Well, I didn't go to quilting today, despite it being the day Judy brings her shop up for us to indulge our wildest fantasies with. Instead I wandered down to the house of our newest member, who was scheduled to collect me, and gave her an envelope with some money and a note for Judy and focussed on getting the house in a fit state for visitors. It is astonishing to me how much one dog and two cats can add to the dustbunny population in the house and, short of engaging someone to come in daily to vacuum, I am not too sure what I am supposed to do about it. I am sure I have better things to do with my time.

Anyway, the first task, after checking weatherzone for the long-term forecast, was to dash out, select a pile of wood, and cut it into fire-box side to add to the pile already indoors. Then out with the vac to clear up the 'knit your own dog' in the house, and the sawdust that inevitably gets tracked in when the wood is cut. Then wading through the latest stockpile of dishes, and cutting up and peeling a swede and some spuds to mash to go with lunch.

Then my friends arrived and we ate, and talked and ... celebrated my friend's son's engagement!! What a surprise. Well, not really, it was kind of inevitable, but now the suspense is over and we can all move on without having to pretend we don't expect an announcement any day. Nice simple ring too. I hate the tatty large things that some people feel are necessary.

So lunch was a bit of a celebration and then we went down to inspect the bees and discovered that, not only have they started eating the last of the winter supplies already, the carpet underlay has caused mildew to form on the wax. I am fairly sure that is not a good thing, so I have taken out the underlay and will call Graham in the morning (he will be getting sick of me and my bee crises!!).

Then the plumber arrived (again) and we discussed the roof and he took measurements and gave me a price which was delightfully low, until he told me it did not include labour ... So he has gone home to work out something a little more definite and will let me know.

With all this coming and going Smidgen (who is surprisingly coy in the presence of strangers) disappeared and did not come home at the appointed hour (or rather, he came home, ate some food, bolted when the plumber left the door open and was not seen for some time). Esther had also disappeared, but it turned out she was in the spare room, as she so often is when she is not responding to call. He is now indoors once more, and we are settling down for bubble and squeak and leftover pie for dinner.

The bonus of the week, however, comes from Chezza who some of you know and love from our former forum days. She has PMd me and offered to quilt the top for me. We are presently negotiating designs, image info she needs and so forth, but it does sound rather more promising than doing it all by hand (aaaaaaaaaargh) or on my short-arm machine (though I can probably borrow Caroline's spare longarm if I really felt compelled to do it myself - I don't!).

With Winter solstice approaching once more, I am looking forward to the snow they keep promising but never delivering as it will make all the grey and cold worth while.

I'm afraid my clever ploy with the army blanket did not work. Why? Because it rained overnight and the blanket got wet, and the sheet also got wet and wicked water into the car interior, then the whole lot froze and I ended up with ice INSIDE the windscreen which made a fairly soggy mess once it melted ... Oh well, on to plan b I guess.

I had a lovely time rummaging around in old Annual Reports at Roberts's today and laughing at photos of my old class mate sporting a rather nasty moustache in the eighties (remember those moustaches??). He looked a little like a startled rabbit, but I won't tell him that. At least I have now unravelled one of the buildings on the site, and established that the second woolstore has nothing to do with its neighbour. The silos remain to be researched as all the stuff I needed is in the Berriedale stores and will have to be ordered in. So I went to Barbara's had a cuppa and came home where I have been entertaining myself re-writing the history so it makes more sense. Now for dinner, and good read by the fire.

It has been rather mild today all things considered, though the galeforce winds have persisted and the neighbour's shadehouse structure was beginning to look like it was planning to take over the neighbourhood, but she finally got round to dealing with it at lunchtime and it has now been successfully killed and weighted down into the pond it was covering.

I had about three hours sleep last night so I was not in a terribly productive frame of mind, but I have roughed out a chronology for landuse and drafted a very sketchy history for the land. Turns out some of those handy maps my colleague had provided had sufficient info on the leaseholds over the land to allow us to avoid a long wait for Crown Land Services to engage staff who can spare the time to do the search.

Last night's casserole as yummy so is doing a replay tonight with some more mash, this time with some swede chopped through it as well.

I am actually working in the 'office' with the result I now realise I must have an office chair, and the dining table, while useful for sorting papers, is way too high for comfy long-term typing, so I will need to find the surface of the desk and see if I can get Caroline to bid for an office chair next time she is at the auctions (she attends weekly, so it should be no problem).

I have laid the old army blanket over the windscreen and anchored it by extending a sheet over it and shutting said sheet into the car doors either side. The front of the sheet is held down with the windscreen wipers. This is because tomorrow is due to start below zero and to rocket up to seven degrees, so it is fair to assume the windscreen would otherwise be deep in ice when I try to drive off tomorrow morning. The back window can be thawed out with the heater thingy embedded in it, and the side windows will presumably thaw out when I splash water on the door to get the lock to work. I have filled the 20 litre jerrycan and am keeping it in the loungeroom so I have water of a suitable temperature to get to work in the morning. Being locked inside a library is sounding pretty darned attractive in these circumstances, though I doubt the dog will share my views.

The Oxtail smells delicious and looks delicious too EMW. I will be serving it with a mountain of buttery mash. The recipe is a bit of a hybrid as I found the recipe after I started cooking. So it started off with some 'holy trinity' being celery, onion and carrot cubed and sauteed with garlic. Then the oxtail was browned and added along with some beef stock. Then I found a recipe that included prunes (I had some left over) and juniper berries (200g prunes, heaped teaspn juniper berries), red wine, the juice of an orange and four slices of orange peel. No red wine in the house so I gave that a miss, and no oranges either so I squeezed a rather sorry looking lemon into it and cooked for several hours before refrigerating overnight. Today I went into Oatlands and bought some oranges, so those ingredients were added and it has had a few more hours simmering away, with the fat removed. The accidental addition of the three base ingredients (not required in the actual recipe) means that it has cooked down to something fairly solid looking, with a rich gravy Mmmmmmmmm.

Since I now own a bag of oranges (and am not too good at eating my five a day of fruit), I sliced several thinly and dried them in the oven. The results are now suspended on a bit of string, to dry out more comprehensively and be jarred for use next time I am cooking a recipe that requires oranges that I don't have. Now all I have to do is work out what to do with the remaining oranges. Am thinking of juicing some and freezing the juice (for similar reasons as drying the slices), and please don't suggest marmalade as I hate the stuff!! I expect I will find a suitable solution with a bit more thought.

Today has had some seriously strong gusts of wind, one of which wiped out the neighbour's greenhouse come whatever that she had constructed over the pond she dug out. Now normally I would have been over like a shot to help sort it out, but since she did not appear, I concluded discretion was the better part of valour as if she found me in her yard she would probably blame me for the damage. Since she has not been to inspect it so far, I assume she is out.

Esther has not returned to the warmth of the hearth today, so I am rather hoping she turns up before dark as I don't like them being out after dark. She has not responded to my calls, so hopefully she is just engrossed in hunting somewhere.

I also cut more wood as yesterday's effort was not all that impressive between the rain showers, and I now have enough indoors for four days. Given that the weather bureau has revised tomorrow's forecast from snow to galeforce winds and rain, and Monday is due to be 7 to minus one, I imagine I will be grateful for the effort.

So I'm off to cook up some mash and start eating stew. Hope your dinner is as nice as mine will be!

A grey day today. So grey it looked like evening all day. And there was a bit of rain to go with it (but not enough to compensate). And the neighbour's chooks came in for a visit. Twice. The first time i panicked and thought that Shadow may have damaged the fence, or dislodged the gate when he was off running around yesterday, but no. When I went down all five of my hens were in situ, but the black hen I had spotted had disappeared, so doubt remained. But the gates were shut and the fence was intact, so it was all a bit of a mystery. Then two black hens materialised outside the loungeroom window. A bantam and an australorp. The latter looked disturbingly like my Australorp, but was not, on closer examination (and mine were still all in their run). So expect that rumours of my negligent fowl-keeping will continue unabated.

I dodged out this morning before the rain started and cut a heap of wood as I was down to the last two pieces (well, I still had my reserve stack, but wanted to keep that in reserve) and after that tidied up the kitchen, then moved into the front office which still contained various boxes of papers awaiting sorting and filing. That is now all pretty well done (though there are a few bits that have no logical home so they are awaiting further though), and I now have an office (rather than the kitchen table) in which to work when the need arises. The kitchen, on the other hand, is now fragrant with the smell of oxtail slowly simmering in the slow-cooker. It will be tomorrow night's dinner (and several more after that) as I have still one more serving of the beef stew to go.

My paperwork for the census work arrived today. There is an incredible number of forms to fill in, Federal Police Checks, where does the money get paid to, what is your TFN, where do you want your super to go, oh, and a double copy of the contract so you can keep one for your records. So that will be the first bit of work I do on the newly cleared table-top in the 'office'.

Tomorrow. Of course.

Today I headed down to Hobart to meet up with my colleague and discuss progress. She gave me sheaves of information she had found on Trove (which I have yet to learn to navigate successfully) and I found the annual reports for the critical years so have rather greater clarity of who was doing what to whom now. I still need to find the Tasmanian Year books so I have a picture of how the grain silos fit into things, as they seem to be a separate entity. And Crown Lease folks require that one writes to them for details on previous leaseholders, so I have to draft a letter to send them tomorrow. That will presumably mean the information is not to hand by the deadline Council has set, so will just have to say that the information is on its way.

From there I went to Spotlight and picked up a couple of metres of 2.5 metre wide calico for backing the quilt (we have our own supplies of cotton wadding in my group, so will get that from them) and some curved safety pins to hold it all together (though I think I will use some basting spray to position the fabrics initially). Had lunch with my colleague and headed home via Gormanston Road in search of Woolstores to photograph. If they are there, they are very cunningly hidden. I drove both directions along the road and could not see them anywhere. So I will go with the aerial photos of them (taken in the 1960s) for illustrating the document.

Got home not too late and was greeted at the drive by a rather embarrassed and ashamed looking dog, dragging his chain The running wire has snapped off at the base of the star picket, so clearly I need heavier wire. It is a good thing he stayed at home, and i can only hope he did that all day once he was free to move around. Will check with some of the friendlier neighbours tomorrow to see if he was out and about (the only real temptation being Kips dogs which regularly wander the streets and come into my yard).

Dinner will be last night's beef and dumpling stew, reheated, so I am rather looking forward to that.

Yay! I have finally put together that quilt top today and it looks pretty darn good even if I do say so myself. The basic colour range was a jelly roll and a matching layer cake, but some of the blocks were just not the right dimensions for pre-cut fabrics, so I have had to ad lib wildly to fill in the gaps. I have four strips left over from the jelly roll, but they are the right colours to be used in the next quilt top which will also be from a jelly roll (but hopefully not require such comprehensive ad-libbing. So the large pink and blue rectangles and the outer border are from the French General collection and were bought as yardage. Some of the strips in the log cabins were derived from another roll of fabric I have had which is supposed to be Christmas prints, but some were not so clearly identifiable as being that theme. There is some tea-dyed calico (the inner sashing and the pale bits of the nine-patches) and a few bits of fat quarters I had lying around as well. Still, they seem to have settled down happily together to make a fairly coordinated end product. Now all I need to do is piece together some calico for the backing, add the wadding, and start quilting. And once that is done, there is always the binding to do ...

And that, apart from a quick scurry to the shops, is the sum total of today's doings ....