Mollie!

I hope you are all having a great day where you are. It is gorgeous here in rural Central New South Wales! Already got the washing on the line and got the next load on.

Our beautiful boxer, Mollie, had her first bath yesterday as she had discovered a kangaroo carcass and absolutely stank. However, this morning, Gary discovered the rest (or so we thought) of the kangaroo in our backyard and had to dispose of that, then Mollie bought us a gift... she bought us some more of the roo and left in on the front doorstep, so now we have to try and rid the house of this awful smell.

Dogs can be gross creatures! and of course, she now needs another bath LOL

Isn't she cute!!

Have a great day wherever you are!

I am so slack!

LOL I keep coming back to this Blog and thinking I need to keep it updated slightly more often than I do :)

Trouble is, I get all carried away in my Aussie Caz Designs Blog, then I forget I should pop in here every now and then :)

Rebekah and Chris came up from Sydney last weekend and they have a new DSLR camera. they spent a lot of time taking pics outside, which is something I haven't done for ages, but I have yet to see the photos that they took!

but.... we did get this photo of this cute little baby Eastern Bearded Dragon (lizard). At first we thought it might be a Water Dragon, as Gary found it on the pool, as in .... in the water, using the surface tension not to drown LOL However, after asking Chris (SIL) who is our animal expert, we are assured it isn't. Shame, as we had carefully placed it on a lillypad in our fishpond LOL

However, the little critter did make his way off the lilly pad and was last seen streaking across the grass to take cover in the undergrowth that pretends to be our garden!

isn't it cute!

WOW!

Well as it has been almost 12 months since I posted on this Blog, I thought it time that I updated LOL

We have had a busy year. At the end of May, we were offered the chance to move a few kms down the road to a HUGE house that needed looking after. We went up and looked around and then had a huge decision to make. The new place was enormous.... 8 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, library, sunroom, games room..... and so on! I think the decider in the end was the swimming pool, tennis court and the fact it was so much warmer than Burgoon. The property was owned by the same landlord and he was keen to get someone in to care for the house as he wanted to keep it as a potential family home for the younger members of his extended family in the future.

We decided to make the move. One week, whilst Nicholas was in Sydney with Rebekah and Chris, Gary and I packed up the house and moved everything using our little 6X4 trailer!

We have a kitchen that is full of cupboards and, although there were mice when we moved in, there were and still aren't any in the pantry. This was a huge problem at Burgoon, where we could sit and listen to the traps going off every few seconds at times! The cats have done their job and I haven't seen a mouse for ages :)

We are convinced that this house was once run by a very well off family. There is a bedroom and a bathroom only accessed from being outside the back of the house which we are sure was for a groundsman and another bedroom and bathroom near the kitchen which would have been for a housekeeper.

We have a aerial photo of the property from some years ago, this shows a sweeping driveway and a double garage around the side of the house. This is now gone, and the garage has been enlarged and become a huge gamesroom. We have the tennis table in this room, a TV and the Nintendo, the bar fridge and our new Christmas present, a pool table! And there is still room to spare!!

There are three bedrooms down the side of the house and I have one as a scrapbooking room and one as a sewing room. The first room is the guest room at the moment, but we have applied to become Foster Parents and so will become a child's bedroom. The sunroom off these bedrooms and this has our computers and Gary's train set.

The sunroom off the formal lounge is now our library and there was an enormous dining room table in the games room when we arrived, and we have moved this into the library as well.

The house has an outside eating area that is surrounded by flyscreen which is lovely. It needs a few repairs but will be lovely when it is finished.

Well, I have to go now and get some work done. I will be back with more updates soon!

More visitors to our garden

Well, the other day we noticed that the Farmer had let a couple of Bulls into the paddock that houses our driveway. We often end up with stock in this paddock as it is used as a holding area for stock that they are working with in the big shed. These bulls were HUGE!! One of them decided to lie down under some trees at the edge of our garden fence and take it easy under the shade of the trees. Gary went down to say hello, but the bull wasn't really interested and got up and wandered off to a more private tree :)

In the morning, I went out to the "board room" so called because it is the only room in the house that has floor boards, and something caught my eye out of the window. It was the bull. He had wandered in through our garden gate, tiny gate, and was making himself at home eating the grass around the washing line. Gary got a couple of good pics of him. After a while we decided he should leave our garden as he kept trying to push round the side of the house and I was a bit worried he would fall into the septic pit! Not a nice thought! So Gary got out and walked behind him, back out the bottom garden gate (large) and he went back to his tree :) What a life LOL

Isn't he gorgeous!!

Nicholas and Cricket

Poor Nicholas has had a run of bad luck with cricket this season. It has either been raining and called off or, as it is now, he has hurt himself and cannot play. Last Saturday week he did get to play a game though, and so finally got to wear all his gear that he got for his birthday. Even that game ended on a bit of a sour note though, just as it was his turn to bat, his team got run out and so he never made it to the pitch. Gary did get some great pics of him though, all done up and practising with his coach.

Nicholas is bowling...

Great swing :)

Such a busy life I lead...

Well, it has been positively ages since my last post, I have been so busy, but no idea what doing LOL

Do you like the new look? Although I design my own digital scrap booking kits, I had to purchase someone else's work to make the changes to this Blog. I love this Kit, it comes with heaps of backgrounds, three different headers and lots of other bits and pieces. It also comes with full illustrated instructions for making the changes to the code and then uploading to Blogger. I still have a few things to sort out, 'cos I lost my favorite Blogs, among other things, but I'm sure I'll get it figured out sooner or later.. no biggie :) This, and another Blog Building kit, is available at Scrap Professor and is created by Tallula Moon Designs. What a clever clogs she is :)

I have a few photos to share with you since my last post. Nicholas has been in the wars... poor thing got smashed by a fast bowler at cricket practice and ended up with a really bruised shoulder and also a bruise from the rebound, on his chin. Then last week, he fell over in the school yard playing handball, and has a suspected fractured wrist. So now he is in a splint and wearing a sling for two weeks til they check him out again at the hospital, then the cast will either be off or on again for another month. Of course he is more annoyed because it is his left wrist and doesn't prevent him from writing :) However, I have noticed that it doesn't prevent him from playing on the computer, but does from putting away the dishes... LOL

and here he is pretending to be in agony LOL

We have had some amazing downpours since moving to NSW. They always seem to happen on the weekend which prevents Nicholas from playing cricket. Last weekend, we got another rainstorm, so I got out and took a few photos. I am not as good as Gary is at catching the closeups but I did get some nice shots :)

It was lovely, you could hardly see two feet in front of you, but it was so nice to see the ground just drinking it up! After living with the drought in South Australia, it is wonderful to be experiencing all this rain!

News on my health

For those of you that have been following my health issues, I went back to the Drs yesterday. I saw my GP in the morning and found out that the blood tests I had done were all fine (the CT scan I had showed a possible issue with my pituitary gland) but he thought maybe the specialist might want an MRI done as well (didn't need one of these). Then off to Orange to see the ENT Specialist. The CT scan that I had done showed a soft tissue growth in the airspace within my inner ear, however the specialist did not feel that this was causing my dizziness at all. He felt that this was probably the result of childhood infections, I had a lot of ear infections as a kid, and nothing to worry about. Apparently the problem was caused by the move to New South Wales ( I knew this place wasn't good for my health LOL ). I had upset all these crystals in my inner ear and they were floating around all over the place instead of sitting nicely in the bottom of the canal as they were supposed to . He gave it a lovely name, which I promptly forgot, and then made me lie down on my back on a couch with my head tipping over the end of the bed, looking at the floor. This had the immediate effect of making the room spin. I had to stay there til it stopped spinning and then look over the other shoulder and do the same again. As I had just eaten Hungry Jacks for lunch, you can imagine how difficult it was becoming to retain this food LOL

Then I had to sit up and recover... and then he did it again!! only this time, I wasn't as dizzy and no where near as long. The whole point of the exercise was to resettle the crystals and put them back where they belong. I now have to spend the next three days not looking up or down, not moving my head suddenly, not bending down, and sleeping sitting upright as possible. Very difficult! If that wasn't enough though, I came out to the counter and was handed a bill for $140.00, which I was so NOT expecting! I must have looked shocked 'cos the lovely receptionist asked me if I would like to take an account and pay it later, which I agreed with as I didn't have that sort of money anyway :) The whole experience was horrible, the Dr was gorgeous, and so were his staff, but the test left me feeling so sick I couldn't walk around anymore and had to stay in the car whilst Gary did the grocery shopping. Fortunately he was there as I couldn't have driven the car either.

On the bright side, Nicholas finally got to use his cricket gear at practice, although it was really wet and muddy and it did rain whilst they were playing, he still got his bat, ball and gloves muddy, so he was one happy boy!

And... look what I found when I was making tea the other night... I have never seen one of these before, so we had to get a picture!