recovery week

Ella

June 27. 2015

This week has mostly been taken up with recovering from last week. Food and scraps left over from the party had to be frozen or fed to chooks and the bones were cooked up for dog food. The table clothes had to be washed and all the extra crockery cleaned and put away. During this process I found the missing glasses. They were our best set that Beni gave us and I had put them away so carefully even I could not find them!

Edd has done a bit more tiling in the bathroom. He has worked on the tricky bits that curl round the walls that make up the shower door way. It has involved a lot of cutting and measuring and we still have the top of the arch to do. We still have the second coat on the shower walls to put up and as Al is off to the UK next week I doubt it will be done soon with out a huge effort.

Edd goes into hospital to deal with his knees on the11th of July and he expects to be out of action for a few weeks after that at least. The young goats are all trained now and one of them called Olga is usually the first in the queue when we let them in for milking. They all learnt to jump up onto the bale in three days and have not looked back. It makes life much easier when we get a group like this.

The new chooks have also settled in and are laying well. They have now got to love eating their greens but I have not started them on household scraps yet. The older chooks devour all of them very quickly.  In the vegetable garden everything is growing well. We have kale of all types; silver beet, parsley, lettuce and celery ready to eat. The broccoli and cauliflower are still too young.

This year our old orange tree that survived the fires is full of fruit and the lemons and limes are also starting to ripen. We ran out of lemons last year but have traded firewood and manure with friends to keep up the supply. I use lemon juice in large quantities when I make soft cheese and I use lots of the soft cheese to make cheesecake.

I try not to think about what is going on in the world. All the records indicate that the earth is warming in a way that will affect life dramatically and Australia is still in denial. I wish I knew what to do. We show as many people as possible round the house so they can see for them selves how it remains a great temperature with out the need for cooling or much heating. We have reed beds, tank water and solar panels but I think we all need to do more.

One amazing thing is that the company who do the work on the power lines sent someone up to put right the mess they made on the grass. We did not even have to fill in a form which is highly unusual.