Merry Christmas Dad

I started this challenge in December 2022, inspired largely by one of my heroes who I was binge watching at the time - Beau Miles, and the sheer volume of random metal junk objects I see on the sides of the roads when out running. I had a brilliant idea to collect them for 12 months and then come December 2023 I would turn my 'sh*t I found on the side of the road' collection into a wreath and give it to Dad for Christmas. Why you may ask? Anyone who knows my Dad, knows he has a brilliant gift for taking 'old sh*t he finds laying around' and restoring it or turning it into beautiful objects - generally with the perfect mix of form and function. But he usually insists it's 'just some old junk' ??.

I remember when we first moved to our property we were digging through the old dump hole and my husband Ben pulled out what looked like just another large rusty piece of broken cast iron (not unlike the hundreds of rusty, broken pieces we'd been pulling out all morning) Dad takes one look from 30 metres away, points at it and goes, 'turn that over and you'll find the number blah blah blah on the back of it' (I can't remember the actual number). Ben did, and sure enough the number was there. We kept digging and found as many of the other pieces as we could, all of which went home with Dad and came back a few months later fully restored into the beautiful grinder you can see in the photo here. Dad sees treasure where others just see junk.

So I kept collecting roadside junk all year, admittedly getting pickier and pickier as I worked out what was and wasn't going to get used - and what gets dang heavy to carry (hello railway spikes, seed bin doors, padlocks, I'm talking to all of you). I also stopped collecting pieces of ratchet straps pretty quickly - they must break fairly easily because there are A LOT of them out there. The things I found most commonly were D shackles - sometimes just the D, sometimes the bolt, sometimes both!

Without any of the actual skills needed to make a metal wreath out of junk ?? I decided to switch my design to a clock - selecting 12 things to put around the edge for the 12 months I collected roadside sh*t. I decided to paint the clock face with a map of the ground that I had covered on my runs where all the sh*t was found. I included the places where I encountered or was chased by wild animals to jazz it up a bit ??.

It ain't pretty, but Dad it is a reminder of the fact that I thought about you on all of those long runs all year! And that I appreciate that you actually follow along on the tracker when Garmin sends you an email to say I started a run - so you were kind of there in spirit too. I appreciate the texts I sometimes get at the end of a run, commenting on a new route I just took or congratulating me on my pace. You are my biggest supporter of my wacky adventures, driving me to race start lines and patiently waiting to get a photo as I cross the finish. You listen while I talk in great detail about how my training is going when I know you (and everyone else on the entire planet) would probably rather stab their ear drums than listen to those details.

So it's a bloody ugly clock, but here you go - its beauty is in neither its form nor its function, but is hopefully in its sentiment. Merry Christmas Dad!