It seems I sprained my ankle so I have a few days off work to look forward to. I have a certificate for today in case the bank cleaning position makes life difficult but I can't see how they can when they have no-one to replace me. I will, however, need to get someone to stand in for me if I go on leave etc, so will start the official process if Judy is interested in being my back up on this as well as the cottages.

All in all it has been a very lazy day and Seb is, so far, being quite forgiving about the lack of exercise. We still hobble down to the oval from time to time, but long walks are out of the question.

I am getting heartily sick of chicken noodle soup with toast sogged into it so will try something a little more adventurous tomorrow!

Well I thought I had sorted out the virus protection but they forgot to mention I was supposed to use the username and password they sent me to confirm the download. So it took a bit of mucking about but I finally got there.

The last few days have been as variable as the weather and today was jolly chilly. I think.

I had food poisoning last night with the usual performance involving buckets balanced on the lap while sitting on the loo. Fortunately I was able to empty it and rinse it between bouts as the last one resulted in me passing out. Came too squished between the shower cubicle and the loo, head on the bottom of the bucket and my foot wedged under me. Judging from the complaints from my ankle I landed on it with some force, and so the side facing the concrete is now rather sore. I have napped on and off today between bowls of chicken noodle soup with toast soaked into it. I expect I will feel better tomorrow but have made an appointment to see about the ankle.

Life in the country is rarely dull. For example, yesterday morning, when I stepped, bleary-eyed out the back door to let the boys have a wee before breakfast I was confronted with two sheep and two sweaty exasperated men who had apparently 'spent all morning trying to catch these four-letter-word sheep'. They did finally round them up - one on the oval and the second after a fine chase up through the neighbour's yard, scattering pigs and horses and dogs as they went. My lot, having worked out what was going on, concentrated on their purpose for being there, and retired indoors once again.

And last night, it was a scene from the Godfather. I turned back my bed to get in and found part of a very dead sparrow that had apparently been vomitted there by Seb. Being the neat little thing that he is he had pulled the bedding back, thrown up, then covered it all once again.....

So after re-making the bed with all fresh linen, set the mattress topper to soak, and concluded the sheets (which I have been wondering for some time how long they will last) were beyond redemption and stuffed them into the rubbish bin, I finally crawled into bed. Sigh.

Yesterday was one of those days when you feel as if you really should have stayed in bed (bleary, lacking energy, sagging at the slightest opportunity), until it is just before bedtime, when you wake up at last. This was due to having had very little sleep the night before. The wildly fluctuating temperatures of this summer are really very wearing and that night I had started under a sheet and ended the night under the doona.

It has been mercifully cooler today, so even making up two cottages did not entirely knock me out and  I have managed to pull the paperwork together for the Railway Committee meeting tonight and even managed an approximation of the letterhead my predecessor (now deceased) had worked out. I have yet to find an image of a train to complete the picture, but I expect I will eventually. Not really a priority right now, lol.

There are presently four pigs not in their run and two that are in their run. Of the four that are out, two have disappeared from the radar. It seems with their usual spectacular inability to learn from past mistakes, they have put the neutered boar, who had been isolated over the road for over a week, back into the run with the other five, not remembering that pigs can be rather territorial. They also appear to have switched back to the battery powered electric fence that they had already learned was not sufficient to retain them. What is more - they are all out and have been since this morning, so the horses have not been fed or their water checked all day. I despair of their ability to ever learn anything from their experiences  :-(

Yesterday I took advantage of the more still weather to do a couple more loads of washing and have sorted all of my clothes into the new wardrobe (including some hanging clothes that have been folded in drawers due to lack of suitable hanging conditions). A big bag went to the Bargain Centre and another big bag went to the tip as it was past redemption - or at least would not be of saleable quality.

The stallion, who went for a stroll on the oval two nights running, has been confined to the stable for three days now, again without exercise, and the filly is alone in a paddock immediately adjacent to the pigs (horses hate pigs). She did have some fun this afternoon chasing the escapees out of her paddock, but is leaning so heavily on the boundary fence to reach some green pick that I imagine that fence too will fail in the not too distant future. The suspense is killing me....

I hope you managed to put two and two together and worked out that I have been having a few difficulties sorting out the virus protection.  One phone call to the UK and two to Sydney (the people in Sydney really need to work on their customer service approach), I finally discovered the only way to do it was to get online .... lovely - and me with no protection! Still,  I gritted my teeth and sorted it out and finally managed to download the new version yesterday.

Meanwhile life has been rather exciting what with one thing and another. Wednesday I headed off to quilting after cleaning the bank and managed to get four more blocks completed - mainly because I had prepped them last time I was there. I now have 25 of the 36 I will need - they are 12 inches square so that will make a 6 foot square which, once I have added a couple of borders, will make up to a quilt that will hang over the edges of the queensize bed and hide the edges of the doona. Borders will probably be a six inch strip of one fabric with a strip of the 2 inch blocks around the outer edge, then binding in the inner border colour. I will have to work out what colour the border will need to be once I finish the quilt as it contains so many different fabrics it is hard to work out what it will look like in the end.

We went out to lunch that day and I had a malaysian chicken claypot as it was a jolly chilly day - I think it made it to 12 degrees. Thursday was spent cleaning the cottages that I should have cleaned on Wednesday but got my wires crossed and thought were required on Thursday (oops). Friday, which was nastily hot was spent in the community Garden. We decided that planting seedlings was a bad idea give the heat and today's forecast so weeded and sprayed the weeds on the paths, picked the produce and dug the last of the spuds. I have a zucchini, a bag of new potatoes and quite a few green beans to accompany the tomatoes from the greenhouse.

Bank cleaning hours have changed, so last night was my first effort at cleaning at the end of the day (not at my best time of day I have to say). The Bank HQ have instructed that all cleaning will occur between 6pm and 6am which is a pretty horrible range of hours when you come to think of it. I wouldn't mind starting at 6 am, but being required to be finished by then is not at all to my taste, and having to head out at 6pm is not much fun either as by then I am usually sitting down to dinner and in full relaxation mode (tracky dax, no bra - you get the picture). I expect I will get used to it.

And that is why I did not get to post last night despite having a virus free computer once more. Well, that and the delivery of the wardrobe. This is a wardrobe that was donated to the Men's Shed for no obvious reason. They had no use for it but I did and managed to get first dibs on it. It was supposed to arrive shortly after the shed closed at 4. It finally arrived at 6 with not two, but one bloke (and him in his seventies) to lift it into the house. We finally managed to get it in the door and into the bedroom (which was by this stage pretty crowded as the furniture had had to be re-arranged to allow for the new bit and manouevring space). Then he turned to me and announced it didn't have a key. Well of course it had a key. He had simply failed to collect it when he collected the wardrobe. The other chap has it on his keyring. I know. I saw it there and we discussed why that was the case (he was sick of people fiddling with it and so had taken it out of the door and put it on his keyring for safety).......

So after trying various strategies I gave up and drove up to the house of the bloke with the key, only to find he was out for the evening. His partner offered a key that might work and I arranged to take it back to her this afternoon (and collect the proper one), then headed in to clean the bank. The Bank got fairly short shrift as a result, though hopefully I covered all the bases, just did it in record time as I was in such a bad mood). Then home to re-arrange the furniture as best I could (which was not terribly effective as the clothes rack was not supposed to be there anymore, but had to be as I had to get into the wardrobe to transfer its contents). Then I fell into bed.

This morning I had all three cottages to clean, which was just fabulous as it was 30 odd degrees. Fortunately I got the two hotter ones done early enough to avoid the worst of it, and the third one was done by one (record time once again, despite having to get milk and tissues as we had run out). Since the linen service has gone downhill spectacularly since they became a monopoly, they had not delivered any towels etc that had been ordered last Monday, so the towels, face washers and bath mats came home with me to go through the machine. By this time it was not only 30 degrees but there was a strong gusty northerly blowing, which dried the towels pretty promptly and before the clotheslines fell over under the lateral pressure. So I loaded them into the ute, drove up to deliver/collect the keys, found they had gone out and shut the gate, opened the gate, drove up to the house, delivered the borrowed key (left it on the table in their sunroom where they will hopefully spot it) and drove back down to the gate, closed it and headed into town to deliver the towels to the cottages.

Then home to rediscover the bedroom floor, try a key of my own which, with a bit of juggling, worked, and sorted out stage one of the bedroom cleanup, which included changing the sheets, rediscovering the top of the bed again, and now I plan to collapse. Thank goodness it will be cooler tomorrow - it may put me in a better mood.

Well this is fun. My online security expires today and despite numerous attempts to renew it I keep getting a 404 error. I have emailed them, so hopefully they will have a solution.

It was a nice sunny day today, so hopefully the hot water is now hot once more, and I can have a nice hot shower tomorrow. Just the right sort of temperature - 20 degrees - not too hot, not too cool, just right!

My over the road neighbours have returned from their journey so I popped over with a bottle of cherry syrup.Them next door were already in residence and taking over the household - doing all the things they should have done prior to Judy's arrival since they were left in charge of the house - airing the bedding, making up the beds with fresh linen etc, and explaining why their teenage son had broken in with his mates and helped himself to the $300 Judy left behind in a drawer.......

I left them to it and took the dogs for a walk.

Today's fourteen was equally disappointing - barely reaching 12 degrees by mid-afternoon. At least the sun put in an appearance which was quite a relief as this morning's shower was quite cool! (I turn off the electrical boost on the solar hot water in summer). Hopefully by tomorrow it will have warmed up a bit. After all this grey misery tomorrow's 20 degrees will be a bit of a shock to the system. And next Saturday's forecast 31 will be a major shock!!

I cut more wood this morning and lit the fire at 10 and it has been going all day - quite actively this time as it had cooled down somewhat in the house. Not any more - it is quite toasty warm now.

The Dog Trials continued without incident and were packed up and gone by 3 this afternoon, so the dogs got to go down and inspect the smells left behind, much to their delight. Normally it is not possible to spot the area where they hold the sheep that are waiting to be herded, but today it is a bare muddy spot. I expect they were glad to get back to their normal paddock and some firm turf underfoot.

It was the Oatlands Market today so I went along to show support but found it difficult to find something to buy (I try to buy something when I go, to encourage the stall holders). Finally I settled on two lavender bushes in pots (a dollar each) and a slice of raised pork pie ($4.00) which exceeded my budget slightly, but they were both good purchases.

Then home via the Roxy to pick up some milk, and the rest of the day has been spent tending the fire between dog walks. Dinner was last night's roast reprised, and jolly good it was too!