Well Brrrr, and yawn. It is cold and I am tired as you can tell. Today started with rather more excitement than I had planned, having scheduled a trip to Hobart. I was all tarted up in my 'city' clothes when I wandered down the back yard to feed the chooks and geese. One of the geese got so excited at the thought of food that she took off into the air at head level and flew straight over the fence toward me. Not sure who was more surprised as i had no idea they could fly that well when properly fledged. Needless to say this was alarming for a number of reasons, but she refused to let me herd her back into her yard and ended up cornering herself so I could catch her. Now, catching the geese has been on the list of things to do for some time, but today was really not good timing. So I carried her around for a while as i debated dispatching her, and leaving her to 'hang' in a cool shady spot till I got home or clipping her wing. I ended up clipping her wing as I concluded that dispatching her would upset the other goose so much I would have no idea what to expect by the time I got home. So she is back in the run with a thoroughly clipped wing and if the weather remains fine I will try catching them both in the shed tomorrow and stop procrastinating about dispatching them.

Fortunately, all that goose carrying did not have the effect on my clothing that I had expected, so I was able to set off to Hobart in still clean clothes. Got to the Andover turnoff and realised that in the excitement I had forgotten the property descriptions I was planning to search, went back, got the dog all excited at the prospect of getting off the chain, disappointed the dog and headed down to Hobart.

Luckily, by the time i got there I had the munchies. So I headed into Dome for coffee and a muffin before entering the basement of the Lands and Titles office. In Queensland, when you do an historic title search, you part with your money and they give you a printout from a microfiche and away you go. In Tasmania, they let you loose unsupervised in the basement storage area and you find it yourself. So I have spent a happy day surrounded by hundreds, thousands, of original title deeds, deeds in grant and mortgage records, wills and goodness knows whatall. All terribly exciting, but incredibly frustrating as well.

I found one of the two Launceston properties i was looking for, and another that I thought was the second, but which turned out to be something else, and which was a land grant from the Crown in 1993!! Who knew they were still doing that sort of thing that recently. I thought, while I was there and had paid my entrance fee, that I would also do the historic title search for my place. Bad Idea!! I found records back to 1909 when it was sold by a bank which had presumably taken possession from an earlier owner, but there was no record of earlier documents. The records of the bank did not show mortgages over any property in Parattah prior to 1909, so that was a dead end. So I had a look for the original grant, in the hope it would reveal something, but no luck there either (well, I found the grant, but it did not give forward references. So I found the town plan (or rather, one of the staff did) and that made reference to a title document which, on closer examination turned out to the original subdivision of my part of the town. Great stuff!! Sadly, when the land was sold off, the records on this document rarely actually described the bit of land bought by each person. This was further compounded by the subdivision being in four parts (parts A-D) each of which had lots counted from number 1 ... And then there is the little complexity that two of the lots in Part D (of which my place is one) are now part of Kip's place and so it all became a little confusing.

Suffice to say, that now I know when the subdivision occurred, I can confidently state which Feng Shui reading applies as the subdivision was later than the cut-opp point.

I have lit the fire, and am wondering if last night's leftovers will suffice as I really can not imagine starting to cook right now....