Category: Uncategorized

Well today the residents of Norwich House were pretty boring and unbloggable. Sure – stuff happened, but nothing remotely worth noting here.

So I decided to share a quick post about the day we took Pip for a walk at Black River Beach. (Read earlier post here if you missed the story on Black River Beach)

We chose Black River because in the cooler months, hardly anyone is on the beach, so Pip could romp about in the sand and not freak out at beach-goers and their dogs.

Its a short walk up through the (empty) camping sites as they close the roads further back during the off season

Its always such a nice view to come up over the path and small dunes to see the beach and sea

First, a reassuring pat from Jeff

And probably a nervous wee in the worlds biggest kitty litter tray

It was really great how Pip was just happy to follow us about on the beach.

Pip is pretty good at posing for me – got him used to the camera right from a kitten!

Jeff kept pointing things out to Pip. He would go over and investigate – but not sure if he was truly impressed with the shells or not! 🙂

Pip gets a fair bit of freedom on his long lead, and he was happy to stay walking along with us – but we are not confident enough to let him loose.

Cat-on-the-shoulder-selfie. This is a lot more awkward than you might think!

By about this stage Pip was making his feelings clear, that it was time to head home – by heading home!!

Now that we are in winter, we should pick a nice sunny day to take Pip on another outing!

I tell you one thing… he sure slept well that night!

Have a wonderful day everyone

Cheers

Ok – we weren’t exactly dancing on the roof… we were being responsible adults and attempting to fix some leaks.

It stopped raining so Jeff asked for my help to do the job. (I was not really that helpful. I took photos, cleaned the top of the skylight and helped wrangle the ladder!)

Really – this skylight is old and whoever put it in was possibly dodgy. I suspect come next summer it would be smart to get a proper skylight person in to remove it completely and put it all back together with new parts. We don’t know where the leaks exactly are – the whole thing looks suspect!

While Jeff was having words (a few naughty ones) with the filler, I went and took some photos of the yard from the roof – never having brought the camera up there before it was nice to have a different view.

I saw this view coming across and thought we should hurry things up!

Despite that dark bottom it didn’t really rain much this afternoon.

Different story right now! Its becoming quite heavy out there. I must go stare at the skylight and see if any of the 20 spots ‘we’ calked actually was the right one!!

I just had a peek – so far, so good…

The two holes circled were the only obvious thing I could see that may have caused the upstairs leak. they have been calked so fingers crossed it was something that simple!

(Yeah, yeah… I know. Nothing is EVER that simple!! 🙂 )

We started having a good look at the yard and ruined path to see what we could do… we even started doing ‘stuff’ (for another day), but later in the afternoon I got onto putting together a terrarium.

One of my lovely sisters, Michelle, had given me a beautiful hanging glass teardrop – but I hadn’t done anything with it. Another friend tagged me in a post on facebook that had a fabulous beach scene terrarium, so I got a bit inspired

(I would like to add I have no clue about what to do or rules or anything about terrariums)

Since we are always collecting beach treasures, it wasn’t hard to get a bunch of possible decorations together for this project

I got a little of my compost soil and spooned it in on top of the sand base at the back – something for the moss to hopefully grow into

Filling this sea urchin shell with dirt took ages! I used a chopstick to poke the roots of the succulent in

I tried a few different items in the teardrop, but settled on a very simple arrangement. A bit disappointing as I have so much stuff to use! Perhaps if I don’t kill this one, I can make more!

Hopefully I will get some nicer photos tomorrow when the light is a wee bit better!

I have hung it in the kitchen where it looks pretty nice!

Enjoy the upcoming weekend everyone! Next week back to my regularly scheduled “Fridays Footprints” & “Ruby Tuesday”

Cheers

ps – occasional extras via my Facebook Page

 

 

My cousin Jeff (want the family breakdown?? He is the step-grandson of my mothers second cousin. lol… I just call everyone ‘cousin’ Much less of a headache) arrived this morning with his part of the barter deal we made.

I mentioned a few posts back how I helped paint his house in exchange for firewood!

And now I have a job to do… however this lot is a bit green so a few weeks with the wind whistling through the pile will do it good!

Jeff (My Jeff this time.. husband Jeff) got the ball rolling with cleaning up today by burning off all our… well… ‘burnables’

It was pretty windy, and I was watching him go through matches trying to light the fire in our barrel… then I decided to step in before he had a major tanty with a scoop of coals from the indoor fire

Whoof! She caught fire very nicely

We got the clean up bug and decided to sort out the BBQ area which was in a disgraceful state

Again – its easy to keep putting ‘things’ in a spot that is not used, and before you know it, its embarrassingly hideous!

Jeff got all my scrappy garden stakes and cut the rotting ends where necessary to a new point and bundled them up for next season.

We decided to go for a tip run. We don’t get garbage collected here, but we get tickets to use the tip free when we pay our rates. We find we need to go once every three or four months. We burn burnables, compost a lot, scraps to the chickens and free recycling of all bottles, glass & plastic. So it does take a little time to fill the two bins.

And check this out!

I brought together my extensive pot collection! Most of these were left behind by the previous owners and there are a lot more around the property!! They will come in handy when I get onto my upcoming garden ideas!

We even moved our bare-breasted goddess (another left behind item) from hiding in the corner of the BBQ area to under the small Acacia Cognata. She looks happy there.

So totally feel like we achieved something today.

Sadly, tomorrow is a market day and the weather is feral. Right now its howling out there with wind and rain. Forecast says the same all day tomorrow.

Looks like I will be finding indoor activities to keep myself amused!

Hope your weekend isn’t as soggy as mine (unless you needed the rain of course!)

Cheers

Unfortunately for me, that spot wasn’t in the garden.

It was the garage.

My life for the foreseeable future is over.

I don’t even have photos!

The main aim was to hang the Kayaks out of the way for winter.

Hang on… let me go get photo…

(It’s quite cold outside right now!! – about 4C or 39F)

Aaaanyway… why am I being a complete drama queen about my life being over? Because it’s going to take forever to sort my stuff – you know the boxes you cart from house to house that you don’t even open but filled with stuff you can’t possibly part with??

yeah, that’s me.

So I started trying to be ruthless. It takes a long time. You have to read all the bad poetry you wrote as a teenager (someone get me a bucket please), read all the cards you kept from long lost rellies, and smile at all the nic-nacs that were given to you by various friends and interrupt your husband a million times so he can “Check out this photo!!!” (His smile and look of interest was getting a bit fixed by late afternoon – no sympathy – he started it!)

Oooooo – I also found my only known last will and testament!! Its Fabulous! I leave my money (described as my ‘fortune’) to my sisters if they can decipher a cryptic message, I leave my soft toys to a school-friends first born (who will be so grateful as she is quite grown up now) and another extremely lucky friend is to inherit my extensive matchbox collection (which I found carefully packed in another of the boxes). I also left my diary to ‘Shaun’ the poor kid I had a relentless crush on throughout school. Mind you – the fact that every diary I ever owned had about a weeks worth of writing before I got distracted and abandoned the project, would have made it a short read for him.

A friend dropped in for a cuppa, which was awesome – rescued me from the agony for a while which was nice.

But I will have to get back in there tomorrow and make the tough decisions (like what to do with the boxes and buckets of collected rocks for instance) so Jeff can have his shed back.

SO – I will leave you with a series of photos I took yesterday of the waves swirling over the rocks at Fossil Bluff last night. (Some of which appeared on my facebook page)

I’ll return with an exciting list of the weird and wonderful things I find and keep in boxes tomorrow.

Cheers

 

Hello – Just an extra post for those people interested in dabbling in photography.

I have run several “Photo Challenges” via facebook and am just starting to gather a new group together for an official start at the end of June.

You don’t have to be an expert with a fancy camera. We have a variety of members – ranging from kids to grandparents, raw beginners through serious photographers, iphones through Nikons.

It’s meant to be a bit of fun – and even a learning experience.

Basically I set ten different subjects – one for each day of the challenge – and participants interpret the subject in their own way, take their photo, then upload it to the challenge page album.

We get some amazing photos – fun photos & wildly different photos considering that people are following one subject!

There is voting by all members in each subject and an overall prize for the winner (altho previous winners cannot take the prize more than once, so it goes to the highest points of a person that hasn’t been sent a prize previously)(Again – don’t get over excited about the prize – consists of something knitted and some things cooked 🙂 )

The list will always include a colour – although I am running out of primary colours! lol

Some subjects are fairly straight forward

And some subjects require a bit more effort

Other subjects require you to get creative

You don’t have to stick to the conventional when interpreting the subject

And if you can inject a bit of humour, all the better:

Anyway – if anyone is interested in joining in, let me know in the comments section & I will send you an email with details and link. (You will be required to have a facebook account as its run via facebook)

Cheers!

 

 

 

So – because it wasn’t actually raining today, we drove up to Penguin to see if we could find another rock beach where we could look for more examples of jasper.

We didn’t quite find what we were looking for, but we stopped by this other little beach to see what we could fossick for.

Well, Jeff found this weird stuff

Well, I got thoroughly over-excited and thought it could possibly be ambergris!  Have you ever heard of it? Basically its whale vomit or whale poo. Why exciting?? Well.. its worth about $20 per gram – the tip-top fancy perfume people use it in their processing! Not kidding.

Well… I had my collecting bags so I popped a couple in bags to bring home to research. And Holy Cats did it stink!!

The one major snag – besides the pong – is that ambergris is not allowed to be traded in Australia because we have a law that prohibits the sale of products from endangered species. And since ambergris is from sperm whales, well… its a blanket no-no. (But from what I have read, no-one has been willing to prosecute for someone picking up random whale sick)

Anyway, the trip home was epic. Jeff was all for taking a photo and leaving it at that, where as I had hatched 10 wild schemes for selling my ambergris all before we hit the front door. The car stank. It was cold, we had all windows down AND the heater going flat out! Jeff was grouchy and I was trying to explain about paying mortgages and clandestine meetings on beaches involving the swapping of whale vomit for a duffle bag stuffed with cash. (we are watching a kind of spy/espionage series at the moment and it may be rubbing off)

Sadly, even though what we found looked so much like a lot of images online, it didn’t pass the ‘hot needle’ test, and a nice fellow from New Zealand emailed me to tell me it was a kind of stinky (yeah I knew that bit) sponge.  He also asked “Are you in Tasmania by any chance?” 😀 Clearly he has had people message him before all hopeful!!

Now I have to dispose of my ‘samples’ I thought it might make good compost, but the look on Jeff’s face when suggested means I will have to find a different place for it.

Far Far Away…

Cheers!

This smiley random man knocked on the door this morning asking if it was too cheeky to see if I had any sweet chilli sauce for sale!!  He had bought some at one of my market stalls a while back, had run out and apparently once tasted, going back to store bought just wasn’t an option!

By law a street address is required on labels, so he knew where to drop in. The great thing was he bought FOUR bottles! I just made 20 bucks and didn’t even break a sweat!

(recipe here if you want to have a go at this)

I figured if he was cheeky enough to come directly to the manufacturer, I could be cheeky enough to get him to pose for a photo! 😀

That started us off on quite a chat as he was interested in photography and travel too!

The new neighbour offered Jeff $50 to mow his paddock! I tell you – the Millar’s are rolling in it today! 🙂

The weather continues its soggy behaviour. I am still collecting water (old habits die hard) and often use the barrels that are around the yard to hand water potted plants. Saves a bit of electricity as the pump kicks in when the taps are turned on, plus I like hand watering.

My cider vinegar experiment seems to be going along well…

I got hit with the apply smell as soon as I opened the cupboard door! It also frothed up nicely when I stirred it!

I figured I had better try that apple cake recipe myself and see how easy/hard it was.

Adding the bicarb soda into the cooked apples to watch it ‘frizzle’ was pretty excellent!

One thing that caught my eye about Ruby’s cakes, was her use of butter paper as a tin liner. I am a massive fan of baking paper, because I haven’t got the hang of greasing a tin well enough to get a cake out in one go.  But it isn’t that cheap. I have been saving my butter papers to make use of in cooking. I don’t really think I will save a squillion dollars, but every little bit helps, and I love reusing things that normally get thrown in the bin with no second thoughts.

That was todays success!! Turned out perfect!

And below was todays failure

I have spared you the image of the gaping cut and blood. My other finger only just healed and I tried to cut this one off!! Damn that knife was sharp! I was cutting apples for the dehydrator. One slipped and I went to catch it with my knife in hand… ok – really I don’t know how I did it, but my live-in nurse patched me back up with a lot of eye rolling and a promise to buy me a tube of crazy glue.

By late in the afternoon after finishing up in the kitchen (I also did a spag-bol for dinner using one of those containers of tomato, garlic etc packs I made a while back) and feeding more mash to the spoiled chickens and fussing about with this and that, it was really nice to sit down to a hot chocolate and a slice (or three) of that Chocolate Apple Cake!

Here’s hoping for a break in the weather tomorrow so we can enjoy getting outdoors properly for a while!

Cheers

PS there is a really cool little “Visit Tasmania” tourist video I put on my facebook page, just in case you want to get all inspired to visit. 🙂

 

 

 

 

For the first time since winter last year, the tanks are overflowing! The rain gauge has refilled and it doesn’t look like stopping anytime soon.

My next post may be about how to build an ark… altho my ark only needs to fit two people, one cat, 12 chickens and 2,000 books. (Maybe a guest room so I can pick up the neighbours on the way past – hey Cindy?? 😀 )

No really – despite the gloom I am delighted we are finally getting some good ground soaking rain.

It is also Lisa-soaking

I was wearing a full length raincoat too! I had to get up the ladder and muck out the water tank sieve that had filled with leaves, sticks & possums.

(ok – I was kidding about the possums)

Seems like the only chooks that have any sense are the three younger new chickens. They stayed firmly in the coop all day, and were nice and fluffy dry. The rest were a pathetic bedraggled lot

The rain has been blowing in too… so pretty much everything on the back veranda is saturated. Only the wood tucked in the very back corner seems reasonably dry (lucky)

Pip’s attitude to the deafening rain today was simple. Enter sleeping bag & Do Not Leave.

Apart from housework (blah) I did get around to sorting and packaging up a lot of the seeds I have been collecting.

I saved three cobs of corn, but I have no idea if they were hybrids or not (threw away original seed packet) plus I have never collected corn seeds before. Will be interesting to see if they sprout

I have not the patience or time to separate the teeny tiny basil seeds, so just took the pods off the stalks and bagged them up. The smell was divine!

Chilli

A mountain of rainbow chard

The cos lettuce seed still needs a bit of drying out

I kept a sunflower – high hopes for a big pretty plot somewhere next season

Remember the tomato laterals I started? Looks like we have two successes and one fatality.

Mind you… the self seeded tomatoes that popped up at Ruby’s that she gave me weeks and weeks ago are going along really nicely – despite the fact I haven’t bothered taking them out of their ice cream container yet!

Can I call that hydroponics??

I was out of potatoes, so I nicked over to the garage and grabbed a new box! We had such a good potato harvest this season. I’ll have to knock off a few sprouts, but they all look really good. (I think there are 4 more boxes to go!!)

For about 10 minutes, just before the sun went down, we got a little colour in the sky.

Enjoy

Cheers

PS Occasional extras via my Facebook Page

The day started sadly with a death in the family. Poor little Crook Chook went to chicken heaven last night. We palliated her the best we could – She got lots of cuddles yesterday and a cat box inside where it was warm.

Even though we love our chickens, taking a chook down to get a $70 vet bill, where it is unlikely to make a difference anyway, is just not a sensible option. Sometimes we nurse them back to health, and other times we fail.

I didn’t dig her plot today, so she is lying in state (in cat box) waiting for her burial tomorrow (Plus I had to check with Jeff to make sure that I wouldn’t be digging up previous chickens to bury this one!)

(and yes I cried!)

I was pretty boring today (not bored – just not doing anything really interesting!)

It really was a day that was full of gloom. It never really got properly daylight in my opinion.

Finally I figured I should toss myself outside and go for that walk. I took the camera in the hope something might cross my path that was interesting.

The river was at a higher tide level this time, which is a lot more aesthetically pleasing.

I came across this bunch of funny cows, whose paddock flanks one side of the path as I start out. They ran away as I got closer, then in true stickybeak-cow style, they started sneaking up on me! I spent a hilarious 10 minutes making them chase me up the paddock – stopping suddenly to turn and look at them so they would stop in their tracks, only to start following me again! (I was hard up for entertainment today) 🙂

Following is the sample of some of the trees that came down in the storm the other day and a sound reason to not go walking when its windy! Wouldn’t be much fun getting clobbered by one of these

I heard several pademelons crashing through the bush – but only got one dodgy photo for you

I didn’t get so much as rained on as constantly sprinkled on today.

Often when walking this course, you see random items of clothing propped up in trees & on stumps. Kind citizens finding these objects display them better in the hopes the owners spot them and claim them.

Today before finding the little beanie, I also saw a child’s sock. Seems like some kid was slowly shedding clothes on the way around!

I came home and went to give the girls another feed and was missing three… found that the three youngsters put themselves to bed early! I know a few mothers that would wish their kids would do this!! 🙂

At least they have gotten the hang of the new coop and roost, so we don’t have to go relocating chickens in the dark anymore. They learn quickly!

And lastly – getting the refresher on my limited crochet skills from Margie has been great – I am zooming around my rug and can now cover both legs!!

I hope what is left of your weekends is great

Cheers

It was an undecided day, weather wise. We got a little rain overnight, and the day started a bit gloomy. By the time early afternoon arrived the day could have gone either way, so Mana and I decided to risk a potential downpour and go for a walk up Sisters Beach.

Darn good choice.

We met about 6 people and three dogs.

Other than that, we pretty much had the beach to ourselves!!

As you walk up the beach, you find interesting rock formations/colours and today a bit more seaweed. (Mana must have been relieved I didn’t have collecting bags with me!)

Mana soaking up the sun & surf

I like where the scrubby grass meets the sand. All this area is Rocky Cape National Park

We came across this great little display of beach treasures. Someone has had a wonderful time putting this together.

Always fun for me to click away with the camera

A closer look at seaweed

I am wondering if I got a bit sunburnt today – while it wasn’t hot, walking into the sun was a bit intense!

We did little else today – sure was a wonderful way to relax and recharge our energy levels!

I hope your day was super too!

Cheers