All the burning widgets...

Now the difference between a farm and a dump is sometimes in the eyes of the beholder. In town you tend to run out of space for junk, no matter how fertile your imagination is for something you might need it for one day... but out here -- well, the shops are long way off any real established farm has a plethora of useful junk (some bordering on the antique. And that's the new stuff). I'm as good at it as the next fellow, or maybe even better. I have a fertile imagination for possible uses ;-).

Only - well, besides the space constraints, we are limited as to what we can take with us. Most of my workshop - which has tools that belonged to my Great-grandfather, can't go. Neither can all the garden tools and and all the useful bits - Garlon to slug-bait. And neither can my pile of lumber. Wood, planks, boards, the leftovers and salvage of hundreds of jobs and projects... So last night I was using it for firewood.

It felt so wrong.

Today I had a slithery drive into Mooi through the worst kind of mud -- red clay 2-5 inches of it on hard-pan. If you slow down... you stick. If you brake or turn, you slide. It takes a cool head and and good judgement to drive it which is why I was dismal at it and am still shaking like a diesel compactor. The truck's roof has mud on it. Miricle of miricles, I got through and back. Although it was a damn cheek allowing other vehicles on MY road. :-) There'll be new places to get stuck, but red clay I can't wait to bid an unfond farewell to. Flinders is mostly beach sand, limestone and granitic soils... are any red clay?

Grim day yesterday - my sister called to say my mum had had a stroke. Mum is 92 and 11/12ths, but other than macular degeneration leaving her with alomost no vision, in good health. She still gets taken for a walk -on her own - in the secure complex she lives in with my sister, by her little dog. Anyway, we drove down - about 2 and half hours I suppose. She's stabilised but still in a frightening way for a very indepentent lady. She's still able to speak co-herently but with difficulty, and has some movement of her left leg, although the arm is very weak. We came back in dark in the mist. An ‘interesting’ trip back as yesterday was the first major big storm of summer up here. They also chose yesterday to leave unmarked stone piles on the road (for putting into the road - about 5 foot high pile of shale boulders.) on one of the worst hills. We came home in rain and mist and nearly hit the first one, but managed to skirt all but the final one just off the top of the hill. They’d just dumped them so they had taken too much road and on the camber and soft edge we slid into the ditch of soft mud. In loading some of their damned rocks to put on the back for weight, B managed to trap her finger and possibly break it. We failed to get out, and so I walked back (a mile or so, in the total dark -there are no lights here and the mist was down) to fetch the other truck. There were 2 stuck logging trucks blocking the road further on. Anyway, I got the other truck (big old heavy diesel) and more by luck than good judgement managed to squeeze past the logging trucks (you cannot go slowly as the verge is soft, and the gap was so narrow I actually touched the side-mirror)
We managed to pull the other truck out and, after a fair epic (nearly stuck across the road) turned around and got home to delighted but very wet dogs - they had my study open and dry, but had to wait at the gate. The power was out and my computer (fortunately unplugged in case of storms) was not working. Found the problem, fixed it. However the radio sytem that does our internet is not working, and landline dialup is so bad as to make even getting a web page time out.
Oh and I have a tummy bug too.
As they say: It never rains in Southern California.