December 12, 2024 • 22 mins
What if you could find beauty and warmth even in the stark contrasts of seasons? This episode journey's through tales of friendship and nature's wonders. The charm of a uniquely shaped tree evokes childhood memories of shadow puppetry, while a trip to Cockle Creek takes us to the edge of Australia, where stunning ocean vistas and a statue celebrating the southern right whale await. Jacquie discusses the invigorating world of daily routines and creative pursuits that bring joy and rejuvenation. As the day draws to a close, she reconnects with Tilly over a shared love for spring and succulents, reminiscing about a family orchid house. These cherished moments remind us of the simple joys in life, as we prepare for another day of discovery and warmth.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jacquie (00:01):
Welcome to the Day-to-Day Podcast, calm
Conversations with a Friend,spoken by Jacquie Joy, and
you're listening to Episode 4.
You decide to check yourmessages.
(00:23):
One new voicemail it's from oneof your friends.
You decide it's time to sitdown, make yourself comfortable
(00:46):
and have a listen.
Hey, thank you so much for yourholiday update and especially
for all of your photos.
Some of these scenes are justbreathtaking.
I absolutely love all thetextures and the colors in the
(01:08):
landscapes that you've beenseeing and just thinking that
the air must be so fresh tobreathe in.
And I can understand now whyyou're walking so much and
having such long days becauseyou want to make the most of it
(01:28):
while you're in a magical placelike that.
It is lucky that you did getsome new boots to help with your
walking, because if you'd takenyour broken ones you wouldn't
have got too far.
So I hope they're wearing inwell and you're not needing too
(01:52):
many band-aids to get throughthe initial blister period.
I buy shoes half to one sizetoo big for me before I go on a
holiday where I'm doing a lot ofwalking, not a lot of working,
(02:17):
and that worked out well for me.
When we went to the UK, becauseit was cold.
We went in there winter and wedefinitely needed a lot of sock
layers to keep warm.
Anyway, it sounds like you'rehaving a great adventure.
(02:39):
So I started looking a bit moreclosely at a few of the photos
you sent.
I started looking a bit moreclosely at a few of the photos
you sent and I really loved thepicture of the tree that had a
fairly unique shape.
That was in front of the waterand it reminded me of one of
(03:00):
those hand shadow puppets thatwe used to make when we were
kids.
You know, when you got a desklamp and shone it onto a wall
and put your hand between thelamp and the wall, started
(03:20):
making shapes with your hand andyou'd come up with some crazy
usually animal shapes on thewall.
So that brought back a fewmemories and I looked up a few
videos on YouTube to try andwork out what animal that tree
(03:40):
reminded me of.
I also learned that the art ofthese shadow puppets or shadow
graphs is called , which is aword I've never heard of and I
had to look up the pronunciationof that.
(04:02):
I found a couple of good videoson shadow puppetry and I
learned a few new moves.
I wish we had these YouTubevideos back when we were trying
to learn different animals,because my repertoire was very
(04:22):
limited.
I think everyone knew how to dothe dog shape.
The tree reminded me of a crossbetween the dog, the deer and
maybe a rabbit.
I do love the beautiful treecolours in the Northern
(04:46):
Hemisphere in fall the yellows,oranges, the reds and greens
that are in your photos.
We call fall autumn here In thenorth part of Australia.
Here it's quite warm, so wedon't have that beautiful
(05:10):
colourful leaf display that'susually associated with fall.
The leaves don't change colour,but often you do find the
leaves may fall off.
We have an interesting tree inthe backyard that we call the
(05:35):
old man tree.
It may be a ghost gum tree, andI think I pointed it out in the
party photo recently.
We lit it up with a big redstage light, which looked
incredible because this tree hasa lot of branches.
(06:02):
It's very tall, probably aboutat least a story and a half tall
, and it has no leaves on it,and the light just accentuated
every little texture branch,every little texture branch line
(06:24):
of this tree, as if it was afine line drawing.
It really gave it personality.
Funny looking at that tree.
Now, though it's fully coveredin leaves, it's green and it
(06:49):
looks like a totally differenttree.
We are now in spring here.
We have opposite seasons to you, and that's just one of those
few differences we have livingdown here.
One other difference Idiscovered a few years ago came
about when I went to purchase aMagnetico sleep pad for Abed,
(07:17):
and we went to order it butcouldn't order the stock
standard model.
We had to order a southernhemisphere model, which meant
that the magnets were placed inreversed polarity, so that was
(07:38):
unexpected.
One of the other photos you senthas a vast blue ocean with
viewing scopes.
It looks like some type ofviewing platform.
I'm wondering what you'relooking at there.
(07:59):
Were there any sea creatures,us to spot any whales?
It reminds me of a place wewent to down in Tasmania last
year and we drove to the mostsouthernmost point of Australia,
to a place called Cockle Creek.
The drive was a bit rocky andbumpy.
(08:23):
It took about an hour on thedirt road and our hire car
certainly rattled around alittle bit but survived the
drive.
And we got to the viewingplatform and there was a huge
bronze statue of a southernright whale there.
(08:45):
Huge bronze statue of asouthern right whale there.
So apparently, if you werethere at the right time of year,
you can see whales frolickingin the extremely cold waters.
Next to this outlook, I took aphoto of an inscription that was
(09:07):
on a rock near the whale'sstatue, so I'll read it out to
you.
I do have it here on aphotograph A celebration of the
southern right whale Conception,birth and nurture.
(09:29):
Far beyond our human scale,this three-month calf begins a
southern ocean journey to feed,to play, to live, a yearly cycle
begun five million years ago.
(09:52):
This rhythm of leviathans wewitness now as these tender,
tactile animals return to ourwaters every year.
Anyway, health-wise, I'm keepingup with my ice baths almost
(10:19):
every day and just got out ofone then.
It was a little lower intemperature than I expected
because overnight the bathstayed quite cool and was still
14 degrees.
We only have a cooling unit,unfortunately, so I couldn't
(10:45):
heat it, but after considerationI decided I would try to get in
, and I did.
I immersed myself very quicklydown to the long sitting
position and the water juststayed above my belly button.
(11:07):
So it was a pretty good effortand I stayed in there for about
10-15 minutes and it wasn't toobad.
My body must be acclimatising.
Of course, this coldness is notfor everyone, and I know you
(11:29):
definitely prefer to be in asauna, which is something I do
prefer personally as well, butwe don't have a sauna here, so
my choices are limited.
I wonder if you have triedputting your face in cold water
(11:53):
in the mornings.
That's something that I find sohelpful and it's not as
dramatic as getting into an iceor cold bath or having a cold
shower, which I find very hardto do.
So when my face is feeling alittle puffy in the mornings,
(12:19):
I'll just get a metal bowl or itcan be any bowl pop some water
in and then just some ice cubesand I will dunk my face in the
bowl, obviously have to hold mybreath for a few seconds, lift
(12:42):
it out and do that a few times,and if that's too much for me in
the mornings, I'll just splashthe ice water over my face,
which still feels amazing, and Ifind that so invigorating.
It is so easy to do, andspeaking about this just reminds
(13:07):
me that I should be doing itevery morning.
It makes me feel like I'mhaving a facelift every time I
do it, and it's free and it'squick, perfect beauty hack and
(13:27):
also I think it's an amazingwell-being and energy hack.
It's something simple that youcould try at home, so let me
know if you do try it and how itfeels.
I finally went to thehairdresser yesterday and I
(13:53):
think it's been nearly threemonths, so I was very happy to
get a colour redo.
I haven't been for a whilebecause my appointment kept
getting bumped because my lovelyhairdresser hurt her knee on an
(14:15):
e-bike.
However, she's a lot better nowand she was just starting work
again yesterday and called me into be her test client.
So she did pretty well and wasable to finish my whole head of
blonde colour.
(14:35):
So I usually have a few hourswhile that's processing to be
able to do something with mydowntime, and I decided to
research some sounds for a TVbrief that I got given.
(14:59):
It was a gritty electronic trackthat I had to write for a show
and I researched the sound sets,got home last night and wrote
the thing in a night andsubmitted it this morning.
So I have been busy doingthings like that as well as
(15:26):
planning the live music set, andso we've got the eight songs
now, and all of the songs weremade famous by female artists.
We'd done a couple of the 1990sby Linda Perry, and this track
(16:01):
has almost 1 billion Spotifyplays, so you would be familiar
with it.
It's called what's Up and itwas done when she was with her
band.
I was surprised to hear thatshe wrote let's Get the Party
Started by Pink and producedthat with her as well.
(16:24):
She's a very talented lady.
We also decided to add in atrack that was made famous by a
16 year old at the time, in 2013.
It's called Royals by Lorde,which you definitely would have
(16:48):
heard of.
The surprise track for me wasBetty Davis Eyes by Kim Carnes,
and that was an older track,made famous in 1981, but since
(17:09):
then it's been played andperformed live in a lot of
concerts by people such asTaylor Swift and Kylie Minogue,
so I found it a very fun song tosing as well, especially
acoustically.
We also did a Miley Cyrus songand decided to do the song
(17:38):
Flowers and also added Rollingin the Deep by Adele onto the
list, and I didn't realize, butRolling in the deep means when
someone has your back, so thatwas her second most popular song
(18:02):
, apparently second to SomeoneLike you.
So that's our set and I'll letyou know how it goes.
I caught up with Tilly earlierin the week.
We had another pulled pork todeliver over there for her and
(18:27):
we got our amazing fresh, tastycoleslaw in return.
She was talking to me about howshe loves spring, the longer
days, increasing humidity, andshe showed me her succulents,
(18:51):
one of which is very much likeone of our jade plants, just a
little smaller but looking verygreen and happy.
And the other plant she hadthere was an aeonium or
something called a treehouseleek, which is a fairly
(19:15):
popular succulent here, and ithas a central base of leaves and
sort of spreads out.
It looks like a flowerarrangement of green leaves and
that was looking very happy andpretty.
She had also just been giventwo pot plants with orchids in
(19:42):
them.
One was fairly well developedbut the other one was a cutting,
so it was going to take alittle bit of TLC, tender,
(20:02):
loving care to get that onegrowing and sprouting like the
other one.
Do you have orchids there?
They are one of the mostpopular and most most beautiful
plants here.
My dad has an orchid house andused to take us to orchid shows
at the local planetarium.
(20:24):
He would grow and donate plantsfor the orchid Club and they
would sell them just for aprofit to keep the Orchid Club
in business, and my mum wouldmake sandwiches and refreshments
(20:46):
for the visitors at the show.
I'll take some photos of theircollection when I visit next and
send them through to you.
I think you'll be surprised bythe variety of colours and sizes
(21:08):
and types of orchids they haveon display.
Anyway, it's time for me tosign off.
I'm going to have an earliernight tonight as I've got to get
up a little earlier tomorrowmorning, but I hope you enjoy
(21:28):
the rest of your happyadventures.
I'm looking forward to seeingmore photographs.
Take care and bye for now.
You.
Welcome to the Day-to-Day Podcast, calm
Conversations with a Friend,spoken by Jacquie Joy, and
you're listening to Episode 4.
You decide to check yourmessages.
(00:23):
One new voicemail it's from oneof your friends.
You decide it's time to sitdown, make yourself comfortable
(00:46):
and have a listen.
Hey, thank you so much for yourholiday update and especially
for all of your photos.
Some of these scenes are justbreathtaking.
I absolutely love all thetextures and the colors in the
(01:08):
landscapes that you've beenseeing and just thinking that
the air must be so fresh tobreathe in.
And I can understand now whyyou're walking so much and
having such long days becauseyou want to make the most of it
(01:28):
while you're in a magical placelike that.
It is lucky that you did getsome new boots to help with your
walking, because if you'd takenyour broken ones you wouldn't
have got too far.
So I hope they're wearing inwell and you're not needing too
(01:52):
many band-aids to get throughthe initial blister period.
I buy shoes half to one sizetoo big for me before I go on a
holiday where I'm doing a lot ofwalking, not a lot of working,
(02:17):
and that worked out well for me.
When we went to the UK, becauseit was cold.
We went in there winter and wedefinitely needed a lot of sock
layers to keep warm.
Anyway, it sounds like you'rehaving a great adventure.
(02:39):
So I started looking a bit moreclosely at a few of the photos
you sent.
I started looking a bit moreclosely at a few of the photos
you sent and I really loved thepicture of the tree that had a
fairly unique shape.
That was in front of the waterand it reminded me of one of
(03:00):
those hand shadow puppets thatwe used to make when we were
kids.
You know, when you got a desklamp and shone it onto a wall
and put your hand between thelamp and the wall, started
(03:20):
making shapes with your hand andyou'd come up with some crazy
usually animal shapes on thewall.
So that brought back a fewmemories and I looked up a few
videos on YouTube to try andwork out what animal that tree
(03:40):
reminded me of.
I also learned that the art ofthese shadow puppets or shadow
graphs is called , which is aword I've never heard of and I
had to look up the pronunciationof that.
(04:02):
I found a couple of good videoson shadow puppetry and I
learned a few new moves.
I wish we had these YouTubevideos back when we were trying
to learn different animals,because my repertoire was very
(04:22):
limited.
I think everyone knew how to dothe dog shape.
The tree reminded me of a crossbetween the dog, the deer and
maybe a rabbit.
I do love the beautiful treecolours in the Northern
(04:46):
Hemisphere in fall the yellows,oranges, the reds and greens
that are in your photos.
We call fall autumn here In thenorth part of Australia.
Here it's quite warm, so wedon't have that beautiful
(05:10):
colourful leaf display that'susually associated with fall.
The leaves don't change colour,but often you do find the
leaves may fall off.
We have an interesting tree inthe backyard that we call the
(05:35):
old man tree.
It may be a ghost gum tree, andI think I pointed it out in the
party photo recently.
We lit it up with a big redstage light, which looked
incredible because this tree hasa lot of branches.
(06:02):
It's very tall, probably aboutat least a story and a half tall
, and it has no leaves on it,and the light just accentuated
every little texture branch,every little texture branch line
(06:24):
of this tree, as if it was afine line drawing.
It really gave it personality.
Funny looking at that tree.
Now, though it's fully coveredin leaves, it's green and it
(06:49):
looks like a totally differenttree.
We are now in spring here.
We have opposite seasons to you, and that's just one of those
few differences we have livingdown here.
One other difference Idiscovered a few years ago came
about when I went to purchase aMagnetico sleep pad for Abed,
(07:17):
and we went to order it butcouldn't order the stock
standard model.
We had to order a southernhemisphere model, which meant
that the magnets were placed inreversed polarity, so that was
(07:38):
unexpected.
One of the other photos you senthas a vast blue ocean with
viewing scopes.
It looks like some type ofviewing platform.
I'm wondering what you'relooking at there.
(07:59):
Were there any sea creatures,us to spot any whales?
It reminds me of a place wewent to down in Tasmania last
year and we drove to the mostsouthernmost point of Australia,
to a place called Cockle Creek.
The drive was a bit rocky andbumpy.
(08:23):
It took about an hour on thedirt road and our hire car
certainly rattled around alittle bit but survived the
drive.
And we got to the viewingplatform and there was a huge
bronze statue of a southernright whale there.
(08:45):
Huge bronze statue of asouthern right whale there.
So apparently, if you werethere at the right time of year,
you can see whales frolickingin the extremely cold waters.
Next to this outlook, I took aphoto of an inscription that was
(09:07):
on a rock near the whale'sstatue, so I'll read it out to
you.
I do have it here on aphotograph A celebration of the
southern right whale Conception,birth and nurture.
(09:29):
Far beyond our human scale,this three-month calf begins a
southern ocean journey to feed,to play, to live, a yearly cycle
begun five million years ago.
(09:52):
This rhythm of leviathans wewitness now as these tender,
tactile animals return to ourwaters every year.
Anyway, health-wise, I'm keepingup with my ice baths almost
(10:19):
every day and just got out ofone then.
It was a little lower intemperature than I expected
because overnight the bathstayed quite cool and was still
14 degrees.
We only have a cooling unit,unfortunately, so I couldn't
(10:45):
heat it, but after considerationI decided I would try to get in
, and I did.
I immersed myself very quicklydown to the long sitting
position and the water juststayed above my belly button.
(11:07):
So it was a pretty good effortand I stayed in there for about
10-15 minutes and it wasn't toobad.
My body must be acclimatising.
Of course, this coldness is notfor everyone, and I know you
(11:29):
definitely prefer to be in asauna, which is something I do
prefer personally as well, butwe don't have a sauna here, so
my choices are limited.
I wonder if you have triedputting your face in cold water
(11:53):
in the mornings.
That's something that I find sohelpful and it's not as
dramatic as getting into an iceor cold bath or having a cold
shower, which I find very hardto do.
So when my face is feeling alittle puffy in the mornings,
(12:19):
I'll just get a metal bowl or itcan be any bowl pop some water
in and then just some ice cubesand I will dunk my face in the
bowl, obviously have to hold mybreath for a few seconds, lift
(12:42):
it out and do that a few times,and if that's too much for me in
the mornings, I'll just splashthe ice water over my face,
which still feels amazing, and Ifind that so invigorating.
It is so easy to do, andspeaking about this just reminds
(13:07):
me that I should be doing itevery morning.
It makes me feel like I'mhaving a facelift every time I
do it, and it's free and it'squick, perfect beauty hack and
(13:27):
also I think it's an amazingwell-being and energy hack.
It's something simple that youcould try at home, so let me
know if you do try it and how itfeels.
I finally went to thehairdresser yesterday and I
(13:53):
think it's been nearly threemonths, so I was very happy to
get a colour redo.
I haven't been for a whilebecause my appointment kept
getting bumped because my lovelyhairdresser hurt her knee on an
(14:15):
e-bike.
However, she's a lot better nowand she was just starting work
again yesterday and called me into be her test client.
So she did pretty well and wasable to finish my whole head of
blonde colour.
(14:35):
So I usually have a few hourswhile that's processing to be
able to do something with mydowntime, and I decided to
research some sounds for a TVbrief that I got given.
(14:59):
It was a gritty electronic trackthat I had to write for a show
and I researched the sound sets,got home last night and wrote
the thing in a night andsubmitted it this morning.
So I have been busy doingthings like that as well as
(15:26):
planning the live music set, andso we've got the eight songs
now, and all of the songs weremade famous by female artists.
We'd done a couple of the 1990sby Linda Perry, and this track
(16:01):
has almost 1 billion Spotifyplays, so you would be familiar
with it.
It's called what's Up and itwas done when she was with her
band.
I was surprised to hear thatshe wrote let's Get the Party
Started by Pink and producedthat with her as well.
(16:24):
She's a very talented lady.
We also decided to add in atrack that was made famous by a
16 year old at the time, in 2013.
It's called Royals by Lorde,which you definitely would have
(16:48):
heard of.
The surprise track for me wasBetty Davis Eyes by Kim Carnes,
and that was an older track,made famous in 1981, but since
(17:09):
then it's been played andperformed live in a lot of
concerts by people such asTaylor Swift and Kylie Minogue,
so I found it a very fun song tosing as well, especially
acoustically.
We also did a Miley Cyrus songand decided to do the song
(17:38):
Flowers and also added Rollingin the Deep by Adele onto the
list, and I didn't realize, butRolling in the deep means when
someone has your back, so thatwas her second most popular song
(18:02):
, apparently second to SomeoneLike you.
So that's our set and I'll letyou know how it goes.
I caught up with Tilly earlierin the week.
We had another pulled pork todeliver over there for her and
(18:27):
we got our amazing fresh, tastycoleslaw in return.
She was talking to me about howshe loves spring, the longer
days, increasing humidity, andshe showed me her succulents,
(18:51):
one of which is very much likeone of our jade plants, just a
little smaller but looking verygreen and happy.
And the other plant she hadthere was an aeonium or
something called a treehouseleek, which is a fairly
(19:15):
popular succulent here, and ithas a central base of leaves and
sort of spreads out.
It looks like a flowerarrangement of green leaves and
that was looking very happy andpretty.
She had also just been giventwo pot plants with orchids in
(19:42):
them.
One was fairly well developedbut the other one was a cutting,
so it was going to take alittle bit of TLC, tender,
(20:02):
loving care to get that onegrowing and sprouting like the
other one.
Do you have orchids there?
They are one of the mostpopular and most most beautiful
plants here.
My dad has an orchid house andused to take us to orchid shows
at the local planetarium.
(20:24):
He would grow and donate plantsfor the orchid Club and they
would sell them just for aprofit to keep the Orchid Club
in business, and my mum wouldmake sandwiches and refreshments
(20:46):
for the visitors at the show.
I'll take some photos of theircollection when I visit next and
send them through to you.
I think you'll be surprised bythe variety of colours and sizes
(21:08):
and types of orchids they haveon display.
Anyway, it's time for me tosign off.
I'm going to have an earliernight tonight as I've got to get
up a little earlier tomorrowmorning, but I hope you enjoy
(21:28):
the rest of your happyadventures.
I'm looking forward to seeingmore photographs.
Take care and bye for now.
You.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.