Back In The Land Of The Living

Far out, what a waste of a whole week.  I have been a poorly girl, having some sort of weird illness that involved the sorest throat I have ever had, reducing me to a blubbering mess on a number of occasions, sucking ice all the while.  Finally, yesterday, I felt like I was arising from the swamp, and today feel completely back to normal.  Hoo-ray. 

Anyway, apart from that, what's been happening here...

 

Damnation! This is the windscreen of our brand new little 4WD.  Steve was driving into Albany when a truck coming the other way threw up a stone which hit the windscreen.  Phonecalls to the insurance company and windscreen people followed, and we are now awaiting a new windscreen.  Thank goodness for insurance!

Steve has been a busy boy sealing the concrete around the house.  First he had to acid-wash it, then rinse it, then wait for it to dry, then do 2 coats of sealer.  We are really pleased with it, the colour has become nice and rich with a slightly uneven look sort of natural rock-like.  It's nice.  Good job done.

Steve has also started putting up the curtain rods above all the windows.  This corner of the living room gets full afternoon sun for a couple of hours and at present we are using sheets to cover them up.  It will be good to have proper curtains..... my job...

And so the sweatshop begins.  I've finished the two spare bedrooms, next are the four living room windows.  You have no idea how many times I have rammed pins into my fingers trying to negotiate the large amounts of fabric through the sewing machine, a bit of language was heard!

I harvested my pumpkins which was rather exciting as we've never grown them before.  As well as these grey ones, I have another 10 small Jap ones sitting on a shelf in the pantry.  The Jap ones make fantastic pumpkin scones!  I reckon all this lot will do us for the year so yay for the home producer.  :-)

I also learned a valuable lesson.  A couple of months ago I pulled up the last of the beetroot, huge, luscious looking things they were.  I decided to try and store them like potatoes, in the pantry in the dark, and I wrapped them in newspaper.  Last week I thought I'd make some beetroot dip so I pulled the basket out and unwrapped them.  Well, all bar one were nondescript shrivelled monstrosities which went straight into the bin.  One large one looked okay albeit rather dehydrated.  I figured boiling it for an hour would revitalise it and all would be well.  Nup.  It tasted foul and as you can see, ended up in the food scraps bin for composting.  So, I now know not to do that again!

We had a win.  We will start planting our orchard in a couple of months, and we have decided to individually net each tree later on to protect them from birds, and in doing that we would need many many metres of  black irrigation pipe.  You hammer four star pickets in the ground around the tree then make a cross over the tree with two pieces of  black pipe that you secure over the top of the star pickets.  Then you sling your net over the top and it stops the net from getting all caught up in the tree.  It wont be cheap to buy all the fencing, the trees, the nets, star pickets and the pipe.  So imagine our delight when chatting to our neighbour who happened to mention that she has heaps of black pipe she no long wanted, and she was actually going to take it to the tip.  That precious pipe is now in our hot little hands and we are really pleased.  Thanks Marilyn!

Speaking of protecting trees, see this cute but bad, very bad bunny?  Another thing we have learned, bunnies like eating bark and leaves of young citrus trees!  Bad bad bunny.  We planted 6 citrus trees between the shed and the house, figuring they would not need the protection of the orchard fence.  After finding the bottoms of all the trees ravaged, we hastily bunged some wire around each one, hence the perplexed looking rabbit staring at the mandarin tree in the background, wondering how to get to it!  Hopefully the trees will be okay now, we are giving them much love and water to aid their recovery.

I will begrudgingly say in the bunny's defence, that it is so dry around here, with hardly any green feed left, that I guess the bad bunny was getting desperate.  The roos have been eating the new leaves of all my young acacia trees for the same reason I guess.  Normally they don't bother with them.  I took this roo photo to show the size difference between the big male, a female and the joey that's been out of the pouch for about a month.  The two big males we see around here are awe inspiring, rippling muscles and power make them a creature to have a lot of respect for.

On a final note, about 3am one night last week, Steve sleepily asked what I was doing.  I was standing at our bedroom window with my camera trying to take a decent shot of this amazing moon.  Doesn't look like much in the photo, but it was gorgeous.  It was low in the western sky, very big, bright gold and red, with bits of cloud covering parts of it.  Beautiful.  If I had had my wits about me I should have tried putting the camera onto the tripod and doing a long exposure shot, but to be honest, my brain was not capable of remembering how to do that at 3am!