The sad situation season

Al.s youngest

10..8.19

This is the third time I have wiped this page and started to rewrite it.  Basically, winter has now arrived with the side effects of mud, flu and misery.   My friend Merrie is in the process of selling up and moving north to Queensland. At this time of year, the climate above Brisbane seems very tempting.  Indi has just got home from visiting a friend in Darwin and I think she went a bit too North.  Her baby got sick with the humidity and they had a very sleepless time.

A quick look at the news here today depicts most of Australia as one big disaster area. The football in Canberra was won by the snow, in SA two truck drivers collided and died in a dust storm, NSW has floods, drought and wind taking rooves off and a poor lady was killed locally when a gum tree fell on her car.  We are relatively well off. The house is warm, the mud is outside, and we have not caught the flu off Bo’s kids yet!

There are now 14 lambs. The bottle reared pair are doing well in the shed and the rest are growing despite the conditions. We are lucky that we still get the spent grain from the brewery. It compensates the sheep for the poorness of the grazing. It is still a few weeks until the goats start to kid and then the real work begins. At least there is enough rain so make watering the garden unnecessary, but I am having another go at the asparagus.  My plants mostly died when I tried to move them a couple of years ago. The problem is that the beds get more and more weedy and cannot be dug over and replenished properly with out disturbing the roots. This time I have planted my corns in very large pots.

Edd is now teaching building at the high school every Wednesday.  They could not find anyone else to do this term with the right teaching qualification who new anything about building.  A lot of the course is done on computers but hands on work with tools us also required. Edd comes home exhausted having had to stretch his skills in every direction.  My job is to take over all the farm work, so I do not get a let out either.

Edd did the farm work yesterday because I baby sat Al’s youngest while he visited a client.  The weather was wet and cold so I (and a lot of others) holed up in the library at Eltham for the morning. It was an excellent place to be. It was clean, warm, had toilets with baby changing tables, and an endless supply of books, we were even treated to a preschool style entertainment, so the time passed with no stress for anyone.  I do think that good public spaces are what is needed now to help the population cope in a distressed climate. Shopping malls provide a refuge from the heat in the hot times and if they have libraries, coffee shops and play spaces for kids lots of people can use them rather than try to keep individual homes at a liveable temperature. 

It would also be cost effective to set them up as disaster refuges. For times of fire and flood.