some minor problems

22.10.2012

I have been too busy to blog. The weather is gradually warming and drying and once again we are able to spend all day outside working on the farm and garden. We have lots of lush thick parsley and the first lettuces are almost at eating stage. The snow peas grow almost visibly and the beet root double in size when no one is looking, over night!

The last two goats kidded on Friday, but Sari hid with her babies up in the Ti –tree, and despite Edd and I spending several hours looking we did not find her until first light next day. She and her babies were fine, but Edd and I had worn out every joint struggling up and down uneven paddocks for hours in the dark and we took a day to recover.

The weekend before we had a better time with Friends visiting from NSW. Prue had an art exhibition in Melbourne so we all met up there and then came back to the farm for the night. We have not seen Prue and Merv for years so it was absolutely wonderful to catch up again. The sun even came out and made everything look good too. I am so enjoying time spent with friends and this house is a lovely space to entertain in.

Now that we are over the main struggle to build we are getting time to sit back and realise just how lucky we are. This place is a dream home for us. I never dreamt we would one day live in anywhere so amazing. We still have lots to do. Last week the plumbers, electricians and the stove man were back trying to sort out the Essa wood stove. The problem had been with the pump that sends the cold water in when the heat is up enough. It had been working too soon and staying on, so the stove was continually cooled by cold water. This meant the wood did not burn right and everything blocked up.

Once it had been adjusted it worked really well and boiled a kettle in a very short time. We now have to bleed the radiators again as when they were drained they developed more air locks. We were told to have a hot fire all day to clean the stove out but not try to bleed the radiators when the pump was on. As a result, by the evening the water started to boil again. I had to get all the wood out of the stove quickly to stop it boiling over. This was the same night that I was searching for the lost goats, and Edd was at a choir concert so I had a fairly busy time.  I am hopeful now, though, that we will get the whole system working well and I will be able to have hot water again.

These are all minor problems; our real concerns are for other family members. Bo had Simon and Morren at the doctors this week and Al still has a lot of issues to get under control. Josh seems to be surviving but is working hard. He spent one week in Albany at the hearing clinic there and decided he liked the town. He gets sent to lots of different clinics where he works on his own, so he is undergoing a crash course in his new profession. I have not seen Wayne for a few weeks but He is still studying his Arborist course as well as working full time so he is pretty busy.

sunny days and trips off the farm

4.10.2012

We have had two warm days and at last I have ditched my winter woollies and gloried in the sunshine. It won’t last, but we are probably starting the stage that I call “build up” weather, where it gets warmer each day until it gets really hot and then suddenly drops down to much lower temperatures. At least we can get things done outside again. Richard has rendered half the blue paper on the tool shed and I have been planting strawberries and celery. There is a lot of work that we need to do on the farm but we have found time for a few trips to the outside world

We had a day off last Friday when we were invited to the work place in Bayswater of the Eaton vehicle group who helped us clean the farm up last year. They had a works BBQ and showed us round their factory. I was totally impressed. I had expected storerooms and messy dirty mechanics but the reality was totally different. Everything was tidy and well-organised and huge gearboxes were assembled in very clean conditions. (The helpers must have been pretty shocked at the state of our shed!).

This week we had another day off because our friend, Alistair who we worked with in the northern territory came up for a brief visit. His eldest daughter has been horribly injured when she was knocked off her bike by a truck and run over. Amazingly she has survived so Alastair was spending time with her in hospital in Melbourne. He now lives in Darwin so we had not seen him for years, which meant we had a lot of catching up to do.

We drove him back into town so that we could talk as long as possible without eating  into the time he needed with his daughter. After we had dropped him off at the hospital we made use of the trip by stopping at a group of Asian antique shops and buying some high wooden stools for our kitchen worktable. The elderly Chinese couple in the shop did not speak English but we still managed to agree on a price and work the efpos machine by combined effort. We were all very happy at this outcome and shared the joy of success even without a common language.