waiting and I created another DIY masterpiece from bits of nothing.

Today I had a hospital appointment (all is fine) and in that wonderfully elastic, wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey way I did a kind of Monday in reverse.

The animals fed, the drive into town, and coffee at the Urban Homestead before catching a bus to the hospital by Spring-bedazzled Hagley park where I saw that they have made some definite rebuild progress since my last visit –

and all before lunchtime.