All recent plans were thrown (weekend interruption was great though!). I was meant to show off the start of a plane but I haven’t gotten past the cube, so I’m showing off my gardening efforts for the day instead. My back and legs hurt. So many rocks, don’t even know where they all came from. I better be able to make a path or something when I pick them all up XD

nb: this is kind of in a thematic/narrative order not really a chronological one. We hit up Bunnings over a couple more weekends to pick up more concrete for the chicken fence, and of course bought more plants and seeds (fortunately I had the bag notebook so we didn’t double up on anything except chicken and insect mix which was done deliberately). On one of the trips we somewhat accidentally split up (on a previous trip I had seen a couple of paint swatches that made up my domain name and wanted them) so Eldest (who had come with us) ended up scuttling back and forth as messenger asking what seeds we had, and after finding (or not finding) his request and telling him I said the only “bad” thing about the notebook was no search function XD

We hadn’t been long after the last update when we accidentally acquired more stuff. We had returned to Bunnings much sooner than anticipated as we had forgotten to buy replacement heat lamps during the last trip and I decided that I really wanted that Elkhorn fern. And of course a couple more things we “needed”. The creeping thyme seeds in the picture is actually the result of another gardening argument. There was some really nice grass when we moved in (after we got it under control as everything was massively overgrown, the house had been unoccupied for many months prior). J was always adamant that he would not under any circumstances ever bother wasting any effort on things that didn’t feed us specifically and it didn’t really matter because the grass didn’t care.

A wise person would have done this before buying more seeds. Unfortunately we are not wise people. So many duplicates XD and so many past “sow by/before” dates x_x

Came for replacement heat lamps and an elkhorn fern. Not pictured is the house paint we also needed and several seed packets which we didn’t really. Bunnings (and by extension nurseries) is getting as dangerous as Officeworks.

It began unexpectedly with the paint I’ve been needing (we have some unexpected asbestos walls which need to remain painted and the current coat is peeling and we didn’t get the renos done that I wanted so I told J it had to be done before summer ended, and I’m running out of summer). He was doing a Bunnings run for some stuff to repair leaky taps and asked if I needed anything, I told him to get Cottage or Federation Green paint and pretty much any white that looked like it would go with it (I don’t much care as Cottage Green and white is not my favourite but I’d never gotten around to redoing it in Cottage Red and we’re planning on repainting the inside in greens).

It’s been about an aeon or so since I last did a garden journal (last one tagged any thing to do with the garden was bundled in with a homeschooling post from 2013 as the kids helped J plant some stuff during an unexpected communication outage). Quite a bit has changed since then. First and only very vaguely related because it’s out there, J finally got me a new clothes hoist (the old one is collapsible and the catch to hold it open broke some years back but we were able to make do and it has been collapsing a LOT more frequently recently especially when there was a lot on it). Youngest brought the concrete bags in and had the old one dug out in about ten seconds (only a slight exaggeration), after which he and J erected the new post and left it overnight for the concrete to dry. The following day J got Eldest and I to help put the top on (I didn’t do much) and then he strung it.

Everything kind of completely fell apart in October. 12yo had caught everything under the sun in Term 3 and so had missed a fair chunk of it. At the beginning of Term 4 she continued insisting that she loved school and still wanted to go, but two weeks in I could count on one hand the number of times she had actually gone. She kept insisting she was “sick” or “too tired” but would always be better just in time for gymnastics. Things eventually came to a head when we had a massive blowout as I told her if she was really that sick then she was not going to gymnastics so she could recover properly and she told me to pull her out of school so she could go to gym (a threat I’d made a few times previously but hadn’t done because I give too many chances). I tried to get her to be reasonable and told her she could go to gym, and then she had to go to school for the rest of the week. If she wanted to quit after that she was to tell me on the weekend and I could pull her out and she could go back to homeschooling, if she wanted to keep going then she had better have as close to a perfect attendance as possible for the rest of the term, and if she didn’t go the following day then I was pulling her out that day.

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now] The skate ramp is skatable! Okay so this is a slightly older picture but it was a good opener :P All but one of the backs are up (the thing that will prevent skaters and skateboards from ending up in the raised bed or in the neighbour’s yard) and the whole thing is now covered in both layers of skin and has been reinforced and all those good things. Now it just needs a paint job (and I know someone who is good at painting that I would like to rope in to help).

We finally bought a NAS, it’s living next to the router (which makes logical sense as it has to plug into the router). I’m currently copying all the music and photos onto it and will probably delete them off my computer as part of my cleanup process (moving a bunch of Stuff off the 250Gb ssd to the 2Tb sata). Moving the iPhoto database was nice and easy (drag, hold down alt when opening iPhoto, selecting where the library had been moved to, delete the original file), and it kind of needed to go elsewhere as it’s 53Gb and going to blow out as I’m shooting RAW.