B is for ...

• Blue - my absolute favourite colour. Navy, cobalt, electric, wedgewood, azure, turquoise. My last house was blue from top to bottom, most of my quilts have at least some blue in them and I wear it a lot.
• Blue and white china . Collect it. Love it. Use it all the time. If it has cats on as well so much the better.
• Black - the other colour [ ok technically it's not a colour, it's a shade ] that I wear a lot of. Probably a third of my wardrobe is black. It's a Melbourne thing.
• Bush . As in THE BUSH ... where I live. Surrounded by acres of gum trees and sky. Woken by the sound of birds not traffic. It's bone dry and this year is going to be a bugger for bushfires, sometimes it's a bit lonely but I'm still happy I made the move.
• Bushfires - there were over 200 separate fires burning earlier this week and it's still 7 weeks to the start of summer. The idea of being in the path of a fire terrifies me but I'm [ nearly] as prepared as I can be.
• birds. I get superb blue wrens, crimson rosellas, choughs, bronzewing pigeons, pardalotes,yellow robins, rose robins, yellow faced honeyeaters, black faced cuckoo shrikes,grass parrots, grey currawongs and a whole lot of others I can't identify.
• Beryl J - my best friend. Lives in Tassie. Miss her.
• Bill - my only sibling. Died of a cerebral haeomorrhage at 34. It's hard to accept that he would be turning 48 next month. The eternal Peter Pan. A troubled, strange person who loved me and my kids unreservedly.
• Billee - my oldest living rellie, is going through some health challenges at the moment but doesn't give up. Williams women are bred tough.
• Ballet - my life from age 3 to 15
• Bellydancing - love it. Great fun, very empowering in a female, guy-free way.
• Boots - for half the year I live in cowdy boots ... literally ... I wear no other footwear from March to September. I currently have blue suede, brown suede and a very battered pair of jade green ones. I need new black ones.
• Bootscootin' ... probably why I only wear cowboy boots ... no one ever said you have to have good taste to be a Line Dancer :] ... so I'm a dag. Who cares? I'm comfortable with my dagginess. Nadie and I started Line Dancing in about '94 or '95. We've even got the gold medals to proove it. Mind you, I don't think Nadie admitted at school to the Line Dancing for a looong time.
• bathroom - mine has peach tiles . I loathe them.
• Blue scented sun orchids - tiny little native orchids that appear in the bush up on top of the hill behind the house in early spring. They're only the size of your thumbnail so it's a challenge to find them.
• Books - lots of books... In alphabetical order... except the quilt books which are by subject. When I was still living in Melbourne, I could ring Nadie from a book shop and ask her to check in bookcase # such-and-such to see what I had by so-and-so and ring me back.
• Bookcases - lots of them too. This is the only house I've ever lived in that doesn't have a bookcase in the bedroom. I need more bookcases!
• Burmese cats - beautiful. Smokey, my blue burmese-cross was almost 15 when he passed away in 2005.
• Bears - the stuffed variety - I have 80 something of them - these days most of them live in storage until the start of december when they all come out of hiding and get to wear scarves and hats till january 6th. At the old house I used to put them all in the loungeroom [ livingroom ] window. We lived on a street between the local primary school and the catholic school so a lot of littlies went past every day. I found out from a lady at one of my classes that Christmas was officially deemed to have started when my bears appeared. Well, that meant I had to keep doing it.
• Bali batiks ... wonderful fabrics ... can't have too many of 'em in the stash. Great for stroking and drooling over.
• Boxes. Love storage stuff even when there's not actually anything in it.
• Buffy. I need Buffy on DVD ... the videos are all worn out!