Sunday 15 May 2011

It’s 10.30am & I feel I’ve done a day’s work already! By 9.00 I’d cleared up poo, (the puppy’s) & sick (the cat’s), hoovered – I must remember to say ‘vacuumed’ - the living room (narrowing avoiding sucking up lego-Buzz-Lightyear’s visor, turned the eggs (incubating eggs must be turned 3 times daily), cleaned the en-suite bathroom and mucked out the laundry. My hoover (sorry, vacuum), whilst being excellent in many ways, doesn’t go around corners & keeps feebly flipping onto its back (I shan’t name the brand but YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE).

While much of this was going on, Bronte & Luke were using binoculars to view an eagle at the top of our hill, an odd eagle as it had a distinctive white head. By the time I ran upstairs, still only half dressed, they’d made so much noise it had wisely moved further up the hill & all that could be seen was its head poking up from behind sedge. Earlier, (just after Luke had woken me at 10 to 7 to ask what time he was allowed to wake us up), I’d sleepily claimed that the “dark triangle on the hill” was itself a lump of sedge. After being partially revived with a mug of tea & reading several pages of ‘Grimble’ (by Clement Freud, it’s a good read) to Luke, I crawled out of bed & began the day’s chores. After breakfast saw yet more poo on the upstairs deck, found the puppy & stuck her nose on it, then nailed the hearth rug to the living room floor (to stop it creeping about the room”) before lighting the fire. Oh, & sometime inbetween all this I put on a turkey brew outside, which is now boiling merrily in its 44 gallon drum, & fed the fluffy black chicks & lone peachick under heat lamps in the garage.

Bronte & Luke have gone swimming – I hate these Sunday morning swimming lessons. They return at lunchtime having stuffed themselves in a café, then go outside just as I’m coming in for my lunch & we end up being out of sync all day.

The day’s next challenge after feeding the animals, is to tackle my car. The cylinder head’s cracked & it’s going to cost $3,000 to fix. I’m trying some magic stuff that’s meant to fix it first. It means draining & flushing the water system, re-filling & running to hot (not boiling) temperature & then (slowly) adding the magic gunk. I don’t hold out a lot of hope frankly. Yesterday afternoon after a day of working in freezing conditions, I did manage to find the radiator drain plug & flush the system. It’s possibly the most difficult to reach drain plug in the universe. After lying under the car with icy water dripping on my face & running down my neck trying to replace the plug, I gave up for the day. My dark mutterings about “how many women have to fix their own cars?” were met by “you’d be surprised in Tasmania”. I refrained from pointing out that although the proportion of women who fixed their own cars in rural Tasmania, was probably higher than that in say suburban Sydney, it was still VERY LOW. I came in instead & made dinner – a turkey that had escaped from its pen a couple of days before & thus sealed its fate.