Winter sunshine

 7.10.22

This has been a good week. On Wednesday Edd and I drove north to Nagambie to buy Lucerne bales.  It was a lovely sunny day and when we had loaded the bales we went into town and had a pub lunch. It was amazingly good and very cheap so we sat outside and basked in the sun like lizards. Many people on the street stopped for a chat as they past me as I walked along and Edd sat on a bench and looked out over the lake. Even with this we were home in good time to do the animals and so it was a surprisingly restful day.

Now, we have another glorious sunny winter’s day. Edd is off doing a pruning workshop with Graeme and I have been back in the creek area cutting out more blackberries.  It is all so quiet here. Bo and family are off holidaying in Qld and Al has had to delay his flights home from the UK because both his young sons have co-vid.   He and his family are staying in rented accommodation in Cornwall and visiting relatives has had to be cancelled.

 

Josh and CB are also away.   Josh is dog sitting for Beth.  One of their dogs is a very elderly golden retriever who needs a lot of care. Tommy is a very special dog and we all adore him.  It is so sad that we all got dogs around the same time after the fires, so they are all old together.  Edd and I are now dogless and so are Al’s family.  Indi’s dog Rosa is also the same age but still going strong.

 

On the farm we are about the best sorted we have ever been. Our young worker, Sev, has worked miracles and with his help everything is looking very neat and maintained.  He has been too good to be true and so he now has more work and can only come here for half a day a week.  It is better than nothing.  He stacks up a pile of fire wood by the house door every week as well as working in the garden, with the animals and at building and fencing jobs.

 

Edd has started to clean out his shed. This is amazing, but it shows how tidy we are becoming as everything else is done!   We still have to put the upper floor in the big shed and put the second coat of lime render on the walls, which is quite enough work to keep us busy for years.

 

I have spent most of the day back in the creek area where I am continuing the work of cutting out blackberries. The goats and deer have killed a lot, but in some places the blackberries are so tall that they are out of reach, so I am slowly getting these ones down.  There are a lot of beautiful ferns and some kangaroo apple plants that I hope I can protect once the blackberries are down.   The creek is not running.  It only really runs during or after heavy rains.

 

Most of the rain has been falling in NSW where people have had their houses flooded as much as four times this year. They are in despair. I feel so sorry for them, it is awful losing all one’s stuff and financially horrendous to have to repair or replace a house.  The cost of insurance is going up, of course, and it may not be affordable much longer in certain areas.