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.