Wednesday, 7 May 2008

Dereel

today's photos

Another day with little to show. Baked some bread, planned a shed for the horses, and did some inevitable work in the garden, including planting two of yesterday's plants (the Bottle Tree and the Bird of Paradise flower). We're still trying to work out where to put the Cycad. Somehow, despite its size, our garden is filling up.

Things that go jump in the night

In the garden we found some tell-tale tracks:

The kangaroos are back, and they've been chewing on our plants. For some reason they like Heartsease (the remains of which are shown above). They also like acacias, and they've had several attempts at a couple that are still barely surviving. Decided to put some old plastic drink bottles to good purpose:

Fresh sardines for dinner, which we did on the barbecue. That required a new cylinder of gas: our old one had run out a couple of days ago, and the spare I thought we had was nowhere to be seen. It's probably a sign of the culture that there's no petrol station between Napoleons and Rokewood, but the Dereel General Store (phone 5346 1391, a number we had difficulty finding) has barbecue gas.

Sardines taste good, but the preparation is rather intensive:

Thursday, 8 May 2008

Dereel

Another day with little to report. My email inbox is getting larger all the time, and this morning I had nearly 5000 messages in it. I had intended to get rid of 2000, but in the end didn't quite make it. It leaves me wondering, though, how long it would take somebody with a monstrosity like Microsoft “Outlook” to process 2000 messages, even just to delete them.

Finally chopped down the fruit tree to the north-east of the house, the one that was too cramped. It's a pity; the fruit must have tasted wonderful, and it's sad to have to chop down something of that size, but it really didn't fit. Now we have to decide what to do with the area.

Telstra has finally paid up in full! Or at least they tell me they have: it'll be credited to my phone bill. I had to write three letters to them, none of which were answered (this one just said “Custumor feedback such as this, whilst [sic] unfavourable, is appreciated”). The fact that it was the writer's own incompetence is, of course, not mentioned.