The Earth Reveals Its Secrets

We had a ripper electrical storm all through the night last Wednesday, thunder and lightning and rain for hours and hours, it was quite spectacular.  We expected Neo to be terrified, but no, he was rather fascinated and sat in the window to watch the light show.  As is to be expected on these occasions, our power went out, about 11pm, along with most of rural Albany. Our little area must have been in the too hard basket as we were, I believe, the last area to get their power back, some 15 hours later. 

That was fine, we coped.  The biggest issue is that we cannot use any water in the house, as our water is pumped from the tank, so no power, no pump!  We went and filled buckets from a gravity tap on the shed tank for flushing the loo, and I had already been a clever girl and filled up the kettle.  All seemed fine, power came back on, everything seemed to be working, great, go to bed on Thursday all at peace with the world.  Until Friday morning and I discovered our fridge/freezer, was under the cloud of "the lights are on but nobody is home" - the damn thing was lit up like a Xmas tree but something very bad had happened to its innards, and we were left with a soggy, warm mess.  You know the drill, sit on the phone and chat to the insurance company, then ring the technician to come and do a report, but he is busy and can't come out til some time next week.  sigh 

Here is the Office Manager assisting with the printing of documents for said insurance company.

So, that was the start of Friday, caput fridge/freezer.  But we were also a bit excited as that was the day the drilling team arrived to try and drill us a bore.  We knew there was a risk he would hit granite and it could get expensive, but what we didn't count on was him hitting 'fractured granite' about 5 metres down in one site, and three metres down in another.  He cannot drill through fractured granite, chunks of it simply revolve down there in the earth along with the drill head.  So, in other words, it was a complete and utter, expensive, waste of time, no bore for us.  Phooey.  So, I put myself to bed for the afternoon and sulked.

On to more cheerful things, see this photo?  It may not look very exciting, but believe me, Steve is very excited.  This is the FINISH of the retaining walls construction!  Yay Steve, poor love, he is so over it. :-)  100 treated pine sleepers later, along with many bags of cement and many nuts and bolts, it is done.  He has popped into town today with the trailer for the last load of soil mix to top it up, then he needs to cut out the grass right alongside the end of the wall so he can put the crushed limestone there, for a path alongside.  We have done that at each end to try (hah!) and maintain a barrier between the kikuyu grass and the garden beds.  At least I will notice when those creeping runners start slinking along towards my precious garden beds.  Now I have to get on with more planting in these spiffy, vacant, garden beds. :-)

The plants that I planted about a month ago at the other end of the retaining walls are growing nicely.  A few flowers are showing themselves.  This one is a pretty Hebe

This is a mystery plant, a cutting from one of the embroidery ladies.  If anyone knows what it is I'd appreciate a comment, ta muchly.  It has tiny little cigar type flowers and it quite a small plant I believe.

 My walled garden at the front is a blaze of colour at present.  I had a lovely time collecting a big bunch of flowers for the house.  Then of course to decide where to put the vase due to a certain furry vandal who is known for quite deliberately knocking things over.  So, they are in the bathroom, where he can't get at them.  Nice to look at when sitting on the loo ha ha ha

This is the old girl Lucy and we are getting first sightings of the head of her tiny new joey.  So cute.  It will be a while before that one starting coming out of the pouch for tiny little practice hops, at least a month I should think.

Meanwhile, on the embroidery front, I have finally finished the Blackwork Sampler I've been working on this year.  I sourced a heap of Elizabethan patterns then put together the bits I liked.

I'm on a roll.  Every Xmas for embroidery we all make something and someone else gets it.  This year we were all given an outline of a flower with some leaves and hearts, with the instruction that we could muck around with the pattern as much as we liked, changing the size, skewing it, removing bits, whatever, then making it into a little something.  So, as I was on a blackwork trend, that was the type of embroidery I chose to do, I left the flower as is, but removed most of the leaves and hearts.  Then I made it into a little zip purse thingy.  I quite like it, I hope its recipient does too!