A Long Weekend

It was a public holiday yesterday across most of Australia and thus a long weekend.  Ironically, given that it was a holiday to mark the Queen's birthday, it wasn't a holiday in Queensland :-D  (Nor Western Australia.)  Now that I have reverted to my usual work pattern I pretty much always have a long weekend, but it was nice to share it with everyone else yesterday.

It was a glorious day on Saturday.  The sun shone brightly in a clear blue sky. Plus, it was the second Saturday of the month, so the market by the lake was on.  Lindsey, Jim and I trundled off to inspect it and had a short stroll around part of the lake while we were there.

Looking from our driveway up towards Hill House which is on
the hill in the background

By the lake, a cheeky marsh hen came to see what I was doing

Autumn colours

No time to sit, but it was very inviting

Tiny tram clearing the leaves from the tram tracks

There were flocks of coots absolutely everywhere around the lake

We bought lots of yummy things at the market. Then we went shopping.  We went to Spotlight for mending tape and to Spring Creek for Veg.  We decided that we didn't need to go to Elaine because neither Lindsey, nor Jim and I needed any extra meat.  We did head back into town and go to the Scoop shop (Its real name is The Source and you can buy all sorts of useful things by the scoopful). We hit the supermarket and Lindsey went back to her place and we went to ours.

Jim and I went and got some more boxes for our backyard. We haven't planted them yet, but they are ready and waiting for when we have seedlings for them

The large ones are waiting for cabbages, cauliflowers and broccoli 

The little ones will have flowers when I get around to putting seeds in them

I keep catching glimpses of my cooking mojo, peeping at me and waving.  I made a lemon cake batter on Sunday but in a moment of inattention stirred a bowl of stewed fruit through it.  This meant that is was much too liquid to bake properly.  We ended up with more or less a pie - with cake stuff instead of pastry around the outside and lots of stewed fruit inside.  It was very tasty, if not quite what I intended.  It was even more tasty when I made some choc orange custard to go with it!   We had pork belly on Saturday evening with roasted things and then the leftover pork in a rich stew with Yorkshire puddings on Sunday.  Yesterday I dug out my pie maker and made chicken and bacon pies for last night's dinner.  I just need to catch my cooking mojo so that it stays with me instead of peeping at me and then running away!!!

So all in all, it was a good weekend.  Apart from Saturday we didn't really leave the house much.  Nice and peaceful. And then we came up to Hill House later than usual on Monday afternoon, ready to start our working week: Jim here, looking after Rupert, Hugo, the house and the garden, and me about to head to Reservoir to see what the surgery has in store for me this week