Episode 9 Rain, rain, go away

On this podcast I whine about the weather, I admit it!  It's been revolting for a week now - floods and gales etc.  I'm pretty sure you're allowed to whinge after your chicken food shed door got ripped off, right?

This is taken out the back door in a relative break in the weather.

And my darling daughter took this one of me, clearing out the flooding drain.  Again.

I give a rundown on my Welcome Swallow quilt.  It's under the needle finally.  In this pic I'm quilting and appliqueing at the same time....'cause I can.

I also talk about mono printing - taking a single print off a surface, in this case a gelli plate - onto fabric.  I'm going to be doing a demonstration of it at our quilting club's regional day.  This is a picture of some mono printing on paper that I did with the kids.   It's been a little while, maybe I should do some more with them this holidays.  We really need some more rainy day activities!

Everything has it's positives and negatives.

Today we are inside hiding from the atrocious weather - rain and wind, which is always a fun combination when you combine it with five children.  Yes, I said five!

My sister in law and her three girls have moved up here from Hamilton for this school term (3 months or so). They want to spend time with my father in law, who is not well.  So they are living in our rental house, which is next door to the parents in law and so far the kids have settled into school well and are having lots of fun playing with their cousins.

But my SIL has to go back to Hamilton now and again for work and this week coming up is one of those now and agains.  Consequently I have five kids today and four for the rest of the week (one will be heading off to stay with the parents in law as we can't fit five kids in the car).


And then tomorrow is my little girls first full day of school!  My husband and I keep marvelling at how fast time has flown, how big she is now, how easy it will be with both kids heading off in the same direction on the same day etc etc.


So I haven't had much time to quilt today, but the electronic baby sitter has just been switched on (DVD player) and so I thought I'd squeeze in this post with a photo of a couple of wall hangings I'm making.  These are made with the positive/negative applique method and are patterns I've designed myself.  


Now I must go and start on the four school lunches for tomorrow!

Summer

It's meant to rain today.  It's not, yet, but I thought I'd show some pictures that show the beautiful spell of summer weather we've been having so far.  My thoughts go to those in Australia dealing with floods at the moment.

After the Storm

And as suddenly as Wilma arrived, she has gone.  This morning is bright and clear and still.  The water is reduced from torrents to trickles.  I plugged in the freezer and she beeped cheerily at me and started up.  Phew.

I would have been really upset to lose a freezer full of food.  On top it has six homegrown roosters that we harvested the other day.  It has our rabbits, chicken stock, homegrown beef, wild pork, duck, homegrown veges......it's our frozen store cupboard that we could live out of for weeks. 

When we bought a big chest freezer we made the decision to spend a little extra and get a Vestfrost and we've never regretted it.  You can see how thick the insulation on it is, it makes it very economical to run.  It has a viewable thermostat and usually it runs at -18 degrees Celsius, this morning when I plugged it back in, it was sitting at -12.  Still absolutely solid frozen even after at least 15 hours with no power. 

I was contemplating a morning of squeezing, rearranging and giving away.  Now I'm breathing a sigh of relief and am grateful that I don't have to.  Instead, we will be working out a plan to clear behind our house.  With having our sewerage system installed there, using it as a storage area for miscellaneous junk and letting it get overgrown, we almost lost a valuable appliance and the food stored within.  It's time to get prepared for next time.

Cheese making with Wilma

So a very good friend of mine initiated me into the secret society of cheesemakers today.  And it really wasn't all that hard.  But you have to have patience.  The recipe* reads something like:  heat your milk to 37 degrees, add the culture, wait 30 mins, add rennet, wait an hour and a half, stirring three times, pack curds into moulds, leave overnight.....so that's the stage I went home!  Pip is draining the curds overnight and then putting it in a brine solution tomorrow.  Then magically, we will have feta!

It was the perfect day for making cheese - raining.  The tropical low that is coming down has not been downgraded, she is still officially Cyclone Wilma.  It was ominously still this morning when I went for a walk and the clouds were the most amazing crimson.

It started to rain about ten this morning and it's gradually got heavier and heavier until it was hosing when I got home with the kids in tow.  Only to find a torrent of water pouring under our house from a blocked drain behind, making a large puddle under the freezer that we have in the last open bay of our shed.  The electrical plug was under water and the freezer had shut off. 

I set to work and my boy and I cleared as much as we could,  then hubby arrived home and got stuck in too.  We managed to redirect the flow and clear the ditch but whether the freezer will be ok or not, well, we'll have to wait until the plug dries out. 

The photo above is taken hanging out a bedroom window.  You can see the water pouring off the overflowing water tank and the stream flowing along the ground is the full drain (which usually doesn't hold any water at all) that was previously mostly flowing under the house!

*I don't have a copy of the recipe so please don't take that as a full and complete set of instructions, you may just be a tad disappointed.

Drill, hammer, bang...

Look what's been happening at our place! 

We are so excited to see it finally happening.  Back up more than a year ago and you would have found us clearing and flattening the shed site, using the topsoil to create a wonderful vege garden, and securing a contract with a shed building company to build us a shed and a verandah.

And now our plans are finally happening.  After a few back and forths with the council, a bankrupt shed building company and more than a year of waiting.

I'll admit to having a celebratory glass of wine tonight.

But we've just heard about the gnarly tropical low (downgraded from a cyclone) coming through tomorrow and over the weekend.  Here's hoping it doesn't pick up the corrugated iron sheets and fling them around!

Things I've been doing

Spending hot afternoons in our cool bush gulley with various family members who've been visiting.

Admiring my nine fluffy yellow ducklings. And laughing at how they ALL want to swim in the old frying pan filled with water at once.

Worrying about Griselda's growing lump. It looks yucky, but she seems happy. My brother (who happens to be a HUMAN doctor) thinks it might be a basal cell carcinoma. I guess we'll just continue to give her a happy life - and I might look around for a vet who knows something about chooks.

Being teased by the weather Gods. Looks threatening, but do you think it'll rain properly? Nope. A drizzle here, a few drops there, then I know my hopes will be dashed again. Oh well, I'll just go cool off in the bush again.

Impending

I've written before about how I love watching the weather roll in. We have such a big sky here I can see for miles. These are pictures from my bedroom window and my lounge window this morning.

It looked threatening and majestic but all it turned into was a few spots of rain. We managed to go for our walk. The kids and I take the dogs (and sometimes the neighbours dogs too) down the road to the cattle yards where they (the kids) play on the fences, gates and ramps. Just like a regular playground but without the bright colours and the swings!

Tonight I'm working a twelve hour shift, from 7 pm to 7 am. I haven't worked a twelve hour for a long time so I'm hoping I don't flake. With any luck the place will be empty and I can get lots of sewing done, prepare for my antenatal classes this weekend and maybe even fit in a snooze. Or I hope it will be really busy with a birth or two so I don't even notice the time passing.