Sorry - I have been busy - not productively busy by and large, but busy nontheless.

Highlights!

After spending a nervous Thursday in the History Room with a forecast of 28 and high winds (fortunately an inaccurate forecast), I spent much of Friday attached to the whipper snipper reducing the firehazard in the back yard. More to go, but at least it is no longer near the house.  The bottom end of the back yard is still rather soggy, so any attempt to slash that resulted in pureed tips and flattened lower sections and was abandoned as not really a fire hazard just yet. Actually not much of it is as it is still  green, but a few days of heat and wind such as we are enduring at present will soon change that. We seem to have skipped Spring and moved straight into summer and today it is so warm I have a fried face (forgot my hat).

The reason I was in the History Room was because another volunteer was not available. But as the President has resigned (she is moving to Longford), we no longer have someone for Sundays so I will be taking that over as well as Tuesdays. I quite enjoy my time in there and now my spinning wheel is in residence it gives me a good excuse to knit or spin to my heart's content.

The spinning ground to a halt as Jo/Rowena was away one Sunday, and was sick once she got back so it was only today she re-opened the shop and I was able to restock. She is impressed by my progress and even bought the second beanie I had knitted to on-sell in the shop!

The plan is that I will now sell my beanies via the History Room, donating that part of the proceeds not required to cover my costs as I am using their space to do the work (well some of it). I will be happy with that, and given the price Jo is charging for them, it will be a good little money earner for the History Room too. We agreed I would not undercut her prices as we are all on the same team.

Yesterday I was in the shower when Seb started barking. Turned out there was someone at the front door. Since it was seven in the morning and I did not recognise the caller so decided to return to the shower and finish dressing. But she was persistent which turned out to be a good thing as it was Round the Bend from ALS. So I reluctantly invited her into my dirty smelly kitchen (I had cooked a lamb roast the night before and you know how that nasty smell of lamb fat lingers on) and we had a catchup chat. She was off on an expedition, having sold up on the mainland and moved to Tassie. She lives up north, so hopefully I can catch up with her.

The obligation to be social at that hour in the morning rather threw me off for the rest of the day, so once my work obligations were dealt with I came home for a nana nap.

Today was the whole town garage sale and the History Room had a stall (hence my sunburn as we are on the sunny side of the street) and made some good money in the process. I personally bought (at another sale I found yesterday quite by chance) a set of china which looks rather more appealing on my dish rack than did the motley collection of cheap modern stuff (this is also cheap modern stuff but a little more cottagey). And today I also purchased two more dinner plates (Meakin Ware) that will complement it and make up the numbers. Motley is good on such open display racks, but it does have to be marginally aesthetically pleasing.

Getting back to spinning, I was spinning in the History Room the other day when two Chinese tourists spotted me and became enthralled watching it happen. They clamoured for things to buy (which I did not have, of course) and so clearly this will work well all round.

Tonight I have been asked to draft up a grant application, but the information provided has failed to find anything on Google so I will have to find out a bit more (the search did turn up something of that name but it does not appear to be targetted at what we are applying for, so further discussion will be necessary).