Category: Personal History

A mixed day,  with some moments of frustration, loss and futility and some great success and serendipity as balance. .

Today was the first business day of the new year for many businesses intown.

My mother in law came off her farm bike just after Christmas,  twisting a knee rather badly in the process.  She is as tough as nails and so driven to work she won’t sit still.  She had an MRI in Dubbo prior to new years and has been waiting for the local GP to reopen for results. Called for an appointment at nine and got no answer,  tried again a few minutes later to be told “no appointments today”  and  “we are so busy we are not taking appointments for days in advance”.  Some bloody triage. We are thinking N may have to go wait outside the office in the morning to secure an appointment by polite force of will.

We missed the bloody bin day.  I don’t even want to talk about the complete lack of recycling.

The hardware store in particular I have been hanging out for. It turns out that their prices on timber are so preposterous that the chook tractor I want to build will have to wait for a trip to a big box store in Dubbo.  The local’s shelves are more than half empty and they only had two of the five things I went in for. You very much get the impression that they have given up and are just trying to empty their stock before the end.

We joined the local library today and I’m pleased to have the first local hire of the new Neil Stephenson.

F has effectively toilet trained himself since arriving. Today we’ve had to introduce some baby sign for 1’s & 2’s as he can’t yet say what he needs. The end of nappies looms,  hooray.

I dug a trench,  carted bricks to cover the conduit with, fought with and eventually fed the phone cable from a coil on the water meter back into the house. Throughout all this thinking that it was likely wasted effort. When at nearly ten o’clock tonight I managed to get dial tone I was delighted. When the modem connected,  ecstatic.

But…  My laptop is dead again.  Froze up after login this morning and hasn’t made it past the password screen without crashing since. I have backed up all important docs and both hard drives are likely in working order but the machine itself is currently irreplaceable. Spending $1200 on a desktop that can’t travel or $2k+ on a laptop that can prior to May isn’t very realistic. I seem to have found at least a partial stability fix for N’s really very good desktop at least.

The iPhone my  cousin found for me arrived today. I’m so grateful to have a working phone again but I want my Samsung fixed. It’s interesting trying out the other dominant os for the first time. There have been some hurdles so far, none of the Google apps maps,  chrome,  mail,  keep etc would install without an ios update which I’d been avoiding as I’ve heard it slows down older phones like the jesusphone 4 I have been given. Also the update is a gig and a bit and until the internet came good I was struggling to think how I would achieve that. All working now though I’m still wondering how people survive without the back button.  I’ll try for a fair comparison in a week or so as this phone is of about the same generation as my now limited samsung. 

Creative out put limited to hanging some art.

The weather in Cobar has been surprisingly mild, we have even had a cool night or two.

It won’t last, 40 degree brain melting dry heat is bound to reappear at some point. Today we bought a season pass to the pool for a cool $240. That makes about twenty more visits before April for it to be worth it. It shouldn’t be hard to do really.

Window cleaning, moping, paving and a bit of drawing took up the rest of the day. Drawing rough thumbnails of each evolution card is now almost complete. I have also begun thumbnailing the terrain cards as well. The printed templates I made yesterday are working well. 

Possible we will be at the farm tomorrow night and it being New Years Eve an evening post is unlikely. Where ever you are welcoming in 2016 I hope you have a lovely night.

Today involved some hot and bloody work. Marking lambs with ear notches, ear tags, tail and testicle bands and plenty of vivid pink ‘Click’ anti-fly spray. N’s family farm runs meat sheep of a ‘Dorper’ variety, which do not have the skin folds characteristic of the wool sheep like ‘Merino’ and thus, thankfully do not need ‘mulesing’. Most of the lambs we worked with today will end up on plates over the next 6 months. Tail and testicle banding clearly hurts the lambs after a time, but the ear piercing and notch cutting is obviously immediately excruciating. I’m grateful that the farm’s notch only requires a single cut.

I eat meat and I am generally quite comfortable with being involved in its production from time to time. I wouldn’t be a farmer for quids though.

The moment these lovely ladies were reunited with their freshly marked lambs.

A photo posted by @liatach on Dec 28, 2015 at 4:12am PST

It occurred to me that the English onomatopoeia for sheep ‘Baaa’ is completely inaccurate. I think Arabic get’s it better according to the list here anyway (under subheading sheep bleating).

I spent what remained of the afternoon tidying, unpacking and beginning to create card template sheets in Illustrator which I will draw card roughs onto over the comming days and weeks.

Edit:

Found something wonderful care of a friend. John Malcovich being awesome.

As mentioned yesterday the dominant species in my new back garden is catheads. Every activity in the garden is fraught with periodic winces of pain and barb removal. Horrible beastly things. Our first major backyard project has dual purposes. A. we can use the washing line and any dropped items will no longer be rendered immediately unusable by contact with the ground and B.  We are rapidly removing the threat posed to curious infants by precarious walls of crushing brick death.

I’ve spent way too long figuring out how to share this. But I haven’t managed to get it to embed properly. Click through for a photo sphere of the garden pre cleanup.

Beginning paving. Bricks are now past the base of the Hill’s Hoist.

A photo posted by @liatach on Dec 27, 2015 at 3:06am PST

Our paving project looks good so far. The piles of bricks are diminishing but the work has not been without its hazards. Each of us has been pricked by catheads repeatedly on the hands and many other sensitive places besides. This afternoon I trod on a rusty nail, it went straight through my boot. Hurts a great deal but is totally fine.  After cleaning it up properly I did go and check out the local hospital and get a tetanus booster to be safe.

The nail that pierced my boot and then the ball of my right foot by 5-10mm. Prompting a trip to the local for a tetanus booster.

A photo posted by @liatach on Dec 27, 2015 at 2:36am PST

Phone problems continue. For a moment this morning I thought I had a fix for the optus network at least. It was not to be. Something is very wrong with my phone and I cannot fix it. However thanks to the social efforts of my cousin Caitlin I will at some point in the future be moving to the ios dark side.

Tonight’s post is written and shared from my computer by tethering to N’s phone with my sim inserted.

Today’s creative energies have been focused on visualising the chook tractor construction.

Since my last post, my family and I have loaded a truck and driven in convoy to our new home eleven hundred kilometres distant from the first. We have unpacked and shifted,  drilled, hung and assembled from morning until late at night for days on end.

We have celebrated Christmas with two ecstatic little boys and N’s very welcoming family.

During all of this I have been effectively offline. My phone which I transfered to Telstra in the days prior to the move decided the day before the big event that it would not like to play nicely with the Telstra network and has refused to do so 99% the time since. Late this afternoon after trying everything including dissembling the phone and inserting pieces of foam between the circuit boards, performing factory resets, purchasing cheap competitors sims and scouring forum posts on Ns’ phone I found what appeared to be a fix.  My delight was shortlived as I am now inexplicably unable to raise a single bar of signal with any sim and I fear there must be some fault with the phone itself. I neither want to nor can afford to purchase a new phone which compounds my distress and frustration. This post is being written on the tablet tethered to N’s phone. Home Internet will be connected at some time in the next 4 weeks. This being dependant on my burying the phone line in conduit and reattaching it to the house in coming days.

Almost all energy has been going into the unpack and setup and no small amount has already been spent on the garden in which the dominant species of ground cover is currently ‘Cathead’ burrs. We have constructed compost heaps and begun paving critical areas for the comfort and safety of both ours and our children’s feet. Two large raised garden beds made of tank rings have been positioned and partially filled and plans have been drawn up for a chook tractor. The chook tractor will have to wait for the hardware store to reopen.

I had hoped to include a bunch of pictures with this post butthey’ll have to wait. Back to daily posts as of today anyway.

Looking forward to getting stuck in to roughing out a lot of game cards over coming weeks.

Merry Christmas everybody,  with love from Cobar.