The New, The Renovated and The Progressive

This weekend has brought many new things. Firstly, a playlist for my blog. Not very exciting and probably old hat to many of you but it is purple and I am very impressed with myself to have made it fit in the sidebar when it was born into blogland with a stubborn insistence that it was bigger and better than the limitations my sidebar wanted to place on it. Again, this is probably small fries for all you html speakers out there but for little old wing-my-way-through-stuff me I thought it was kinda awesome.

Other new things are three new laying pullets which I am hoping dearly that our dog will not eat. I've been clipping wings and re-running the chicken wire on the now renovated chook area so touch wood that they all remain in one piece. The kids have claimed one of the new chooks each (no one cares much about the existing two now the new ones are here) with the Kman naming his Bridgette, the impossible princess naming hers Fairy Dust and the smiley monster naming his 'and then it went crash and all with what it bit some more to drive out with Tali and bring it back in the box' and various other nonsense stories that he tells with such animation these days. Here's a photo of Fairy Dust:



Another new thing is the ability to utilise my new fishtank filter to assist with the water changes. I thought it was theoretically possible but now I have proven it and am very pleased with the result. Much less time, much less spillage and much less stress on the fish. So that's win, win, win, me thinks.

New location for the nine live cat with clipped wings as well. That will be harder to visit - now over four hours away. Have written a letter tonight and The Starchild is planning on an early yet still very long day trip next Saturday but it will all work out.

Ok, so, not that many new things, and still plenty of old things, like the mess on the kitchen table and in the lair particularly. I mentioned the renovations to the chook area and that's not exactly a new thing but it is really great. We used to have two chook pens, a big one for the laying pullets and a small one for the bantams and chinese silky but when we got down to one non-laying pullet and the silky, we put them in the same pen. Now we have the swing set and have set up an area for the trampoline, we decided to merge the two pens completely and move two of the fences. We (read: The Starchild doing the manual labour and me coming up with the brilliant ideas and giving much moral support) have also pulled apart one of the sheds as the other one is newer, easier to access and big enough for as many chickens as we are likely to ever have at any given time and then we have an open under cover area where the other shed was so we now have shelter for the water dishes and just a bit more shade in general. I'm thinking about growing passionfruit or something similar to regulate the heat over the top of the roof there as well but that will happen a bit down the track.

We also had a wonderful picnic lunch yesterday and it was really lovely day for it. I love the changing seasons and it's great to sneak in a few more family days outside before the weather really starts to turn.

Oh, and the other lovely thing was that The Starchild was helping the next door neighbours to move and they also gave us some really good pool furniture so I spent some time on that while the widdies had a swim.

Meeting with Mrs P to talk figures and continue progressing the company. Am almost there and have done so much while feeling like nothing has been done and there is so much more to go!