Friday, October 7th …..

Jamie made us a roast lamb dinner last night; we’re certainly not going without decent meals just because Marilyn is away. He tells me he will turn the rest of the leg into a sweet curry with apples and sultanas. I haven’t had a curry like that for years and can’t wait.

We went out to Bunnings yesterday to pick up some timber to make a box around the water heater on the back verandah. The plan is to put Marilyn’s clothes dryer on top to get it out of the way but still make it useful in bad weather. Because of the light frame of our metal cottage, I’m uncomfortable about hanging the dryer in the normal way. Just another little job among the many we have on our endless list. We got our eye on a tool cupboard at Bunnings which we’ve realised we can’t live without so Jamie will go in to buy that today. The one we looked at is cheap and pretty basic but the top of the range, at $2400, has a CD player and a fridge. You’d have to live in your shed to justify that cost.

It’s fabulous to have a good shed but it’s important to have the right organisation; otherwise it becomes just another place to store rubbish.

I’ve discovered a very interesting TV program which is on the ABC at 10 oçlock each morning. It’s called How the Earth Was Made and looks at volcanoes and glaciers and tectonic plates and so on. Yesterday’s episode was set at Loch Ness in Scotland (of all places!). I was astounded to hear that Scotland has not always been physically attached to England. In fact, it used to be part of North America but during the break-up of the supercontinent, Pangaea, it was rammed together with England and drifted to its present position. I’ve always said that Scots are fundamentally different from the English, but now it is clear that the differences are more than skin-deep – they are seated in the bedrock.

The program also showed that Loch Ness is only 10000 years old; not much chance of a pre-historic monster living there!

Our flock of galahs has been steadily growing since the first pair arrived a few days ago. There were a dozen this morning and there are still five scratching around in the grass just outside the window. The cat ignores the other birds but watches the galahs intently, making that particular sound that cats make when they see birds. (that’s when she’s not sleeping, of course. She’s a very strange cat with particular routines. In the morning, she won’t rest until she’s had a little bowl of milk and a drink from the kitchen tap. But, that’s only in the morning; during the rest of the day, she drinks normally and eats her biscuits from a bowl. In the evening, she insists on finishing off Marilyn’s dessert, especially if it’s a little tub of chocolate mousse. She licks what she can and uses her paw to get the last scraps from the corner of the tub. Who knows what things go on in the mind of a cat! As Marilyn says, we always seem to get the oddest pets.