While Not Working

All night long the rain rained and the wind winded and we woke up to tales of tornadoes and mayhem in Adelaide but all that was awry in our part of the world was our outdoor chair, which had been  blown off our little front verandah in  the middle of the night. Whoopsadaisy! The wind blew strongly and was forecast to increase throughout the day.  The rain splattered on the roof of our cabin, threatening at times to escalate to a Queensland-style shower.   We chained our bikes up to the front railing and went out in the car instead,  exploring the countryside  around the Barossa valley.  While Prussian immigrants in the 1840s provided the German flavour of the area, the viticulture for which it is best known was kick-started by both Samuel Smith from Dorset, England, and Johann Gramp from Bavaria.  They separately started the Yalumba and Jacob's Creekwineries which are still going strong today. We didn't visit Yalumba or Jacob's  Creek....

The common area upstairs in the Ramsgate Hotel provided comfortable chairs, tea and coffee facilities, and access to the verandah with ocean views. It was very nice but I should have twigged that all was not silent in paradise when I discovered a large jar of single use earplugs, provided free for patrons to use as they saw fit.  Suffice to say that a grand old pub on the beachfront on a Saturday night was not the quietest of places and we partook of the downstairs music last night whether we wanted to or not Sunday morning, on the other hand, was very quiet indeed. The revellers had all gone home and a single person wandered down the street, collecting cans from the gutter. The sea was quiet and still in what the BoM informed us was the calm before the storm. Peaceful sea from the Ramsgate Hotel verandah. Bad weather is coming. Morning sunlight on the upper verandah  of the Ramsgate Hotel.   On our way out of town we popped in to St Kilda beach and found the best playgro...

The cats owners were in transit, whiling away time in an aeroplane somewhere between a long way away and home. Had we the desire to do so, we could have tracked them in FlightRadar (and I confess one of us did) however due to our previous procrastinating we had a lot to do and were jolly glad that they wouldn't land until well into the evening. Wanting to maintain our very nice 5-star house sitting reputation we spent the day cleaning and polishing and washing linen. We scrubbed all the surfaces and dusted all the other surfaces and mopped and wiped everywhere that would benefit from mopping and wiping. We brushed the cat to perfection and dosed him with antihistamines so he wouldn't sneeze in his owners' faces when they were reunited. He has a habit of sneezing in people's faces and you wouldn't believe how much snot one cat can produce, or how far he can propel it. We packed everything up and put it in the car, marveling both at how little we'd managed to live...

  I rang the bicycle mechanic to check on the progress of my bike.  "Oh, we haven't got to it yet," a young fella airily informed me. "Shane's off sick with Covid." I was talking to Shane yesterday but we were both masked so hopefully he shared nothing other than his bicycle knowledge with me; while I wished him good health I was disappointed because his untimely illness meant that I would have to make do with old fashioned legs for yet another day.   The (not-sick) bicycle mechanic texted me later that day.  "Hey, you know that grinding noise?" he texted.  "That's your seat creaking.  There's nothing wrong with the bike!"   Well, that was nice to know.  It would have been nicer to know before I spent $300 fixing bike bits that possibly didn't need to be fixed after all, but that's the way of bicycles. Like taking sick children to the doctor: they're at death's door until you walk into the surgery and then ev...

  What?  You're going out again?  What about me?   On Sunday we caught a steam train from Mt Barker up to the Bugle Range and back again, sharing the trip with Mama, Gramps, and hordes of other citizens who also wanted to get coal dust in their eyes and up their noses.   There was a wee bit of cheating involved: two big diesel engines lurked at the back of the train and pushed us up the hill, thereby relieving the steam engine of having to do much other than use its steam to puff vigorously and blow the whistle loudly as we chugged past train-spotters at every level crossing. Our train had a number... ... a name, ...and last, but probably most important, a driver.   The sun shone brightly in a clear, cold blue sky as we finished our train ride, ate our sausages on the platform, and polished off strawberries and icecream back at Mama and Gramps'.  It was way too nice weather to just go home so after the strawberries and ice cream I dropped Roger...

Voting is a very important and necessary thing to do, and an important and necessary part of voting is the democracy sausage that is sold at polling booths around the country on election day.  One of the tragedies of pre-polling is that all those conscientious people who vote early end up missing out on their democracy sausage.  Of course they could just go home to cook a sausage and wrap it up in soggy white bread with too much tomato sauce, but that just wouldn't taste the same. We braved the lack of democracy sausages and voted early, just to make sure that there would be no hiccups with the fact that we were still registered in Queensland and therefore had to vote in absentia for Maranoa.  Voting went without a hitch and I even went the extra civic mile and donated blood after I voted. If you timed your donation right you could get lunch there as well. Now don't be silly, that wasn't blood in the bottle. After the voting and the blood-letting we wandered the mall feel...