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.