Hill House

 Lindsey and Ian have taken advantage of the opening of the border between Victoria and New South Wales to go to Sydney so they can finally meet their grandbaby, who is 4 or 5 months old.

Jim and I have relocated to Hill House to stay with Rupert and Hugo.  Brandy and Whiskey have not. So I go down to Tani each morning and each afternoon for an hour or two each time. I feed and water the cats, play with them a bit, water the garden, check out my seedlings and generally potter around. Brandy and Whiskey don't seem to be particularly perturbed by this, though they are pleased to see me when I appear.  As you would expect.  I  proffer food!

Chris came to Ballarat to go shopping on Tuesday and popped by for a spot of lunch.  We had that at Tani - exciting to have visitors now that it is allowed. Up to 15 a day for now, rising to 30 in mid-December.  I can't imagine many occasions when I would want to have more than 30 visitors in the course of a day.  I'm not sure that 30 people would fit in our house and garden.  They would fit at Hill House, so if I were minded to have a gigantic gathering it would have to be up here. 

Jim added a certain level of excitement yesterday by deciding, against all advice to the contrary, to go out and start planting potatoes at around 17:00.  He can't find his large, potato planting dibber so was using my small, seedling planting dibber. He had planted five potatoes when his knees locked and he couldn't get up.  In fact, he couldn't move.

I went down to the potato patch to see what he was doing and why he was making strange noises. We managed to get him sitting on the ledge that separates the terraces.  I could not get him up.  This was strangely reminiscent of trying to get Stella up last week! However, Jim had not fallen, as such and I was not going to call an ambulance if it could be avoided.  The problem was that his knees were not minded to cooperate. Eventually I got the shower chair which was stable enough to give him some leverage and he was upright. But his knees were still not minded to cooperate and he couldn't walk properly. So I fished the spare walker (you may remember that Stella bought a new one last week; the old one had been left here) out of the shed and we managed to get him into the house.

I am now officially over trying to hoik people up from a sitting position who are unable to get up under their own steam. I will plant the rest of the potatoes myself, not using my small dibber but by digging a small trench and chucking them in. And hope that I remain upright and mobile. There is no one to get me up if I can't do it myself!

Apart from that, it's been a largely uneventful week. I can live without "events", people coming for lunch always excepted, of course.