Belly dance camp is finally nearly here. There has been a lot of work involved - room allocations, workshop allocations, last minute cancellations and bookings, tshirts to be printed, stalls to arrange, food to decide on and soon to be cooked, performances to organise and my own students readying themselves for performing. Not to mention preparing my family and home for a weekend without me. But I'm so excited and really looking forward to a weekend full of dancing, girly fun and all that goes with it. I'm feeling extremely proud of our little camp, which is not only great for me, but which is sold out and all of the other 49 women coming are also excited.
On the home front, the rains have finally come and I'm loving listening to water run into the tanks and watching my garden get a good drink. We started to put up the fence around what Stu calls 'Tracey's paddock' just before it really started, so I had a post to hang my rain gauge on. It's been fun to see it begin to fill up.
Mother's Day saw us back out there fencing. It's not a huge fence, but the idea is that it will keep stray critters (and passers by) out of my vegie garden/orchard and allow the ducks to free range in there without having them wondering out of our yard and onto my verandah where they get into the wheat and poop everwhere. Working out there on Mother's Day was wonderful. I was covered in mud and aching from the work, but my kids came out to help and prepared morning tea for us too. It was just the kind of Mother's Day I like.
Speaking of the kids, a couple of weeks ago, we decided we needed a family hobby. Something we could do together, all enjoy, that was a little bit healthy, not too expensive and that was away from home. We decided on bush walking. That first day we visited Tower Hill, a local state park. We walked for about 2 hours and loved it. This weekend, we visited Mt Eccles national park. We didn't walk as long or far as we had somewhere to be, but we all enjoyed exploring the forest and chatted happily about plans to go camping there sometime soon. We now have a list of places we want to visit and something we all get excited about for weekends.
At home again and our thoughts seem to be always drawn back to power. After much delay (and finally a very grumpy email sent to the power company by me) we are finally set up to be paid for the excess power our solar panels produce and put into the grid. We received a bill with our first (tiny as it had only been a week) credit for power produced! It's very exciting, even though its now winter and so we'll be using much more than we produce.
The other thing happening that makes us keep thinking of power is that our heater died. Our home came with ceiling ducted electric, reverse cycle heating. It's never been great, but this year it decided to simply blow out cold air. We could get it fixed, but since we're not happy with the system, it hardly seems worth it. So now we're trying to decide what heater/s to invest in, and in the meantime, using room heaters and only heating the room we're using. We're restricted to using only electric heaters, and don't have a lot of wall space, so the decision is challenging, and we don't want to rush in. Any advice? Other than use warm clothes and hot water bottles... We're already doing that!
We went out for a friends birthday on Saturday night. It was a fun night with beautiful food. It was the first time I'd seen her in a while, so we had a birthday present exchange. I gave her a necklace I'd made, and she gave me a terrific cookbook - one I'd borrowed from the library before and had thought would work well in my kitchen. I'm making the pea and ham soup recipe from it tonight and have used the handy book marks to mark some more recipes to try.
Well, my morning break is over and I have a list of jobs to do, so I'll apologise for this iPod written blog post (ie. no formatting) and get on with my day. Hope your day is a happy one.
Good to see you - and great to hear it is life's good stuff keeping you from posting :) I love the bush walking idea...we are going to do something similar when the youngest is old enough to walk more than four metres without demanding to be picked up because "my legs are chopped off". lol
ReplyDeleteWe had the same problem with our heater/cooler system. Worked ok as a heater until it got cold then would de-ice inside and we'd freeze. We decided bottled gas was too expensive(we don't have access to mains gas), wood fire was too messy and as much as I love the idea, too much work. So we up-graded our split system. The new unit is graded to -15 so no more cold air:) Karen
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