Bushwalk to Pryor's Hut

 

Bill and I went for a bushwalk on Saturday with some friends up in Namadgi National Park. It was a perfect day for a walk and took us right up into the Brindabellas. We started from Corin Dam and the first 3 km was a very steep climb, then it was a lovely walk along the spur and then along the Mt Franklin Road with some lovely views of Mt Gininni, the Brindabellas and the Australian Alps. We stopped for lunch at Pryors Hut where on the doorstep is the border between NSW and the ACT. We headed back the same way, with a 3 km steep descent this time. It was a great walk but my quads are certainly letting me know they had a work out- have been hobbling around like a little old lady. Canberra is such a great place to live with all this at our doorstep!

Good Friday Easter Picnic

We have had yet another wonderful Good Friday Easter Picnic at Lennox Gardens with friends and family. Canberra is such a lovely place in autumn and it was a lovely morning- sunny but rather cool. We had the traditional egg and bacon rolls and hot cross buns. We had the traditional egg hunt with Simon and Lachlan trying to find the most extreme spots to hide eggs- even the big kids had to look for Easter Eggs. We had the Easter Egg Rolling or should I say throwing competition this year- it was amazing how far those eggs went this year without cracking! I couldn't accuse anyone of tampering with the eggs as I did the hard boiling, even a raw egg was thrown a remarkable distance without cracking!

My Youngest Nephews

 

I met 8 week old baby Ben this week for the first time. Also got a photo of 5 year old Matthew pretending to be a cat and then taking photos of me while I was taking photos of him!

Lovely Sunset Tonight

Lovely sunset over Gordon tonight!

Altona Beach

Spent the weekend with mum in Melbourne.  On the Saturday we headed down to Costco at Docklands, then down to Point Cook to visit my  brothe and family and meet my new nephew. On the way home we called in at Altona to visit my niece , while we were waiting we discovered Altona Beach and picked up some dinner to eat by the seaside.

What a Week

We were "Nookal" ed at work this week! Nookal is a vegetable used in Indian Cooking sometimes known as Kohlrabi- but it is also a new practice management system for physiotherapy practices. It has been introduced to our work this week and it has been a rather stressful week coping with all the changes that running a new system brings! I have been at work every day this week except Wednesday, and that includes a couple of hours on Monday a public holiday!

 

 

 

 

Next pleasant task of the week was to go and have a biopsy on a spot on my nose that we are expecting is a basal cell carcinoma- which if confirmed means I will have to visit a plastic surgeon to have it removed. The local anaesthetic they gave me was horrible and the whole experience was not pleasant- It took me a good 15 minutes and a couple of attempts to stand before I could walk out of the rooms with out passing out! So if it is confirmed and I have to go through something similar hopefully I will end up looking like the above picture!
 

Clancy has a tumor like this growing above his eye, it is probably twice the size but too gross to put a picture in the blog. We went to the vet last week to discuss options, had been previously, this lump is non cancerous but he has ones in his mouth which are. We have decided to go down the non operative route as they may well grow back and the ones in his mouth would be significant surgery with no guarantee of success and a long recovery process for a 12 year old dog, so we have got some stronger medication from the vets, who have been very helpful and we will see what happens.


To top off this week we got a phone call to say Bill's dad was in hospital with pulmonary oedema and they didn't think there was much they could do- Jim is 90 in September- by the end of the day though he had turned a corner and was doing much better-so we just have to wait and see! Hopefully next week will be a better one!

 



Mum's New Unit

Mum has moved into a two bedroom unit in a retirement village in Berwick, not far from where she has lived for the last 37 years. She can still walk into the Main Street and is just a short walk from the railway station. The unit has been refurbished and compared to her old place it is very modern and comfortable. All her stuff has fitted in well and she is very happy with the move and no regrets. She already seems to know half the people in the village as she has been going down for a couple of years to U3A classes. It is great to see her so happy and so settled so quickly.

Sweeney's Farm

My first job was working on Sweeny's Farm. Mr Sweeney was a bit of an eccentric, he was a lecturer at Monash University, but owned a farm. My brothers and I used to work on the farm on Saturday mornings, and we would keep a note in a little notebook and he would pay us every month or so. I think I started off on about 25 cents an hour. I would do things like house work, cook him lunch, wipe down lemon trees with detergent to get rid of bugs, weed. Sometimes we got to weigh the cows, tag them, freeze brand them, it was always interesting. I took some photos of the old farm.

Harkaway

When I was 12 we moved from Adelaide to Melbourne. The first three years were spent living in Harkaway a little hamlet on the outskirts of Melbourne, it had a general store and a two teacher Primary school and that was about it. We had to catch a bus to the nearest high school about 10 km away. After about three years we moved three kilometers down the road to the township of Berwick - our parents got sick of running us back and forth as everything we did was in Berwick. Berwick has really grown and I hardly recognize it any more, all the market gardens have been carved up for houses, but Harkaway has not changed all that much. I took a walk and took some photos of the hamlet.

Berwick- The Big Move

Just last week I drove down to Melbourne to help mum move. She had sold the house she had lived in for thirty seven years in Lyall Road and she had brought a two bedroom unit in Fiddlers Green Retirement Village which is just the other side of Berwick. I drove down and spent the week with her packing up the old house and moving into the new unit. I probably only lived in this house for about seven years before leaving home, but it has lots of memories. Unfortunately it will be demolished shortly and two houses built on the block. I think the hardest thing for mum was saying goodbye to the magpie family she had been feeding. I told her she should have given them the new address.