Yes, I have travelled 1878km or so to camp in a house that is twice the size of my old one ;o) Living in a bedsit situation is bearable, but the addition of two cats makes it even more..um…shall we say…interesting? They are being very good, and treat the window with the screen on it as Bird-TV - here they are on their first day:

I have also been informed that the educational establishment for which I work had not actually caught on to the fact that I’ve been working for them as a casual since October 2002. Apparently casual staff can work a total of four months fulltime and that’s it, so I have been (unknowingly) on a good thing. The good thing expired yesterday when I was told to take July off, but my boss has kindly arranged for me to still do some work in July, and I will add those hours to my timesheet in August. So I don’t really lose out, except that I won’t see cash for a while, so at present I’m deciding whether to fall into the warm embrace of Centrelink, look for work, roast a cat or sit it out.

Here’s the first view of our street the very first time we ever drove into it:

I notice I haven’t posted any pics of the house yet. Let it be known that it’s probably too scary for public viewing. We have ripped out the whole kitchen and bathroom, and have been busy filling nail/screw holes and sanding, sanding, sanding. Anyone who happened to pop in yesterday would have been quite amused at the sight of M and I trying to get the old cast iron bath out of the bathroom (it took up about one third of the room). It was waaaay too heavy to lift, so we angled it on to a blanket and he pushed, I pulled, until we got it to the top of the back steps. One good thing about this place is that we have little respect for the bits of it that we’re going to remove at a later date i.e the back steps. So we pushed the bath down them, they buckled, held, and then the bath came to rest on the ground. We’ve propped it up against the water tank for the moment - the plan being that we’re going to build it into our deck later on. It will be sunken so that the deck goes over the top of it, but then if you want to have a bath you pull up the section of the deck that covers it and jump in. Tres decadent.

Speaking of the water tank. We’d organised to have it cleaned, but the guys couldn’t do it for a week and a half and it was going to cost $210. We booked in, but decided in the end that we needed the money more so M said he would cancel it and we’d do it another time. The water in the tank is OK for washing dishes etc, but because it’s been sitting there so long and for some of that time didn’t have the mesh guard on the top where the water goes in, we thought we better have it cleaned before we attempted to drink it. So, after a hard day of sanding yesterday I woke up this moring and was dwelling on the difficulty of all things financial, and something occurred to me.
‘Did you cancel the tank cleaning guys?’
M went pale.
‘!#@$#^@$^%$!’
Ten minutes later we were moving our cars so the truck could get to the tank and two hours later we were down $260 because we had to get a new filter for the top of the tank. Life wasn’t meant to be easy - at least the weathers good!