A Miscellany

We managed to unwrap and install the new mattress with no trouble at all.  Took a bare, few minutes.

Now the bed is snuggly and cosy, and much firmer than the old mattress was.  I wish I could say that I am sleeping better but that would be an exaggeration.  I am, however, much more comfortable.

Grumpy cat cushion nice and cosy

New friend who came with the mattress

Speaking of new beds, Lindsey bought Rupert and Hugo new dog beds.  Hugo's is in front of the heater in the hallway.  He loves snoozing there on cold, frosty mornings.  Rupert took one look at his new bed and loudly declared his intention of ignoring it completely and remaining on the blankies on the couch.

He has recently changed his mind

When we moved from Tupton to Mount Helen I converted all of my cooking books that could be converted from hard copy to ebook format.  I would counsel you against doing this should you ever find yourself needing to move from one hemisphere to the other.  Since we got here I have been (expensively!) converting them back.  I have been buying new books as well.  In one of the new ones, Good food for bad days by Jack Monroe, I found a recipe for bread cooked in the slow cooker.  I gave it a go.  It was an absolute revelation.  Because it is steamed rather than baked, it is quite soft.  It looks undercooked because it doesn't brown, but it has a fabulous crumb and tastes delicious.  Once I've properly mastered it I might have a play with other kinds of bread

My first attempt. I forgot to flour my hands when I took the
dough out of the bowl to put it in the cooker.
It stuck like sticky glue to my hands and couldn't be shaped!!!

Tasted lovely, though

We've had some beautiful sunrises and sunsets.  We see the sunrises at our place.  Lindsey and Ian see the sunsets, from their hill looking out over the plain.  They get the better deal

Sunset from Hill House

Oh - and we've finished one of the fiendish jigsaws that Lindsey gave Jim some time ago

And so we reach the end of the first half of 2020, where we find several suburbs in Melbourne locked down again because of a surge in Covid cases. Not as bad as in some parts of the world, but then you really wouldn't want it to be.  In a burst of possibly misplaced optimism, and in defiance of my experiences in March, I am planning a holiday in November.  A road trip. With hotels booked that can be cancelled without penalty should the need arise. I am hopeful that 2020 might have got bored with messing us all about by November.  It will be an old year by then. Running out of steam. Slowing down.

Or so we can hope.  It may, of course, have more surprises yet in store!!

Bugger

Most states in Australia have very little to no active CV-19 circulating.  In Victoria, alas, we have had a spike of cases over the last week, mostly in and around Melbourne. Regional areas are not affected as much - we've had no active cases in Ballarat for a month at least, and very few cases before that. But we can't assume that that will continue

The upshot of this is that some of the CV-19 restrictions, which were being slowly relaxed, have been put on hold, or rolled back a bit.  So we are back to having no more than 5 visitors in our homes (plus household members) instead of up to 20 people in total. Pubs and restaurants, which were expecting to be able to have up to 50 people per space from this week, are still restricted to 20. Some things are still going ahead, but more cautiously.  And people who live in the local government areas which are most affected by the clusters and spikes are encouraged not to travel unnecessarily out of their local areas - and certainly not out into the regions.

This is mildly inconvenient for us.  Freyja and Simon have recently moved from one "hotspot" area in Melbourne to an adjacent "hotspot".  We had been trying to organise a weekend when they could come to Ballarat, have lunch with us, catch up with Freyja's dad, gather in an appropriate physically distancing manner with some friends and generally have a nice weekend out of town. We have put that on hold.  Better to be mildly inconvenienced than for us all to create a family-transmitted, regional cluster.

Here's hoping that by re-applying some of the restrictions and holding back a bit on easing some of the others we can nip this outbreak in the bud. We do not want CV-19 spreading over the state like some sort of noxious weed.  Otherwise we'll end up as a pariah state within a hermit nation forever isolated on the far side of the world!

In other, happier news, the For Sale board at the bottom of our driveway now looks like this

I don't know who has bought #2. Our neighbours said that they weren't interested in buying it because it is too small for them long term.  But we are definitely the buyers of #3.  The rental property manager rang me up yesterday to congratulate us on our conditional finance now being unconditional and to discuss the dissolving of the lease after settlement.  We definitely do not want to be renting from ourselves - the tax implications don't bear thinking about!

For some time now Jim has been complaining of a bad back.  And I have been aware that I am waking up during the night with a sore back, uncomfortable hips, grumbling shoulder, sad neck.  Then we go to Hill House and sleep in our room up there and think how comfortable that bed is.  It seemed ridiculous that our primary bed is very much less comfortable than what was a spare bed at Hill House before we rocked up and took it over.

Time for a new mattress.  Freyja and Simon have a Koala bed and mattress which we found remarkably comfortable when we stayed there at Christmas.  Koala was offering End of Financial Year discounts.  I ordered one.  It arrived yesterday

We will put it on our bed this morning.  Later.  It is still much too early to be doing such energetic things as changing mattresses.  Anyway, Jim is still tucked up in bed.  As I should be really.  It's only just after 4 am.  I am hopeful that a new mattress might encourage me to stay asleep for longer.  Waking up in the Wee Smalls is getting to be Very Tedious Indeed!

An early start to the day

Up at Hill House there is a little suite off the kitchen which houses two bedrooms, a bathroom, a toilet and a door leading to the backyard.

Our bedroom is one of the two rooms in that suite.

There is a door between the kitchen and the small corridor but we almost never shut it.  Instead, we close a child gate to keep the dogs out overnight.  We never close our bedroom door.

This is what happens when you forget to close the gate when you go to bed and then get up at 4:30 to go to the loo

It wasn't daylight yet.  I had put a light on when I got up

It didn't seem worth the effort trying to get them to move.  I usually get up sometime between 5 and 5:30 anyway.  So an early start to the day for me.

Sunday Lunch -- OUT!

It's been months since Jim and I have been properly out for a meal.

Stella has had takeaway sandwiches from her local cafe and eaten them sat in a car with a carer or family member in the car park by her local beach.  But she hasn't properly been out for a sit down meal.

For a long time we couldn't.  The pubs and restaurant and cafes were closed for dining in.

But now they are open, to a limited extent.  They can have up to 20 people in each "space" provided that people are seated at a table and that the appropriate physical distancing is observed.

The Dava in Mount Martha has re-opened and is allowed to have up to 40 people, in two spaces.  Matthew tried to book last weekend but missed out.  I heard about this and booked a table last Tuesday.  And on Sunday, Stella, Jim and I turned up for our first proper Sunday lunch out since March.

They had Welcome signs up on the walls, plus the required Physical Distancing posters. They had hand sanitiser bottles dotted around and instead of salt and pepper shakers there were sachets in little bowls.  They had far fewer staff - but also far fewer patrons.  There were 17 people in the bistro.  I don't know how many there were in the cafe but they also had the bar in play, which doesn't usually serve meals.  Mind you, at this stage you can't buy alcohol unless you are having a sit down meal, so they might as well use it for meals.  The casino and the deck upstairs were closed.

They also have a reduced menu.  This was no bad thing.  You don't really need a menu the size of a book.  A few things done well is more than satisfactory.

We had a lovely time and a lovely meal.  It was good to be able to dine out again

I have never really noticed the carpet at the Dava before.  And if I had, I wouldn't have thought anything much about it.  But I noticed immediately we walked in on Sunday that they have hundreds of Corona viruses scattered all over their floor.  I have to admit that, until the new corona virus emerged in December or January, I had never heard of them. Or I didn't remember having heard about them. I don't usually pay much attention to viruses.  I didn't even know that they aren't properly alive.  But when they started showing images of various corona viruses I thought that they were quite pretty. Not that I wish to make the acquaintance of them up close, you understand. But the images are quite pretty.  And so is the carpet at the Dava.  In an ironic sort of a way

The Backyard

This is what our backyard looked like on Saturday morning

On Saturday afternoon we went to Bunnings with Lindsey. While we were there I bought a hexagonal small raised garden bed, thinking that we could put one of the lemon trees in it.  When we got home I assembled it (no screws, just slotting things into place; took 5 or 6 minutes) and put in the lemon tree, still in its plant pot.

Cool, thought I.  We need another one for the other lemon tree.  And perhaps another couple to grow vegetables and herbs in.

On Sunday, Jim and I went back to Bunnings and bought more hexagonal beds and some square ones.

Now our backyard looks like this

I need another couple of hexagonal ones or something similar for the now dispossessed lemon trees.

I did consider shaping the hexagonal boxes in the shape of a Coronavirus, and getting some narrow ones to form the spikes. But I think it would have taken up too much room.  And perhaps wouldn't have amused anyone but me :-D  

I also wonder what it is about us that makes us buy blocks of land with really weirdly shaped boundaries.  The land in Tupton had all sort of angles forming the boundary.  And so does this place, although not quite so many.  What ever happened to rectangular blocks of land formed with right angles???

You may think it reckless of us to start landscaping the garden when it isn't yet ours. But the  raised beds aren't permanent fixtures and can be dismantled and moved as required.  We have not planted the lemon trees. And today we went to the bank and signed the Home Loan papers. 

Contracts have been signed. Finance is in place. Settlement is set for July 21st.  Short of some sort of disaster, the place will be ours in around 40 days.  And if there is a disaster of such magnitude that it falls through now, the raised garden beds will be the least of our worries. 

It is an indication of the differing complexities of buying and selling property in England and Australia that, when I told people about this, the Aussies all said: "How exciting! Congratulations" and the Brits said: "How exciting! I hope it all goes well"

Advice

I have a piece of advice for you.

It is a bad, bad plan if you have had several sleepless nights in a row to put little containers of apricot and custard crumble in the oven and then to sit down on your cosy, cosy couch next to your cosy, cosy heater with your cosy, cosy cushion, ready to watch Masterchef.  A very bad plan.

Because what will happen is that, instead of enjoying small servings of apricot and custard crumble during the second half of Masterchef, you will drift off to sleep, miss pretty much all of Masterchef and awaken a couple of hours later to find your crumbles have transformed into something so solid that you could practically use them as bricks - if only you could work out how to get them out of the containers!!

Apart from that, we have had a largely uneventful few days. Lindsey and I did the usual round of mushroom farm and Elaine farm shop on Saturday. I accompanied her to the supermarket and actually went into Woolworths, which was quite exciting. The weather has been cold and miserable so not much has happened outside. We have garlic to plant both at the Hill House allotment and in one of my boxes but neither Jim nor I is motivated to go out into drizzle, mizzle, mist or fog to plant them.  We'll do it the very next time we have a dry day.

The buying of the house seems to be trundling along OK.  I have closed my British credit card and, while I was at it, the bank account associated with it.  I haven't used that account much since we left the UK, not even when we were in England in March. Seemed silly to keep it, especially as we have a joint account with a different British bank which we do use.  We have signed the pieces of paper the conveyancing solicitor sent to us and sent them back. As it stands at the moment, the place should be ours on July 21st.  Fingers crossed!

We have also arranged to update our wills.  We do have wills, of course, but they're in the UK.  I figured that if we were buying a house in Australia, we should probably have wills in Australia.

It's funny how things work out, though.  If we had been looking for a house to buy when we first came to look at Tani as a rental, it wouldn't have been Tani that we would have looked at.  We would have been looking at miner's cottages and little Federation houses closer in to Ballarat. Then, when we had rented Tani and got settled in, people asked if we would buy it if we could and we said yes.  We like the location. We like the unit. We like not having to move house again.  So there you go.

And I will be able to put a fly screen door at the front.  The present owner said we could at our expense, as long as it had the same colour frame as the fly screens on the window.  I did want a screen door - but not enough to pay exorbitant amounts of money to have a frame made to order. I won't care if the new screen door matches the window screens. We can get a sensibly priced one from Bunnings.