Little Wandering Wren …. chats!

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Did you know, there is more than one Stratford-Upon-Avon in the world? The most famous, being the birthplace of playwright and poet 
William Shakespeare, 
 but Stratford-Upon-Avon, Victoria, 
is Australia's lesser known equivalent...

Well sort of...

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date . . . .
"Sonnet 18," 1–4

When you arrive in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Victoria,  or as the Aussies prefer to call it, Stratford by the river, you notice immediately, how proud the town is to be one of  Stratfords of the World...
But apart from a big silver monument to sisterhood, a Shakespeare festival each year, oh and a river called Avon, they are worlds apart...
"The course of true love never did run smooth".  Midsummer Night's Dream (Act I, Scene I).
In my local Aussie Stratford,  the township dates back to the …

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Linking with Wordless Wednesday

Beautiful connections made  through my ‘Grow Your Blog’ giveaway!
Hello - sorry to go AWOL* on you.  I’m in England and I can’t wait to show you!  She’s is looking good,  dressed in a blaze of golden daffodils  and people saying: 
“Aren’t you the lucky one? 
The weather’s so loverly since you arrived’ 


But right now before I do this, I have a BIG announcement to make…
In January, I joined ‘Grow Your Blog Hop,’the brainchild of Vicki at 2 Bags Full to put bloggers in touch with each other. One suggestion was to offer a giveaway, chosen from those who visit and leave a comment. About half the blogs did this.
I was tempted, there were some amazing prizes on offer… Then it came to me…

‘Be different Wren! 
Do a giveaway, but shush! 
Don’t tell anyone…’


This way anyone who comments on my GYB post, was visiting because they wanted to, not because they were chasing my million dollar prize - ha ha, in my dreams, but you get my drift.
I was just trying to figure out the random number generator that bloggers us…

Autumn?! You'd have thought that came weeks ago in Melbourne

That’s it, all over! The fifteenth hottest Australian summer on record in the past 100 years is behind us. The garden has struggled, leaves are frazzled and burnt. There is hardly a flower in sight and we are hoping for rain.
The world’s weather is topsy turvy. Whilst the East coast of America is well over their endless icy winter, and the British are wading through muddy flooded waters, NSW and Queensland are enduring a terrible drought.
This year our sun was so strong and the heat intense, we had six week of a summer garden and straight into an early autumn! If you watched the Australian Open tennis you will  remember tennis players suffering from heat exhaustion? That was when our garden suffered the most, but we can’t complain. Around Victoria bush fires raged, houses, crops and animals were lost. 
We went from a gorgeous garden to autumn orange cinders within two days of extreme heat. The searing temperatures continued …