That cold snap was a bit of a shock to the system. The only way to keep warm was to hang around in the shed and mess about with dyes.

I had a jar of agrocyte sitting in the sun in salted rainwater which had gone a nice deep yellow, so I popped in some wool during the hot spell, but by the time the chill arrived it was still pretty anaemic. The same could be said for some other wool I had put in with the dark brown fermented lichen. That turned out a pale fawn.

So I cooked them (individually) in the crock pot and that did little to improve the situation. So I started adding powdered acid dyes. The fawn had quarry and wombat added (dark  blue and dark brown, and it has been grabbing in various places with the result it is a multicoloured yarn. The yellow had Landscape lichen and wheat added, and is now multiple shades of yellow, brown and green (fairly close shades though so not shockingly different. This left me with the difficulty of what to do with it, so I also dyed up some red. There was quite a bit of that, and it was fairly tightly packed into the crock pot. So I put Coral and Kangaroo paw powder at the bottom, then sprinkled Clay on the other end, added water and cooked. It went clear long before the yarn was dyed, so I added the three colours in sequence as the water ran clear and it seemed to work pretty well.

But there were still some very light patches on the red, so I went looking for the gum tree that is supposed to give red colour. I had been told it is common in these parts and easy to spot as it has a blue bloom over the entire tree. So finding a tree that matched that description, I brought it home, added some suffolk yarn and one skein of the red, and cooked it. And got a medium green/brown. Still it filled in the pale gaps of the red and the suffolk picked up some of the red as well so I threw in the other two skeins, added some more leaves and now have three matching red skeins.

I have also finally got the Singer going - the drive band arrived promptly (thanks Fran for that tip) and was fitted, and then I fiddled around trying to get the bobbin thread to join the needle thread, only to discover the needle goes in a different position to my old Singer (flat bit to the left). Then putting the bits in the wrong position resulted in further problems which, when rectified allowed sewing. But the tension was all over the shop so I had to dismantle the tension button and re-set it (following instructions from Youtube), and I had a stitch. The wrong length stitch. So that took further reference to the manual and a bit of pot luck as the gauge is worn off, and still I had a bit of tension problem and the occasional missed stitch. A new sharp needle sorted out the stitch issue, and a twiddle with the bobbin tension, and voila - I have a fully functional machine! Now to work out what all the feet are for. I seem to have two types in duplicate, so will see if I can swap them with someone who has excess ordinary feet, as the less complicated feet are the ones missing from the set.

Well it's still muggy and rather warmer than I would like it to be. Sporadic falls from time to time have cooled things down to a more reasonable 25, but it's still not my idea of pleasant.

The dog triallers left behind some rope leashes which will come in handy in the event I break Seb's leash - unless of course they come back to claim them when they will, of course, be returned. And I was a little alarmed to notice this morning that the aluminium decked seating Council blithely left down at the oval was missing. Turns out it has been missing for a few days, and it's all legitimately so. Apparently it is at Kempton at present. I refrained from commenting on how desirable it might be to let me know these things - after all, it is not my job to keep an eye on things for them, though I seem to get interrogated with vigour if they do want to know about something!!!

Pity I have to clean the bank tonight - I would much rather stay at home and blob this evening!

And I thought yesterday was hot! But it is, of course, cumulative and indoors it is bloody hot - outdoors it is hotter. Thank heaven for short hair - sticking my head under the shower at regular intervals.

Tonight's dinner will be fish and chips with salad (the salad at least is home grown). Dog walking has been confined to early morning and late evening, though now the dog trials have packed up and gone away for another year (but not before making a firm booking for next year!!) at least we can stay off the bitumen.

Picked some apricots but the mere thought of turning them into jam is unacceptable, so they will be accumulated till the cool change arrives. Apparently it will arrive with a bang tomorrow afternoon with a temperature drop of 10 degrees within an hour - bring it on I say.

And snow by Wednesday - I kid you not!

Even Billy thinks it's too hot to sit on my lap and is sprawled beside me on the couch.

There's always a variation between the plan and the execution - though the heat certainly made its presence felt! Quietly melting in front of the fan at the moment.

The lack of decent television programming combined badly with the behaviour of the blokes down the back - the one who had his dogs attached to the gate tried to tell me it was not a public lane (so apparently locking them to a person's private gate makes it OK?) and took some persuasion to act, and I remain doubtful he will stick to the arrangement at the end of the day. The chain was a diagonal from his car to the gate - actually attached to the gate with the result it was virtually impossible to open it (so much for the community fire escape to our safe haven!).

And the President of the club was less than helpful when I spoke to him about the lack of a booking - he assured me the chap had come out twice to make it but had not found me at home - I pointed out there is this thing called leaving a note in the letterbox asking me to get in touch - he shrugged and wandered off. So I was in such a bad mood that I stormed into Oatlands for an iced chocolate and caramel slice.

Just watching A Taste of Ladline on the Telly about the strange netted orchard/greenhouses i have noticed at Jericho - apparently very high tech, so presumably an initiative arising from the irrigation. At least I now know what they are!

That small kitten has been in the back yard again - it is a little butterfly of a thing and happily independent though starting to show the effects of living on the streets so I have set the trap (which I had dismantled for rooster transport) and will see if I can catch him. I have put a bale of straw over the top of the trap so it creates a dry sheltered spot in the unlikely event it rains.

It was a tad warm today, though not as warm as it is going to be tomorrow. The plan for tomorrow is, of course, total lockdown. Today however was spinning in public day in Oatlands so I joined with various fellow-spinners in the High Street, clinging to the shade (though not entirely successfully) until the sun moved round and made life less hot. If you are on Facebook, go to the page of The Lucky Ewe at Oatlands and you will find not only a photo of me hard at work, but some footage of me spinning, focussing on my hands (ignore the state of my hands!).

While my body was shaded fairly early on, my left foot was in the sun a little longer. A little too long as it turned out. I was sitting here wondering what had bitten the top of my foot, giving it a rub, applying insect repellant (which I have found is as effective as Stingose) and finally had an actual look at it, only to realise it was the bit of foot that was not covered by sandal. Ooops.

Got home to discover the Dog Trials are setting up camp down at the Oval. Pity they don't have a booking. Bloody good luck for them I don't have another booking. I will be suggesting our President have a word with them this year as this is the third year in a row they have done this. Their argument is they always hold them on the Australia Day weekend. Which is true. Except the years they don't.

Since it will be mid-30s tomorrow (and this time i think it really will be), I have put up two jars for solar dyeing. One is derived from a fungus I found growing on the tree over the road which is a sort of brownish yellow, the other is a 1:2 ammonia fermentation of the hairy lichen I found on the firewood, with an iron mordant. I am told the fungus doesn't need a mordant so I am believing them.

The lichen with iron is a deep chocolate colour liquid which will hopefully be as rich in the yarn, but may not be (I will overdye with some Wombat is necessary) and the other is a brownish yellow. Fingers crossed it works as there are a lot of balls of Bluebell in the jars!

Multiple sluicings with mouth wash have erradicated the tenderness of the tooth (and cancelled out the taste of the 'tooth shampoo' used by the dentist. And chicken noodle soup with saltines sogged into it was a filling dinner.

It has been hot and still here today but is now windy - hopefully presaging a bit of rain, but I won't hold my breath.

My efforts today have ground to a halt with washing the windows and trying to establish the surveillance camera. Washing the windows has had its usual alarming effect of making me think panes of glass are missing, and the camera is being a pain.

The process for setup is multi-stage, first the app connection then the computer. The app is fairly straight forward but it asks you to establish a username, suggesting an email address is preferable. So I can now scan and freeze frame and record to phone etc etc with relative ease (the scan option is slow and a bit bumpy), but setting up the computer software has proven a little more problematic. Why? Because it asks you to log in using your username, but then tells you it must not contain symbols other than numbers, underscores and stops. The @ symbol is not one of those permitted, which renders the established username useless on the computer. The app does not permit changing the username. Sigh.

I will have to uninstall it and reinstall it and hope that works - but frankly I can't be bothered. Got the fidgets today which might have been fixed if I had enough fuel left to go for a drive to the beach, but after this week's expenses that is simply not an option, and I suspect I am too restless for a nap, though I will give it a try.

Thanks Guys, I haven't had time to sit and feel sorry for myself as I had a dental appointment this morning so after walking the dog was straight out the door to get there. This was for a checkup, mapping of my teeth, and a filling in the other tooth I had broken - no more dental wax for me!

After I headed to Moonah to Jaycar which seems to be the place to be if you want surveillance equipment. Once I managed to gag the sales chappy who was trying to sell me $500 kits and remind him that when I said I was looking for a price more like 10% of that, not 10% OFF that, he settled down into a human being and sold me a unit that was three times more than I wanted to spend, but a lot less than what he was trying to sell me.

It is amazingly versatile (assuming it works). It has day and night vision, a swivel head and comes with an app that lets you drive it from your phone where-ever you are. With the phone you can move it around, talk to anyone you see (get the hell off my property!) and store up to a day's worth of images on the chip. You can also transfer it to your computer so you can freeze-frame stuff. Clearly it will take a while to learn to drive. The only thing it didn't come with was window signs warning it was in use.

That sorted, I stopped off at Cove Hill and bought some coffee as well as visiting the best fish and chip shop in Tassie (outside the Woolworths). They do the best potato cakes (scallops) you can possibly imagine with great crunchy light batter and properly cooked potato! I scurried off to Dysart to park under the pine trees to eat this and when I was finished I discovered that the tooth that had been repaired last week had lost one of the two remaining fragments of actual tooth. So back to the dentist for more work. It has worn off  now, but I think I will be wanting a pain killer at bedtime. Since all that remains of the tooth was one tiny sliver, a large blob of amalgam and a similar sized lump of white filling, there was not much to work with, but he has fashioned a sort of defacto crown from filling material.

Needless to say dinner tonight was soup and yoghurt.