Alas, poor Zucchini

I finally had to take them out. The fruit was actually dying on the plant. Still, I got the last five, and here we are not far off June. The seasons change, and right now dawn (above) is just spectacular. The book is finally moving -4K words yesterday, but that is meaning I see little but my desk.

I've planted out a garlic clove under a plastic cup - partly to follow Quilly's advice, and partly to keep the $#@#ing mice digging it up and eating it. Roll on kitty-cats! (yes, not good for birds, and I am sorry about that, but the mice are just so darned destructive.) I've also planted - in an enclosed bed Jerusalem artichoke -also mouse sheilded. Oh and we have had an outbreak of snails again. Yep, small farming, dead easy, innit? Anyway, in the electricity conservation stakes (I think this heat-leaking piece of rubbish oven is a major culprit) I did my best to cook on lounge heater/stove thing tonight. Hmm. Well the big 'camp oven'cast iron pots were supposed to produce pitas. It was more like frizbees. Anyway very tasty frizbees, and so what if they don't open up for filling. The filling went fine on top :-)

Oh, the joys of being a mother!

Another 11 sleeps and then our children arrive to visit us.

I am so excited, and in a way anxious. I want them to love our new lifestyle, have a lot of fun and be happy on the island. But I am also realistic, and realise that they are not just little clones of the two of us. (At 6ft and 6ft 2, they are not little at all.) The boys both have minds of their own, and will decide for themselves about Flinders, but I do want the island to put on a bit of a show, with good weather and beautiful sunsets for them to enjoy. The sunrises can do what they like, the boys will not be around to appreciate them anyway.

With both of them studying in South Africa, we have resigned ourselves to only seeing Paddy and James twice a year, if we are lucky. So I just want every minute to count as a happy time. Cloud cuckoo land??

Electricity

Today started off as a really good day, I was taken out for coffee out in town,(while Dave stayed home to write). With lots of chat and laughs, it was great to feel part of the community.

I also got some of my requested books from the library, the Tas library service is very good at sending me most of the books that I ask for. I am taking part in the Australian 2010 MS Readathon, so I am reading some of the classics that they suggest, as well as books of my own choice. So my reading list on their site is very varied.

Then we got our electricity bill. They are only sent out every 3 months, so we had no idea that the two of us were using about 50% more electricity than our landlord and his family did. (And the same time last year is listed on the bill, so we don't have to just take his word for it.)

So, now to the questions. I only use my computer off and on during the day, should I turn it off when not in use? Will turning it on and off shorten its life? I watch TV in the evenings, should I leave it on standby the rest of the time, or turn it right off? We do all the obvious things like not leaving on lights etc already.

But now there is a glorious fire in the sitting room, and Dave attacked the big logs with our new blockbuster, so we have lots of firewood. (Until we got here, I thought a blockbuster was the description of a movie, not a lumberjacks tool!) So who can be sad, while there is warmth and the wonderful smell of dinner cooking?

Rain

Flinders Island is doing a passable imitiation of Cape Town in winter - which was rather what B and I feared when we moved here (and has not been true so far). The rain today is thin and damp-making and persistant (most of the time rain here is big drops, and a lot of them - very wet, but not persistant, if you get the difference).

We went into Whitemark PO this morning and posted off a smell-o-gram to Roland. A niffy t-shirt... hope it helps. It should be with him by tomorrow as we sent it express. Then we had tea with Inge and came home before leading fringe of rain. This sort of rain makes staying indoors and warm and dry attractive (I've HEARD gung-ho types (inevitably with desk jobs) say how they like being on a heaving deck in a force ten gale and sleeting rain etc. By the time you have tried it for a few years you may still like the excitement, but well, just being out in the persistant rain and cold wind is not fun. I've tried it. The good part is coming in and being safe and warm and dry afterwards. Facing the elements when you can do that is bracing stimulating, yes. But not day after day - as someone who once fish-farmed through a Cape winter can tell you) So it's been a good day for the fall of Galata. We move on in the book. Only about 2K words, but it was a hard piece to write.

The fire is warm (and thus the house reasonably so) we've had a tasty supper of a clam pasta, and a piece of choccy (BIG treat. Chocolate is one of those things I'm not even prepared to go all self-sufficiency on.) It left me thinking that this phase of our move has to start moving along soon. By next year we might heaven help us be in a shed or a yurt or a tent...

But that is for next year.

Signs of the times.

It is with a little sadness that I must report we now have a very posh sign at our supermarket (the island has one). I no longer feel I belong to this exclusive club AKA 'locals' who actually know where it is. Sort of 'if you don't KNOW where it is (straight across the road from the pub, next to the petrol pumps) then you don't belong and should be obliged to live on a diet of dead sea-birds, saltbush and old Boags cans. It'll make a man of you and eventually you'll be fit to be let into our secret. Ah well. They've done a good job of signage, but it's, well, rather ordinary. Perhaps we can arrange for a few misleading pointers via Green Island, just so that strangers can appreciate the treasures wrested from the erratic belly of the ferry instead of just thinking we have supermarkets like everwhere else.

Knowing the top sekrit location of the Emita Hall (where the Cracker Night was held) is definitely a sign of being one of the local cognosenti. It hasn't lowered itself to any of these infra dig signs, and is suitably discretely hidden behind a screen of trees. And no... it isn't actually IN Emita. Well. Maybe by some definitions of 'in', or 'Emita'. The Emita church and Fire Station mark that well-know landmark 'the end of the tar road', and may possibly share the area with some feral peacocks, but not houses or a town or even village as such, no. That - which in my ignorance might be Emita (Google Earth says so) or possibly Port Davies or both or neither, is about two kilometres back. There is also a dirt road turn off inland just before the Fire Station. If you follow this road for a further two and half kilometers, past nary a sign of human habitation you will come that betraying feature...

A fork in the road!

And if you KNOW where to go, you will take neither of the two roads, but proceed down the track straight in front of you, rather obscured by trees, you'll be there in a hundred metres or so. It's really obvious (if you have lived here since birth) :-).

I can't wait to be able to smile friendlily (because almost everyone here will, and wave. Smile and wave, smile and wave. That really is the way it is here) at the lost tourists, and say "203 Palana Rd.? Now who lives there?" (and look suitably blank). "Ah, you mean Joe Smith's house? Now why didn't you say so? Well now, go back the way you came, turn left at the third brown cow, go on down there until you get power-pole number 4323, and then turn right onto the track. It's about two km down that just after the burned out stump..."

Kolskoot!

Which means bulls-eye... or more directly shooting the spot. Time and tide were more or less right tonight and we went down to see if we could get some more squid -- B was netting the third one of the evening getting quite blasé about her skill at avoiding the squirts of water or ink... when it did not work as planned. My stocks and shares in the marriage stakes are fairly low right now because I couldn't help laughing. It got her neatly between the legs, with a big inky-wet splurt. Very cold and very inky. Some serious be nice to B effort is called for, I think.

I've thought about Roly - quite a lot - and have decided I'll contact the quarantine kennel in the morning to check how he is eating, and if I can send the old boy a smell-o-gram (say a sweaty t-shirt, smelling of dad) and some other treats. Doing something is better than just worrying.

And now to Galata (historic fortress across the Golden Horn from Constantinople) again.

cracker night

I'm a worried about my Roly Boy - he's lost a lot of weight apparently. I had a chat to the vet in Sydney tonight. He's fine otherwise as far as he can see, just very thin. I so want to see him and check him out myself - but even if I could afford to, I think it would break his big doggy heart to see me and have me leave. Oh how I wish I could explain. I am heartsore and worried again.

Anyway, it was the last cracker night tonight SES fundraiser at which the old flares are let off along with some fireworks - apparently firework rules are changing and they won't be able to do it again. New public liability rules or something. I do wonder if anyone in big city ever thinks how all these petty rules (it's the rescue guys and fire service doing this display not arb people) impact small communities. Literally half the island (or of those under 70) must have been there, kids running around together, having fun. Half the island would be maybe 300 people - which by city standards isn't even a shopping-mall crowd. It was... very warming to have a fair number of people talk to us, greet us.

Anyway, I'm a bit too down and worried to write chatty and amusing blog posts tonight, so I'll go back to trying to write a rather grizzly murder scene in the current book