Voice from yonder

More stars where I am!

So it's been an even longer break since last time, and even more left unsaid that I don't think I'll try to catch up on.

Let me try and catch up on a few of the major points from the past few weeks:

FARM: We're living out at Narromine, enjoying the sunshine, the quiet and the absence of annoying people. Despite the long drive every day, which takes around 25-30mins, we love it there... and have no real desire to come back to the house.

ELI: To our surprise, Eli is one of the very few boys who were selected from individual auditions to sing in the Kindergarten & Year 1 school choir. Apparently they're practicing The Lion Sleeps Tonight... which is quite a tricky song I reckon.

CLAYTON: We're watching kid No.2 grow up so fast. He's thriving in the farm environment and really enjoying close contact with cousins and his long-lost aunty Win. Claytie is saying heaps of words now and is putting three and four word sentences together.

KILLING SPREE: The other day on the farm we killed two pigs, a sheep and three chooks. If that wasn't enough, we killed another five pigs and six-or-so more chookies. Half the meat was given away, but we have enough meat now in freezers to last a half century!

RENOVATIONS: Suddenly the renovations have sprung forward dramatically! Three of the four outside walls are completed, the laundry was done ages ago, and the sleepout area - i.e. my office and the kids playroom - is now completed. Things are looking good. I can't wait to sell it and get out on the farm :P

DECISIONS: Of late we've made a few decisions. One is that we WILL build a house on the farm. Another is even more biggerer. I had begun thinking of more kids, and Janene was almost about to concede... though near the end of it all, we finally agreed that it wasn't a good idea for both of us. I might be able to handle more kids, but Janene is not the kind of strong-willed mother to endure more than we've got.

Janene is an awesome mum to our two legendary boys, but she might crack under any more pressure - especially considering the worst is yet to come (teenager years!).

I'm happy with this decision and I'm gonna give my two boys the best fathering that any good, loving father could offer.

PROTEAS: So I've done heaps of research and decided I want to grow some proteas on the farm. (check http://www.protea.com.au/) This will be a hobby for starters, but will hopefully grow beyond that.

Sis has taken a big interest in the Proteas, and she's thrown some money in already. Dad, Juanita and I both finished fencing off the area which will contain our first Protea trial. It's about half an acre, and I've already bought a few plants to chuck in as tests until I go ahead and make a full order for the rest of the plants.

ADAM: My big-little bro has again proved the extent of his talent by taking out Grand Prize in two major animation competitions in the United States. He flew to San Fransisco the other day and spent a week there being famous. There are a lot of things happening for big bro at the moment and soon he'll probably want to buy my Protea farm with his pocket money.

CAMERA CAPER: While playing at the table, Clayton dropped my camera on the floor and dislodged the lense from it's internal tracks (i.e. he broke it). A half hour or so later I was reading my book "Bringing Up Boys" by Dr James Dobson, and lo and behold a paragraph read something like this:

Boys will frustrate their dads. They will leave their best tools out in the weather, they will leave tools piled up on the work bench. They will lose their binoculars and they will drop their cameras.

What insight this man has...!

Well today I bought myself a little kit of minature screwdrivers and I pulled that Nikon digital camera to bits, taking careful note of which screw went where (there were tons of them!). Eventually I fixed the lense and I got the camera back togehter - only one screw was missing!

The camera works, which is direct testament to how excellent I am! Perhaps I will start putting more pics on my blog, if only blogger.com devises a more convenient way to do it.

KNEE-DING A REST: I went to the doc cos of my aching knee and the news was un-welcome. I have to take three months off any kind of sport and attend physiotherapy sessions to get it fixed. There was a long name for my problem, but basically it's the cartilage which is stuffed, plus I have tenonitis on the tendon that holds the patella on the knee joint.

LASTLY, I just want to mention that I've moved offices. Brad and I now sit in what used to be the Table Tennis Parlour. It's full of fond memories, and it's sad to see that a once thriving sport in Dubbo (*ahem*) has died to but a distant murmur. Perhaps we'll resurrect the game when we find somewhere more convenient to play it.

Well that's it for now. I have a new tool for updating my blog called "hohoBlog", so hopefully I will find a moment more regularly to update this thing.

Thanks for reading... whoever you are.