August Update...Back With My Pics....All Good!

Early August  2019...

Well, that was a bit of a shock!

Went down the paddock to pick some plums, thinking one of the 4 trees would probably have enough plums for the 6th bucket of plums, thus far, about to be cooked up.

I sat under one hanging branch and picked...and the bucket was full! What the...?

There are another 10 or more branches left on just that one tree...and another possible 3 buckets left on the branch I picked from.

Help, I'm drowning in plums...

Amazing!
Another big pot of plums to cook tomorrow.
Today I plucked a big container of Elderberries, cooked them and will bottle the juice as juice for winter. Apparently it is very high in good things!

Picked another bucket of tomatoes. Every day now I'm gathering a bucket of tomatoes.

So I keep a few out to eat fresh, and just rinse the rest and cut them in half and pop into the boiler with no water and cover and slowly bring to the boil, turn off the heat and cool, then pop into the freezer in jars...to be used however I need later on.

So, today, Sunday, I finally completed laying the bricks for the last bit of garden path...and it looks great, I think.

Did the mowing thru the week, in between rainy moments...a bit of a gooey mess, but at least it's all done.

Will have to get a whipper snipper for next year to keep the edges neat. There is a concrete mini wall around the paddock, about a foot high and then the wire mesh etc goes up from there. It looks so nice when all the weeds around it, are cut back.

Hoping the man to build the shed comes this week and starts the frame, now the cement has cured.

I need all the extra furniture out ASAP, as I need to complete the front room this month.

Last week, I took my beautiful French cream, terrylene curtains I had in the first house I built in OZ in 1979, into the seamstress to hem the side edges. It was originally for a 10 foot, (3 metres) long window, so I cut it into 3 pieces and have the perfect beautiful curtains for all three, 1 metre long windows in the front room.

She also is hemming and lining the family room curtains, red gingham, and a few other odds and ends for me, so am finally getting stuff out of the cupboards and boxes and on the windows etc where it all belongs.

One thing I just realised...again...is that when part of a building is completed and starts to be pretty habitable, it is no longer a construction zone, it becomes a blessed maintenance zone!

Dohhhh, more work!

So, now, on top of the fruit and veggies everywhere here right now to preserve for later on, veggie and flower gardens to care for, painting, adjusting stuff, shifting furniture etc, mowing to do, I have to do blessed house work too! Gotta get me a hubby!

Now I know why I moved so much in the past. This cleaning every day, stuff, is not exciting work...

Building, creating, planning is fantastically exciting to me...but over and over same 'ole, same 'ole, is not my thing. I'm definitely a pioneer, not a settler. I like to build, create and make things nice for others to settle into.

Anyways, I am very grateful to be able to do all this over here. I still have the cottage to complete in Oct-Nov and then later next year start the big room...

After the big room is completed, I'd like to get something going down the end paddock.
Was going to build a place with round corners...but when I went back to my big old farm house in OZ last year, the Munster House as everyone called it, I was once again charmed by its grace, character and fabulous lines...more sort of Englishy, than the one I intended eventually building here.

But plenty of time yet to decide what will suit best when everything is neat and tidy.
 
Will have to find a cleaning lady a few hours a week soon. It takes too much space in my mind to be thinking of damp mopping under the beds every day, keeping the windows clean, dusting, yada yada yada and so on! Not complaining, just sayin'...

The weather has been pretty comfy for me, for summer over here this year. The house has only reached 26C inside 2 times this year, the rest of the time it has been around 23 to 24 C inside...Finally learning how to manage this type of mud brick building in the heat.

It's lovely at the moment, crickets...or cicadas... chirping away out there, a frog in the down pipe croaking every now and then, a cool evening breeze wafting in through the open, screened windows...the fridge quietly humming away in the corner bulging with it's load of frozen goodies...cat and kitten, loudly purring away on the verandah and dog down the paddock barking at her 8.30 pm doggy visitors as they are taken for an evening walk with their dog walkers...while I chomp on a mouth full of local home grown walnuts...It doesn't get much better than this!

My very arty sister sent another awesome DVD to me which I received yesterday. It has lovely pics and stories of the pups and kitten from birth til' they all went to homes. I really miss the little critters. They were so loving, so gentle, I loved them...but not to keep. They wrecked most of my flower gardens, 3 out of 4 ...Not happy Jan, but I did enjoy the puppies so much.

Mother cat and kitten are so funny...all the time stretching and running up poles and trees, the clothes line posts...anything that goes up, they are up it.

Dog plays with kitten a lot too. They are good mates.

OK...will try and load some pics from the past week from the phone now and get this blog out tonight if possible.

Cute new haybale art at the end of my street. Theme...garden bugs,pets and bees!

Lady Bug...

A dog, I think!

A cat?

Looks like a rooster?

Freedo the Frog, called Jake

I wonder if it is a gopher?

Booking her in for desexing this week!

Finally some sort of order...

I have a family of 5 people coming for the weekend of 18th August for 2 nights...They came.

The room comfortably slept 5 people

The lovely pink roses are not as big as they were 2 years ago...

Neighbours gave me zucchini, squash, peppers and a huge bucket of carrots...and a bucket of tomatoes... to add to my own overflowing containers of tomatoes!

More tomatoes...

Lovely yellow plums growing on the footpaths in Tizafured...

Blackberries and crab apples, picked from the footpaths on my morning jog...

Just toooo delicious...I love the colour.

So many plums this year...This big pot only filled one of the white dishes above.

Breakie coming up!...Fresh farm eggs and tomatoes...Just cook toms, with no oil or water, with lid on, until they come to the boil, turn off electricity add the eggs and cover for a minute or so and cook till soft.

More pickings next day.

Zucchini spaghetti. Can eat it raw in salads, or heated in whatever you are cooking. Do not cook it...only add at the end of cooking and heat through only.

Elderberries...

After pulling them off the stems and ready to cook...in a litre of water only. Makes good elixir.

Cottage cheese, flaxseed oil and some plum spread to make it look pretty... Very good for cholesterol balancing, I believe.

Wow, that was 6 weeks ago, that I started this blog!

Could not get the pics to upload, but a workaway girl from USA came to my rescue near the middle  of August and now all is good to go!
She was here for 10 days and sorted out the cloud pic storage thing for me, so after a bit of fooling around just now, I have found how to locate ALL the pics!
Paulie will be so proud of me!

Then I had 2 awesome young ones from England come for just under a month and we achieved a lot in that time from the last week in August to 18th of September

They did a lot of fiddly jobs and finally attacked the blessed windows in that few weeks too, and have now gone back to uni and a job in England...and I really miss them. So funny, listening to them chatter...in pommie talk!!! At least I could understand that foreign language...hehehe

More on the kids next blog.

Anyways, this will be all for now, so, catch you all a lot sooner next time!

Cheers,

M
xxx
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The Reno Train Keeps Moving...

Back again...

A lot going on this week here...

I can't believe how a bit of a yard clean up changes things so much...not just the look, but emotionally.
Move a few bricks and old roof tiles...BAM...it feels like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders.

It feels soooo goood to have all the old stuff gone...well, almost. Only a few barrow loads of  mud bricks to move down the end of the paddock. Can't wait.

The back of the shed floor concreting will be finished tomorrow and then the rendering goes on the back wall...then the roof goes on.  Not sure if I'll do a door in the wall first or just leave it and finish off the little store room and do the door next year or the year after.

Actually, it is tomorrow now and the cement guy has arrived and decided it would be better to render the walls first...then complete the floor last, as he would have to walk on the wet floor if he completed the floor first!

Logical...but I couldn't get the other guy to do that when he started the floor last week!

Anyways...it looks like I'll have this guy for a few days, if he doesn't get called away to his permanent job.

If it looks like rain, he doesn't get called in...but it is sunny now, so whooppee... I am the lucky one!

The last...and cuddliest, puppy to go. He went the next day to a good home, thankfully. They heard me clicking the camera and woke up...

All this spare timber will go under the new shed roof...

Almost cleaned up the yard...Moved all the old tiles this morning, moved the rest of the stuff, so only the mud bricks remain! Yeahhhhy. The mud bricks will be taken down the paddock and broken up, to level out the hollows down there. Then all the messy things that have to happen out side now, will just be the rendering and painting of the cottage exterior.

More stuff to go around the back for storage...

More stuff to go around the back of the shed...This is the new pergola which will go up after the tomatoes are finished...about Oct...ish.

The cement going down for the back of the shed floor for a new little handy, pretty sheltered, store room. When he finishes the floor, he'll render the back wall.

More of Andy's gear I bought...Just have to get it moved to the right places now!

Stork babies getting stronger by the day...

First tomato of the season...

Check out the beach drink name... hahaha at the local little new cafe...

The last nest down the road blew off the top of the pole last month. The mayor had a new metal base erected and mother stork came back and started building a new nest. They took her babies to a refuge.

Eniko and Mum, Maria...on her birthday...

All happy and chatting away...

Eniko has muscular dystrophy...

Mum and Dad and a rocket candle...planted in an apple...I forgot a cake!!!

So cute...

So happy she enjoyed the day...

She has the best smile ever!

This is what happens when you clink your glasses too hard!!!

Only one thing to do when this happens...bottoms up people!

Strange flowers in town...

A lovely park on the way around to Eniko's house.

A funny thing happened on the way home in the bus a few weeks ago...

I was really tired, as 4 months of getting up 2 or 3 times a night to the pups and kitten, really knocked me around. I usually sleep right through from about 10pm...ish to around 5.30 to 6am ish, so having one night of interupted sleep is really bad for me...but 4 months, night after night, I was a wreck.

Anyways, I'd been to town shopping for groceries and caught the 4pm bus home. I had my usual big back pack on, laden with groceries and I could't even be bothered taking it off when I sat down in the bus, I was soooo tired.

Next thing I know, the bus driver and a lady were shaking me awake...apparently I had fallen asleep...
It was pouring with rain, so I guessed the driver had stopped outside my house to save me walking back in the rain from the bus stop... so I got out and off they went. It took a second or two to realize I was not outside my place...or any place I recognised for that matter!

It turned out I had over shot my stop by a klm or so when someone on the bus must have realised I was not a regular on that part of the ride. ..and I ended up wayyy out of my village, in the pouring rain. Too funny...once I woke right up, that was!!!

Anyways, I had an Aldi bag from OZ in my bag and used that as a rain hat and wandered home in the rain.
I couldn't stop laughing, as it was really funny!

So I'm very thankful to have had the fun of the pups for the time I did have them...but am very happy they are all placed elsewhere in their new families now.

It is so calm and quiet and clean outside now...almost.
Kitten started suckling on mother again after we removed the stitches from her operation and has 4 titties on the go.

Mother was dry from the get go and I'm sure she is still dry, but kitten is determined to make up for being deserted for almost the first 6 weeks of her life...and suckles on mother ALL day! Amazing.

Dog is a bit lost without her babies, but plays with kitten and cat for company. She is such a good doggy. I lock her in between the 2 doors at night, which is a perfect night bed for her.

The exterior house walls are 2 foot thick, so the dog bed is almost 2 foot wide by a metre long...the width of the door. She is a little doggy, so it is a perfect and safe spot for her and she doesn't bark at all, once in her cozy little custom cubby house.

Off to town this arvo to buy some more bags of cement, nails, timber studs...we are short a few...and the corrugated roofing roll for the new store room at the back of the tool shed.
Will go and get the shopping list checked by Istvan and later this arvo, go into town with him as he needs some special other stuff...I have no idea about.

Current pics of today's rendering on the walls, won't load...internet slow in parts of EU today again...so will keep trying to load them daily.

Had to have about 5 goes at this blog as the blogger platform (google owned) would not function yesterday and this morning.

OK...that's it people...I'll go while the going is good.

Hoping to get to work on my computer more often now the pups are gone and kitten is self feeding...it still is not happening yet, as much as I think I want to though...

Anyways...it is all good.

Cheers,

Take care everyone,
Love to all...

Mary
xxxx

Do We Have a 6th Sense We Do not Use?

Well, you live and learn...

Mowing the massive yards here has revealed something to me, I'm sure we often don't think enough about.

Let me set the scene before I explain...

The main front yard is half an acre, 2,000 M2 and is over twice as long as it is wide. In English that means, bloomin' big!

Now the paddock is groomed enough to resemble a lawn when freshly mowed, it is much easier to keep from being a jungle, as it was when first I arrived a few years ago.

BUT!

Nothing at all, is straight here, nothing lines up straight, as the original tracks were meandering horse and buggy trails...
As time went by, cottages sprung up along these tracks and soon a wider road was needed and so, they widened the roads inching closer to the homes dotting the widening tracks.

That created more problems when they put in the much wider tar roads with nature strips and concreted footpaths, a few years ago.
Everyone who had a tiny front yard, lost it. Over half, now have a half metre, like mine, some actually have the front end of the house becoming the "boundary fence".

Others who were set back from the road, ended up with nicely placed front yards.

Guess where I'm going with this?
Yup...where do you measure the first straight line mow from? 😅😅😃😄

Run it along the side front fence line? Back fence line? Where on earth to start?
You can tell I'm one of those people, who when wiping up the dishes at your place, rearranges the crockery and sorts all the knives and forks facing up the right way...

Well, I found just to do a first run and see how awful it looks and go from there.
That is basically how I started trying to get the mowing lines straight, even if it meant mowing over half of the first mow track again.

Then  I noticed how hard it was to keep the next tracks straight.
Apart from the blessed mole holes and mounds of dirt they cause, creating too many bumps in the mowing track, it really annoyed me.
I wanted it to look nice and fairly straight, well mostly.

Then a few weeks ago I began focusing on a spot waaaay down at the end fence and lined up a place on the mower, a wheel, the petrol knob etc. to head towards it so I'd end up with that meeting the spot on the fence.

Easier said than done as over a fair distance like I have, you must look where you are going, right?

Then something struck me...I follow a group online and the saying is to "Trust the Plan"...we can't see or know what is happening behind the scenes, so we must trust...

So I thought, OK...what if I never looked at the ground as I was mowing and only looked at the spot on the fence?

I tell you what...it was/is the weirdest feeling ever., like driving a car blindfolded!

I lined up the R mower wheel with a spot on the bottom fence and went towards it, focusing only on the spot.
So I thought.
Somehow an inner sensor, took note of the wheel position and I headed off...knowing to trust the plan, but all the time, looking back to see if the line was straight. dohhhh!!!

It took a few weeks of trial, but eventually, am learning to trust the plan.

It is totally amazing that just by only looking ahead, on the spot on the fence, and pushing the really heavy mower...that the mowing lines were as straight as can be.(but only when I focused, mind you)

This made me wonder if we have an inner sensor, like radar or something, as I did not look at the ground, or look behind me, or look at the part of the mower I'd designated to line up, but only on that imaginary spot on the fence...
...and blow me down, each time the part of the mower I'd designated to line up with the imaginary spot on the fence...did!

How come???

This got me to wondering if we have more amazing abilities we are not using, not trained to use...or even perhaps, we are not to know about?

Of course, every mowing line is not always straight...as I hit the mole hole bumps and other things like dodging the growing trees in the fileld.

Somehow though, when I focus on that spot on the fence and head towards, looking neither left or right...or even down at the grass (in case something is there?) I feel a place in the front of my forehead that seems to be involved and it seems like an out of body experience or something going ahead of me.

Turmoil runs amok inside, as I surrender to the spot on the fence, after lining up a spot on the mower, that I never look at again.

With over 100 back and forths in the front paddock alone, there is plenty of practice available, but this inner censor/sensor possibility has set me really thinking.

So weird.   A really spiritual experience.

Who'da thot, hey?

My 3 remaining babies playing nicely!

Kissy time...

Anyone for a cuddle?

Freshly mowed...Looking good.

A lovely hand embroidered linen bed sheet I received from Andy...

Yee old home made ladder has seen its last day...

Airing out the leaky wood shed.

Kitty sleeping like a snow angel, until I moved for the camera

The she vanished...Sprung, asleep on my bed!

Golden rain tree at the bus stop...

Baby storks are growing fast They fly out in about a month.

A huge bee on the golden rain tree...

See how long their body is?

Hahaha...electric heated slippers! Heat it up and pop your feet into the velvety warm slippers

Hahaha...boiled egg warmers...

Well, I have sorted all my stuff gathered from the past 8 years of travel, into one final pile to clean up!

A lovely antique blanket box to match the antique wardrobe....

Half an acre and the 3 of them squeeze into one 4 inch tiddly corner!

See? I barely fit in here!

Piggy back time...

Kitty hangin' out with her bros'...

Too funny...

Patches decided to go to sleep...

The 5 weeks of rain allowed my straw garden get out of hand more than a tad!

It was pretty easy to pull out, thankfully.

See how the moles burrow just under the surface and make tunnels everywhere after the big wet? You have to stomp on the mounds to flatten them out so I can mow.

Gradually getting things back to normal after adding in the house load of Andy's stuff...

Nice flowers at the markets last week...

Kitten torments the poor puppies...

They had their first injections and had a chip planted in their necks last week and have to wait another 2 weeks for the final injection and their passports...before waiting for another 2 weeks until they are old enough to cross the borders into Germany for their new homes!

Such happy little puppies...

Kitten never gives up!

Thank goodness she has gone at last, both heave a  sigh of relief!

Actually found some gym pants that fit OK...

I found some old pics, just at the same time my son, on the right, in this picture, took his son and a friend down to the same place, a mere 35 years later!! Coincidence?

Kitten doesn't stop annoying anything that moves!

I don't know what the stretching thing with both these cats is all about...

Such a surprise. 3 luscious big, juicy apricots...

The last of the scraggly cherries. Lots of cherry grubs this year...

Black currants growing too, on the gooseberry bush!

Self sown petunias took over after the pansies drowned in the big wet!

Red currants. I can't believe it at they actually grew!

Tomatoes filling out. A neighbour gave me a dozen plants last month and with the rain, they took off.

Plums starting to weigh down the branches again. A big crop this year after a small crop last year. But, not one apple blossom this year on the tree after a blowout year last year..

Loving my almost straight mowing lines...

Still can't get the petunias to show up in the pics...

All good here...the weather is hot, but inside I forget about it. There has been a lovely cool breeze blowing all week, which has been wonderful. I was even able to mow in the middle of the day yesterday!

Speaking of which, the nature strips outside need mowing and the mower is calling...

Take care everyone and stay warm...or cool...whichever end of the globe you live in.

Lots of love until next time...

Cheers,
M xxxx