Building a new future, one precarious stone at a time...

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” 

Mother Teresa

Thanks Bruny Island for your therapeutic qualities - again!

Mountain Madness

Time will say nothing but I told you so...

W. H. Auden

Crazy times up here in the hills.  The much maligned Musso died a week ago - apparently if a timing chain snaps the whole shebang becomes an inert pile of metal - great design and another indication that since the dawn of the automobile the outward appearance may have improved but the old internal combustion engine is still an 18th century-style barely controlled explosion.  To quote Norman Mayersohn:

"The internal combustion engine is a throwback. It is a holdover from the age of steam. Its details have been refined, its materials improved and its output multiplied, but the basic mechanism—a piston moving up and down in a cylinder bore—was invented before the phonograph or the light bulb.
The product of an era of cheap, abundant energy, the combustion engine is also flagrantly wasteful... today’s gasoline engine typically converts 14 to 30 percent of the energy stored in fuel into useful work. The rest is lost as heat and friction."

So we are now out looking for an inefficient fossil fuel burner again <sigh>.  Thanks Musso for a swag of stories and a dry bank account.

On Sunday we tried to go to an Easter church service - honest.  We got up in good time, filled everyone up with pancakes, put on our Sunday best - and then headed off.  Along the way we were flagged down by an old lady on the side of the road.  She is 89 and has just handed in her licence.  We have seen her about as she used to drive only in first gear at about 20 kph - you could hear her coming!  Anyhoo now she refuses to pay the delivery charge for a Sunday paper.  Far better for us to forego 20 minutes of our time and a litre or so of fuel to ferry her to the shops and back!

With "good deeds" under our belt it was time for the "faith" part and off we scampered again, late now, to church.  Well thanks to not reading the fine print in last week's bulletin we arrived to an empty carpark and church - the Easter service was half an hour away and we were already 15 minutes late - oh well, I guess deeds will have to do this week.  Kym was near crying with laughter.

Whilst out looking for a car today, we were directed towards a wonderfully well kept little white sedan driven back and forth to the shops, as the sales pitch goes, by a little old lady in Mountain River.  Yep, the same car the old lady down the road had just switched for our free taxi service.

To finish up this missive of madness, today I looked out the back and saw two moons, one normal and one that appears to be a fully operational Death Star.  We know this because we're watching our way through Star Wars with the new kids because it's a great story illustrating that you can use your power for good or evil.  Some of us still cried when Darth Vader died in "Return of the Jedi", so I guess we have some more work to do on the whole ethics/morality spectrum.

Mooning in the mountains

Now that's crazy...

Making it up as we go along

“Pressure is something you feel when you don't know what the hell you're doing.” 

Peyton Manning

Autumn creeps inexorably into our lives, with football training commencing (!!) and long days of gentle rain.  Also a long day in the garden yesterday - now four beds are cleared and ready for Brassica season which commences over the Easter break (4 days but who's counting...)

Mr Lanky on the boundary takes a picture of the little ones running about

From the balcony as the rain obliterates Sleeping Beauty

We have had some challenges on the domestic front, as our new babies try to settle into a routine. Having regular anything has not been previously part of their experience and so they find it a bit scary, and react accordingly. It is interesting that in the old days we would be quick to judge "What a horrible child", whereas now we are more likely to opine "What horrible behaviour, what is causing the meltdown?"

Without a lot of information, and being the last to find out anything, we can only hold, soothe and continue to provide a safe, warm and consistent environment. Visitors are aghast at the chaos, but in fact it is no worse than our remembered early days in Canberra with two rugrats running amok - and look how they turned out!

Positives are celebrated, and isn't that a nice recipe for a good day.  Go on, give yourself a hug and come visit the circus!

The Fading Summer

“It looked like the world was covered in a cobbler crust of brown sugar and cinnamon.” 

Sarah Addison Allen, First Frost

There has been a bit of mini-surge in temperatures of late and so we were at the beach again on Friday night. The light was beautiful just as the sun was setting so we snapped the vista, and then a quick pic of Jess waiting for ice cream (yes we know she's a little portly but Kym keeps saying she's just big boned).

Difficult to snap a bad pic in this light...

In the right light even Jess is a darl...

The garden continues to over produce and just today we started the Passata experiment - it seems a success!

Yum!

Finally we recently attended the Huon Valley Small Farms Expo which was going great until a little hallucinogenic material must have snuck into the sausage in a bun - damn hippies!

We're hoping (hopping?) a few others saw the pink rabbit...