What Sort Of An Egg Is That!

Over the last few weeks we have had numerous trips to Perth.  We said a lovely goodbye to Steve's dad Eric, his funeral was gentle and funny and beautiful.  And he made sure he said goodbye to us all with the huge clap of thunder and flickering lights when the curtain was drawing over his coffin - we heard you Eric :-) xx

Neo the wonder cat has been an absolute trooper, being stuffed into his carrier and enduring 8 five hour drives, he is such a good traveller, not a peep out of him and he just doses.  Until the final trip home when he decided that he'd had enough and proceeded to try and claw his way out!  I spent the last half an hour of the trip with my hand over the mesh and he settled down again, will have to do some darning with fishing line to fix it I reckon.  Despite Neo's one and only brief faux pas, we rewarded his good behaviour by going to the seafood shop and buying his his very own piece of fresh tuna for his dinner - he lurves fresh tuna!

He did lots of sleeping for a few days after we got home and was very well behaved, however the devil is showing its face once again...... :-)

In between trips to Perth we were racing home and watering madly to try and keep most things alive, it is so darn dry at the moment.  It was also a race to harvest the sweetcorn before it tipped over the edge.  I was pleased with the harvest considering we didn't plant too many, and I stripped the corn kernels off the ears and froze them in bags.  Last years I froze both stripped kernels and full ears of corn and I found the stripped kernels were more useful, so did that to all the harvest for the freezer this time.

 

On a side note, the little drinks fridge outside had a hissy fit - the shelf between the fridge bit and freezer bit came loose and effectively turned the whole bar fridge into a freezer.  Coke cans don't like being frozen, as evidenced by the exploded one on the bottom shelf, and the blobs of frozen coke splattered from top to bottom.  Ah well, might just throw a bucket of water in there to rinse it.

We had a trial run of Skyping with Paul, Stevie and Riley - good fun!  The girls were running back and forth finding things to show us, lovely :-)

The chooks have been decidedly difficult the last 2 months, they've gone from laying about 3 a day, to only about 5 a week.  No idea why, I have tried everything diet-wise, I just can't believe they are lacking in anything, perhaps they are getting a bit old for regular laying.  Oh yes, we lost one too, in the middle of the trips to Perth.  And I am ashamed to say that I don't actually know who it was!  Since we got the two new girls and they filled out and feathered up, I have trouble telling some of them apart.  All I know is that either Leanne or Angelina went to the big chookhouse in the sky.  The others are fine and actually their laying has picked up a bit over the last week.  This morning's batch was interesting, among two good sized eggs was the teeniest little chook egg I've ever seen!  It's not much bigger than a quail's egg!  How odd hey.

I'm looking out the window and there are roos everywhere.  They are so darn hungry with no green grass around any more.  I do throw out a bucket of lucerne chaff or whole wheat for them a few times a week, but I've had to change how I do it - I used to have a few of the girls following me to the place I used to feed them, but when a few of the hungry big males started following me too, then having one growl at me, I decided that I now throw the feed around when the roos aren't around, so they can find it later when I am safely tucked up in my bed! 

On a final note, we have had to absolute pleasure today of watching the most delightful 81 year old gentleman do water divining on our property.  He is renowned for his accuracy.  It was incredible to watch, Steve can water divine to some extent but this guy, wow, he used wires, and a weird plastic thing and a glass bottle of water, and the movement of them was astounding. Me on the other hand, I am the dead earth wire of the human world - I couldn't divine an ocean! I wish we had heard of him and the drilling guy that uses him earlier - if you remember we had a guy in to try and unsuccessfully drill a bore for us a couple of months ago, well, we have since found out he is rather shonky and useless.  So crossing our fingers that Leon, one of the nicest old blokes I have met (sort of guy you'd wish was your grandad), has pinpointed water that Phil the driller can get to for us.