Mid-week pick me up

Thank you for your reassuring and sympathetic comments on my post about the driveway. I’m feeling better about it, our friend doesn’t think it will get much worse, but he won’t be able to fix it until it dries out. So we’re just keeping an eye on it, and driving on the opposite side of the road! It’s our only access onto the block; we have a very strange shaped block of land, a big triangle with a narrow access (only 20m) at the wide end of the triangle. It just so happens that it’s also incredibly steep and goes over a creek! Anyway, we’re being positive and hoping the wet weather stops soon.

So I thought I’d share a few things that have made me happy this week.

This guy is seriously cute with curly black hair and his white tummy. The “Oreo” bull (really a belted Galloway) lives over the back fence, which is about 10m away from the hut. We have a series of long narrow windows that run down the hall and smaller windows on the back wall of the living room, as well as the breezeway French doors. So as I wander down the hut, I often lock eyes with this dude. He seems quite calm. Just happy to munch the grass and watch the crazy antics of our dogs!

More red in the hut. I just had to go back a buy a few more of these candleholders from Spotlight, ahem like seven more!

Finally, we got around to finishing off a project we started in June last year.

Do you remember the two unloved Blackwood chairs we found at the tip? Rob had sanded them back and oiled them last year. But with nowhere to put them, recovering them didn’t seem that urgent. When we moved to the hut, we popped them up in the loft and forgot them again. Last weekend we picked up some red fabric and Rob pulled out the many staples and replaced the horrible dirty blue hessian fabric with the new bright red. Now I’m thinking I’d like to recover the four pale blue chairs with red too….watch this space.

Hope your week is going well, mine has certainly picked up!

 

Monday's Menu, and taking things to heart

Hello, just a brief Monday's Menu...Stir fry rice, pork belly noodle soup, spaghetti ala puttanesca, rump steak with little garlic and rosemary roasted potatoes and salad, Spanakopitta, and a Friday night cheese platter.


We had a lot of rain at the hut on Saturday afternoon, it pelted down. Rob and I ran inside and felt quite smug in our nice warm hut. On Sunday morning we headed out for a mid-morning perimter. At the end we headed over to our drive way where it crosses the creek (with a culvert underneath) in the gully, and the side of the bank had slumped down by over a metre! Right next to the edge of the driveway. The clay had become a terrible goopy mess that is now bulging untidily. So for the rest of the weekend I obsessively checked the bank for further damage. I know far worse things could happen, that Rob and I are well, the hut is ok etc, but I was kind of hoping that days of stressing over the hut and future expenses were over. My heart has been aching ever since, and I barely slept a wink last night, just tossed and turned envisaging waking to find the driveway impassable! So at 6am this morning I had to go see, dragging Rob and the dogs with me, relieved at least that it hasn't gotten any worse.  Our good friend who built our driveway two years ago is heading down this afternoon for a diagnosis and to suggest a solution. Fingers crossed the repairs are not too extensive or expensive! I feel so silly for worrying, and that I'm going to turn into an obsessive worrier like my mother, and that really it's not a big deal compared to what others have to face (like after Cyclone Yasi or the Victorian bushfires) but still my weekend would have been much better without it! Any suggestions for reducing anxiety?!

A crazy running dog

I was wandering through my pictures and found this series of shots. We had headed down to the block to check on the progress of our driveway. Nigella thought it was great, she could leap off the piles of soil and turf and run across the drive at full speed. It was hilarious.