Sunday 17 February 2013

We Love Puddles

I am sitting here at my desk smiling at this sight out the window.  Tis merely a boring puddle you say, but it has been ages since we've seen one.  Yes, it is raining!


The ground will suck the rain up and the plants will say thank you.  Everything is so dry and we have been doing ever such a lot of hand watering of plants and vegies to keep things barely alive.  I am hoping that in a few days all this brown grass will turn lovely and green.
I mention hand watering the vegies, and it is a real pain as our tank where the hose comes off is about 30 metres away from the vegies, and I can put on quite a tantrum trying to lug long hoses around, which of course kink and get caught on roots.  So my darling husband undertook his next mission, the extension of the tank watering system down to the vegie patch.  He dug a long long trench and laid out one inch poly pipe until it reached the vegie patch.
Ta-dum, look at this, a TAP in the vegie garden!!  It is wonderful, you have no idea how wonderful. :-)
Even the roos have been struggling to find green grass to eat, and the braver ones have taken to coming up right in front of the house where there happens to be a patch of lush, green kikuyu that has sprung up.  They love it.
So, yet another close-up of gorgeous mummy and baby roo from our bedroom window.  This is the feisty baby I have talked about before, the one with attitude.  I know it is this one because its mother has this sort of sleepy eyed look about her all the time.  I think she is trying to block out the behaviour of her child in her mind.
I had a big day in the kitchen.  I wanted to make a couple of lasagnes and as I found my pasta squisher in another unpacked box, home made pasta was on the menu.  It is rather fun actually, you just keep feeding it through over and over, and each time turn the dial to make it a bit thinner, until you are happy with it.
There we have it, lasagne pasta sheets.  I find the clothes airer handy for this, as it is a place to keep the pasta without it sticking to things or losing its shape.
Then I amassed our home grown tomatoes, onions, garlic, capsicum and herbs, and added to that some mince and more tinned tomatoes and some bought mushrooms, and cooked up a huge quantity of meat sauce for the lasagnes.  Then I made a big pot of bechamel sauce to which I added parmesan cheese, then made up two huge lasagnes.  One went in the freezer and the other one we ate over three days!  Very yummy.
Have I mentioned that we don't have a rubbish collection where we live?  We have to take our rubbish to the local transfer station, which, luckily for us, is only a five minute drive away.  We usually go once a fortnight, waving our tip pass, and rid ourselves of rubbish and recycling.  There is also a small tip shop there, where people leave things too good to throw away but not worth trying to sell.  I was most chuffed with this pick-up, seven huge preserving jars.  I managed to buy lids to fit them so Steve will be able to make masses and masses of pickled onions this year!
One thing we did buy last week was this gorgeous metal hat and coat rack.  We have been looking for one for a few months, not quite liking anything we saw, but we spotted this one in an Emporium in Albany and both loved it, so we snapped it up for the bargain price of $35. 
My big mission at the moment is curtain making.  I managed to buy some end of roll fabrics from Textile Traders at a really good price, and bought timber curtain rods from Spotlight also for a really good price, so I starting this big task with the satisfaction of dollars well spent.  :-)
I like to think about how I am to go about tasks for quite a while before I actually commence, thus my etchings of thought processes and measurements stretched to be quite a few pages long.  I have 9 windows to make curtains for, one window is complete and I'm halfway through the second window.  It's going well albeit slowly.
In the meantime I finished my blackwork embroidery project and framed it.  I like the simplicity of the monochrome.  I had an idea of putting a tiny bit of red in it, thinking the middle of a flower would look good like that, but after three different tries doing three different things, I pulled them all out, instead preferring the look of the plain flower middles.
The grand finale of this week was the arrival of our new car.  Meet our Suzuki Jimny 4WD, and we have named the car 'Jimmitu', cos our friend Laurie has one so we have one too.  ha ha ha 
We will be buying a small box trailer in a couple of weeks and this will open things up a lot for us, making it easy to go and get a load of cow poo from the local dairy, or buy some bales of hay.  Steve will be able to get his little tinny in the water eventually.  For now we are taking things slowly, getting used to having a four wheel drive, and trying not to embarrass ourselves by getting stuck somewhere that we were not experienced enough to have been in the first place.  We did our first four wheel drive track yesterday, one that Steve knew was very easy, and I am proud to announce that we came out of it unscathed.  Well done Steve.

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