Snoskred – Life in the Country

What do you think?

My thought is, the older he gets the more handsome he is..

Earlier today I was rear-ended for a second time, only on this occasion the rear-ender had tailgated me for 20km, at speeds between 80km/hr and 100km/hr. She was so close to the back of my car at these speeds that, had I needed to brake suddenly, someone would have been seriously injured. She also spent some time gesturing inappropriately and swearing at me. When I had to stop at the roundabout, she tapped me.

After I got out of the car, she claimed she had not hit me. Her car at that time was resting on my bumper, still touching it, so her claim was DENIED.

After I took care of my appointment that I was on my way to, I went to the police station to report this woman for tailgaiting. She had already been on the phone to the police person I spoke to and given them a completely different and untrue story.

Piffle to bad drivers and liars, I say! I have been driving for 22 years now and this week is the first & second time I have ever had an accident, neither of them being my fault.

After that, I felt the need to go to the garden nursery and spend some $$ on plants, as retail therapy. I got a pea, a zucchini, a well developed strawberry and some punnets of flower seedlings. And now, I will post some pictures of my garden.

First, an overview of the garden bed.

A newly planted Zucchini, Beetroot seedlings and in the back corner Chard.

Cauliflower seedlings, rainbow silverbeet seedlings, the tall thing down a bit further is silverbeet which was saved from the old garden with strawberries in front of that.

A closer view of the caulis and rainbow silverbeets

Strawberries, Kale and newly planted peas.

The base of the lemon tree surrounded by lettuce seedlings. Something is eating the lettuce seedlings so I have started putting protective plastic bottles made into covers around them. Flat leaf parsley off to the side.

The flat leaf parsley with a couple of the larger silverbeets saved from the old garden.

More silverbeet – the chickens adore it.

The Alaska Nasturtium in the corner. There is some sawdust covering some chicken poop which is composting there.

The next garden bed to be developed – we took the ugly fence covering down today and killed all the spiders and other creatures living behind it. I’m thinking we can run a bed from where the gate is right down to the back corner of the yard. You can also see the channel we dug out across the lawn for drainage.

A closer view of the drain. With my white shovel!

While I was working on the garden the chookys were attacking their brussel sprouts that I gave them, happily tooting and making chooky sounds.

Today was the kind of day I think I should have stayed in bed. Or stayed at home and did chooky chores.

I woke up with a not-awesome sinus. There’s a wattle tree near the chicken coop – not on our property unfortunately – which I am allergic to.

I had to go to work so even though I was feeling pretty blah I got up and moving. With all the rain the last few days my Polo smells a bit like wet dog, even though I don’t have a dog. Even so, j’adore my Polo, so I got in and headed off to work.

First this old lady tries to hit me while I am next to her – she started moving into my lane while I was still in it. I had to brake and swerve.

Not keen on this, I accelerate past her at which point she moves into the lane behind me.

I have my blinker on as I am going around the corner, and I have to stop at the roundabout for a car, so I start to slow down in order to stop.

She does not slow down – in fact she accelerates. I hear this enormous bang at which point I realise this crazy lady has hit me in the rear. My car stalls. She hits me a second time, almost pushing me out into the intersection.

I stop the car and get out yelling at her, as you do when you’ve had a scare and you think the back end of your car has been pushed in. She tries to tell me she had both feet on the brake trying to stop. If that was the case, how did she hit me a second time?

Anyway I tell her to pull into the side street and sort it out.

I wouldn’t let her leave until the police got there because frankly I thought she was either drunk or a nutter.

Thankfully there isn’t a lot of damage to the car mainly just some scratches on the bumper and I think she might have pushed it in and it popped back out again by itself but I am starting to think there might be damage to me. I’ve had a splitting headache ever since and my neck and back are pretty sore.

To add insult to injury, she tells me while I am leaning on the back of the car, shaking and feeling like I was going to throw up, not to worry because these are just cars, just metal, and she’s had breast cancer so she knows what is important.

Anyway, what a crap day. I’ve taken some Nurofen Plus earlier this afternoon but they did zip. I might have to break out the big guns and Panadeine Forte myself to bed.

My poor Polo. I’m so angry.

This past week has been extremely busy because it has rained cats and dogs here. In 4 days we had over 120mm.

The trouble with this is that we live next door to a large football oval which is elevated higher than our place. So, all the run off from the football oval ends up in our backyard. This turned the yard into a swimming pool. It looked like this.

Yes, next to the beige fence is all waterlogged too. Bear in mind the grass is pretty long, it didn’t get mowed and the chooks haven’t been out chopping it down with their beaks.

The rain started on Tuesday. On Wednesday around lunchtime when the above photo was taken I went out to check on the chookys, the water went through my shoes thoroughly saturating my feet. After I did not have any shoes which would be suitable for going out to the chook coop! Uhoh, what now?

Once I changed shoes and socks, I spent a good couple of hours in pouring rain driving around to local stores trying to find gumboots. You would think this would be an easy task – and it would be if you were a kid. However being an adult, not a single store had any adult gumboots. Just after 5:30pm I found my way to the local fishing store which was closed but lucky for me took pity on me and let me in when they had what I needed. YAYS O YAYS teh gumboots.

I was then able to return home and shut the chooks up for the night but the fun was not quite over yet. We discovered a minor flood at the front of the house where the garbage bins reside. This required a trip to Bunnings to get a hoe so we could build a drain down the side of the driveway. If any human can go to Bunnings and return home with just the thing they went there for, they must be a better human than we are, because we spent $133 and only $20 of that was on the hoe.

The other half then STOLE my gumboots to go outside and make a drain. We have the same size feet, isn’t that funny? Well the next day we had to go back and get a second pair of gumboots so we both have a set.

We spent time over the next couple of days digging various drains in different places to allow the water to run off better. We now have a sludgy, muddy, icky mess. But at least all the water sitting on top of the ground (eg in the below photo) has drained away. There is now a drain right through the middle of this shot, which I do not have a photo of.

We dug a drain along the front of my veg garden which was running like a stream for the past few days. The garden has loved the rain, my plants are very happy. I was inspired to get a few more seedlings today while at Bunnings, again, to get flyscreen for my mealworm farm. Because as I say you can’t just get the thing you went for.

I have killed 2 Redbacks this week who showed themselves once the water rose higher than where they live.

The chookys have been somewhat locked in this week – even on the days I let them out into their run they preferred to stay inside the coop. But this has inspired a new chooky besides Floppy to lay! It was a perfect first egg, though a little on the small side. With that said it was still big enough to eat. I made up scrambled eggs today with that egg and four of Floppy’s eggs.

We don’t know who it was. I suspect one of the English Game bantams as one of them – purple comb – has changed comb color significantly this week. It is now more like burgundy comb. Same chooky has been approaching me for feather massage and back scratching whenever I have been near the coop so I think she thinks I am a rooster.

I was out in the yard this afternoon having planted my new beetroot seedlings and my rainbow chard plant, in my gumboots having just put down the hoe, leaning on the fence around the garden, watching my chookys scratch around and make happy noises and trumpet about their lactose free yogurt I gave them and the brussel sprouts they demolished while I was at work today.. and they really did demolish them, there was only one leaf left..

.. it occurred to me that as muddy as it was and with new rain starting to spit down around me.. this is the life.

Intense contentment.