Home Is Where The Heart Is.......

Last week I took my daughter to feed the swans and ducks on our local lake.  This time, I think we had just about every swan in the area clamouring for our few slices of stale bread, and things got pretty heated.  If you have never seen a couple of swans having a punch-up, let me tell you it is quite spectacular, involving lots of standing up in the water, flapping of enormous wings and pecking of beaks.  Of course I did not have my camera with me that morning....

In the distance I noticed a pair of swans who were not interested in the bread, they just had eyes for each other and were participating in a pair-bonding display.  This is like a courtship dance with the swans making elegant shapes with their necks and wings and mirroring each other's movements.  It was truly beautiful to watch, especially when you think that swans mate for life.  A recurring movement between the swans was the bending of their necks and touching of beaks, which I noticed made the shape of a heart...which in turn gave me an idea for a felt model.  The above is the result and I am quite proud of it, having designed it entirely on my own.  It will be for sale in my Etsy shop shortly.

On a more serious note, while it is easy in 'Blogland' to make it seem that everything in your world is happy and pretty with nothing ever going wrong, sometimes something happens that brings you down to earth with a bump.  I've been having a pretty stressful time lately due to a couple of things going on - one involving extensive visits to the dentist (ouch!) and the other involving my day job which I don't feel at liberty to discuss, despite my inner outrage.  Yesterday however, something happened which topped it all - my partner of 17 years was home from Belgium for the weekend but was feeling quite wonky since early Saturday morning.  He checked himself in to the Emergency Dept at lunchtime yesterday and I got a phone call two hours later to tell me that he'd been whisked up to CCU with a heart attack.  They'd dealt with it incredibly fast, cleared the offending artery, gave him a stent and he should be home within a couple of days.  It was a lucky escape - he could have had this happen while on his own in Belgium or while driving to or from there.  It kind of puts things in perspective - your loved ones are what matters, everything else is just decoration.