today i had my first formal driving lesson. at 31 years old. i was a little nervous, so it doesn't help that we live quite close to a major-ish road, so we spent the lesson doing blockies in the back streets at twenty kilometers per hour... i know, i've left it till so late but i'm glad i've finally made myself do it. i have to get my p's before july cause that's when my learners expires! i know, it's pretty slack of me to have sat on my learners for so long, but as far as getting my license goes, i never said i was anything other than a slackarse. here's hoping my new-driver's nerves don't last too long. in other news, i've been busy clearing and planting things recently, both physically and metaphorically. i sprayed weed 'n feed on this huge mass of potato-viney weirdness in our backyard and it seems to be fading away. as the poison took effect and the mass of bushes started dying, it lost is sponginess and began and shrinking back to the ground. toys that the kids next door would have missed months ago have started appearing in amongst the twisted leafy-ness; so far i have found one spiderman, two crazy bounce balls and one christmas tree baubly-decoration thing. i've also found brick edging underneath it that was obviously meant to be a boundary marker between garden and lawn. one of these weekends soon, i will find myself and old-school iron rake and clear the vines away, then re-plant my chilly tree into the ground, maybe get a good clump of lemongrass going (there is nothing like fresh lemongrass tea - it used to grow wild around our house in fiji, and i always knew it as 'fiji chai'. it's only when i moved to melbourne that i found out that lemongrass was its actual name). i'd also like to nick some rosemary out of dad's garden - he's got masses of it. i've never been a veggie-patch kinda girl, but i think that's changing, which is nice. i wouldn't mind home-grown tomatoes.