So Long

Oh dear. It's so long since I played with my blog that I had actually forgotten my password. Tragedy! Now have a natty little bit of software called Roboform, so my ageing memory should no longer cause me any anguish.

These last school holidays were very fruitful. This year I have been really slack and achieved very little during the holidays, but this time I decided to get off my butt and do something. Each day I made myself do an intensive clean out of part of a room. Brilliant. I managed to get through two complete rooms and the front hallway and since then another room. Everything was washed, dusted, polished cleaned out and left sparkling. I threw out bags and bags of unwanted stuff that had been collecting in cupboards for years. Only 4 rooms and a huge bank of storage cupboards to go. LOL!!

At the same time I determined to work in the garden each day and to complete some sewing - catching up on ATC swaps.

Where to from there - painting inside and out. In my dreams. Still I do feel good about actually getting something completed.

Our poor garden suffered several tragedies of its own this winter. In the fron garden we have a huge willow that has provided welcome shade for a num,ber of camellias, tree ferns, other shade loving plants and the patio. This year it collapsed in 3 parts and fell on the garden underneath it. No way we could cut it up so had to call in a tree expert. Said it was the largest willow he had ever seen. He charged us $2300 just to cut it down and cut it up. We had to dispose of it. So far we have burnt quite a bit of it in the middle of the front lawn, but there is a huge pile of logs that we cannot shift - the agreement was that the tree would be cut up in manageable lengths, but because it was not written into the contract, that did not happen. That's one business we will not deal with again.

We still have another 5 or 6 willows that need to be removed - may have to wait until we strike Lotto!!!

Oh bum!! Now Blogger won't let me download photos.

Here we go after much fiddling and swearing!! This is the tree as it collapsed. Willows are lovely if they are relatively young and not subjected to winds. This one was here and a decent size when we moved in 40 years ago.

This is one part that came to rest on another tree.

Another view of the mess

These are the stumps of the three branches - the main trunk was huge and encompassed all three of the branches shown.

Here we are starting to build up a pile of small brances

Once we got it going we were able to roll some of the logs onto the fore and Mark helped with some larger ones when he got home. It burnt for 48 hours. BUT, we have at least 3 times as much agin to burn when we work out how to move it. Never plant willows!!!!!


And this is what it used to look like under the willow tree!!!





Liz