HOT HOT HOT

30.1.2011

BUILDING NEWS

It is hot. The footings on the house site are getting dried out and crumbly. Our concrete team is meant to start work here tomorrow but if the weather stays like this they might find it too hard.

OTHER NEWS

It is 6pm and 40 degrees in this donga. Luckily with the door open and the fan on that is not actually as bad as it sounds. I now have a theory that once it gets over 35 I have an excuse not to cook an evening meal. We can either eat something cold, do without or go out.

We got up really early and started the day as the sun was rising carting hay bales back from a paddock in Yarra Glen. It is not the best hay because it had some rain on it, but with so much of the country farmland flooded we will have to put up with what ever is available. We did one trip with hay last night and two this morning but with the heat of the day rising we decided to wait until evening when we could borrow a trailer and get the rest in one trip.

Bo and Al took the boys sailing today and then we all got together here for a BBQ lunch so that the kids could swim in the pool. The pool is far from crystal clear but no one cares when it gets this hot. There has also been a high wind which blew a huge branch off one of the garden trees and so we rigged up a shade cloth that tied down to the old house remains rather than put the canopy on the swing seat set up. This flapped in the breeze and created a kind of draft system but held firm. No one minded the draft.

If I help Edd get the hay again tonight I will have to do it soon because as dusk falls a plague of horrible biting insects descends and tries to eat me. My wrists and ankles are still red and swollen from last night’s attack. Insects just love me but their feelings are not reciprocated.
The other big problem is the water in the dairy tank. It was getting a bit of algae in the water because the tank has no roof.

We did not use the water for drinking, but it was OK for washing clothes and I even used it in the dishwasher, which gets pretty hot. Edd tried to treat the water with hydrogen peroxide to fix the algae but now the water has gone brown and a scum has formed so it will not go through the filters on the machines and is generally un useable. It is a good thing that the old tank still has drinking quality water in it but the last thing I need is to start having to take the clothes to wash in Yarra Glen again.

Josh is on his way to Perth somewhere on the Nullabor. Luckily the cyclone  has calmed down a bit because she was due to arrive at the same time as Josh. Sometimes I think it would be nice to get gaps between the natural disasters. They are hitting one after another at the moment.