A more confusing aspect of the end of DS is that the night is suddenly upon one, triggering feelings of sleepiness that are disproportionate to the time of day. Still, I had a plate full of szechuan prawns to keep me awake last night and the same again tonight, so that should be OK. Disappointingly the mornings are not much brighter, partly due to the overcast, partly due to waking at five when the sun is still snoring over the horizon. I cut a head of cabbage today and it is sliced and diced waiting for an ox cheek to simmer down to jelly to make the base of the russian cabbage soup that is the destination of this lovely wee thing. A friend dropped off a pumpkin, onions, sweet potato and other such lovelies which will combine nicely into another soup option so it will be a while before I starve. And I have been eyeing off the few cider apples and some pears and other such pomes lying around and decided to make a small batch of cider using a recipe that does not require me to own a cider press. Another recruiting call came through today - only 16yoa which strikes me as a bit young to get a merchant account - but otherwise she sounds very poised and mature. Awaiting my coach's verdict on her and will call her in the morning.

A foggy start to the day was a useful adjunct to the end of DS as the animals did not realise how late it was!! And a nice sleep-in was had by all - up at five by the clock, but six by the body clock, so very relaxing. Did I mention I finally managed to book a stall for Campania?! Amazing huh! It turns out the name and phone number provided in the Southern Midlands news is no longer current (which will explain the failure to respond) and so I have now managed to reach the right person and book a place! So see you at the Campania Market next Sunday between 9 and 2 - I will be the one surrounded by lime green with a few hexagon patchworks being worked if it is as slow a day as today. I was taking some chives into the market today for a friend's stall so packed up the ute and decided to throw some of my stuff into the ute as well and as it turned out, they did not have all the stallholders present and correct, so I nabbed a table and put up a bit of a display. Not the full shebang as I am still busy printing out testimonials with a view to binding them into a browsing booklet for the stall. But I had a couple shoved into plastic sleeves for starters. To my great amazement, three people expressed an interest, including one old farmer who I would not have thought would part with a penny without inspecting it five times. for his wife, apparently. So I will sit back and see if anything comes of that. When I got home the dog and the cats were all so fast asleep that I had unloaded the car and started calling anxiously before they emerged sheepishly from the bedroom. They must be getting old. sunny and pleasantly warm today - currently around 20+ish. All very nice. Pity it will be going to custard tomorrow with rain and wind and 15... Still, you can't have everything.

More phone calls, market preparation and chainsawing activity today - I have sufficient fire wood to see me through Monday, though the Weather Bureau seems to have changed its mind about how cold it will get then, and are heading back up to the mid teens once more. I think I will need to have a pre-market checklist so I don't forget stuff. But tomorrow the primary focus will be selling the chives plants I pulled off the main plant while thinning it some weeks ago. They are all now happily established in their individual pots so should sell fairly easily. So apart from having some flyers, wearing a badge and having my business cards on stand by (and samples of some of the products in a box under the table) I won't be doing much in the way of advertising tomorrow. The midnight temperature fluctuations are active once more - not me, the actual temperature!! It is rather annoying to sleep well till 3 and then wake up far too hot, simply because the temperature has been inconsiderate enough to spike. And then it plummets once more before sunrise - very annoying!!

Apparently the chainsaw felt I needed the exercise yesterday since it started quite happily this morning and carved its way through sufficient wood to keep the chill at bay for a couple of days. Since it will be 13 on Monday, this is not an idle exercise, but rather one that will be needful. Tomorrow morning is once again scheduled for lots of calls to various people. I did follow up on yesterday's enquiry and she seems very keen - albeit may not be able to work due to her residency status (sigh), but she is checking that out and we will call her back not Tomorrow, but the following Saturday. So that is quite exciting. I also received my stuff back from my failed previous customer attempt, with a lovely note from the son. A gorgeous autumn day so I spent it visiting friends and catching up on all the gossip that can no longer be shared at quilting now my charming neighbour's charming friend has joined the Wednesday group as well as that on Tuesday. I am possibly being paranoid, but really - would you join a group that involved someone you hated as much as her behaviour suggests she hates me? Of course not - unless you hoped to drive your target away from her favourite haunts as part of the neighbour's campaign to displace me from my home. Not quite what one might expect from someone so loudly self avowed as a Christian ... The hexagons are going slowly - all the paper ones are cut out, the fabric ones are largely cut out, some are even tacked onto the papers, though I begin to wonder if I actually left sufficient seam allowance for the type of tacking I am doing ... Very mild hint of a frost this morning before a lovely sunny day.

Well the Lord giveth and he taketh away - I had a call today from someone in Melbourne following up on my ad so perhaps i have a new prospective client - who knows. I have sent her an email and will await results. It was a nice still sunny day today so I decided I would take the time to cut some firewood. Well that idea lasted long enough for me to realise the chainsaw was not going to start, so I gave up and went to visit Jean (tomorrow I will visit Caroline and get her husband to start it for me - it is just being lazy after 18 months of inaction one assumes. new fuel and new bar lube does not appear to have been sufficient incentive. Then, having retrieved my hexagon templates from Jean I cut quantities of papers, and some fabric hexagons and am now plodding my way through tacking them down, so I can sew them together. I am making a cushion cover. The various partial unpackings I have indulged in have included a cane chair. This has been around for as long as I can remember though, until I visited my aunt in 2009, no-one thought to let me know that it was part of a dining suite brought out from Germany by one of my forebears. My sister has one of the carvers, and the other carver and several chairs are distributed around some of the more remote reaches of the family. The reason it needs a cushion is because the cats, given half a chance, will destroy the caning on the seat. At present there is a rather random cushion sitting on it which Esther rather likes to lie upon, but it needs its own cushion that suits the chair. I have some down-filled cushion inserts, so once I have made a hexagon cover for it, it will use one of them to plump it up for appearances sake. The colour range is autumn greens, reds and oranges which should tie back to the various other colours in the room reasonably well. Fiddly stuff these hexagons... So I have no wood cut for tonight which, given the frost we had this morning is disappointing, but there is enough to keep the place warm till bed time.

Well my concerns about my prospective client have proven valid and so I have cancelled the sale and the costs against her card. Her son has agreed to return the material that was sent, and we parted as friends. The package had been redirected so I contacted Australia Post to see what was happening, then rang the client and managed to extract her son's name and place of work from her, so we soon sorted things out once we were all on the same page. Pity, but I had my doubts from the outset so not too disappointed. My other customer has finally received her things and is rapt and already talking about ordering more stuff. Arranged to call her Saturday morning so that we can talk and take her measurements. And another more elusive person has finally been reached and has ordered a trial run, so that is another one that will hopefully work for me. Of todays two leads, one had already changed her mind, and the other shares her name with an actress - the phone diverts to another phone and the message is for someone other than the name given ... ho hum. Will try that number again tomorrow, but for tonight I am heading for bed early due to a 3 am wakeup call courtesy of Tas Rail. Quilting was, of necessity cut short due to phone call requirements, but I guess this is what it takes to build a business. Sigh.

My day of visitors went well with a large roast chicken to add to the salad, chocolates and hot cross buns they brought with them. This of course was disaster to all diet aspirations, but I ate all the chocolate at once on the principle if it was not there to tempt me I could limit my sinning to one day ... an interesting theory, I hear you say. Telstra, in their wisdom, decided rural Australians did not need an internet signal yesterday (or a phone signal, not to be accused of discrimination) and so communication with the outside world was limited, at best. The more so as the ute was out of petrol and I didn't have money until today. Still, all sorted now. Yesterday's overcast but balmy weather has been replaced today with a morning of bright, crisp sunshine (with low temps) and an afternoon of rain and clouds. The perfect excuse to stay indoors and light the fire (not that i need an excuse). So that is what i did. My visitors brought the second volume in the trilogy that commenced with the volume i borrowed at Christmas - excellent reading for those into fantasy. The author is a newcomer called Patrick Rothfuss if you are interested. The third volume has not yet been published (it is on my Amazon alerts list). It can be bought for i-phone at around $5.00 if you are too cheap to buy the real book. Personally I prefer my books to be paper.