My Journal:

July 2009

I’ve been beavering away, researching and scribbling, trying to finish a rough draft of my life story. My departure date for Perth is coming up in 2 weeks, and I still have a way to go. Memories are fleeting things and sometimes I struggle to recall what happened when; my siblings must be sick of me asking them … ‘do you remember ….?

The extension to my home is finally finished, and the area between my back door and the little patio is sectioned off with shade cloth and a gate. All that remains to be done now is the balance of the reticulation for the termite control and I imagine my brother will be glad to have it all done and finished so he can have his life back – apart from the usual maintenance that an older house like this continually needs, the leaves cleared from the gutters, gardening and the like that is.

I travelled out to Jimbour House on 25th July, for the biennial Opera At Jimbour. I took my sister, who had never been there before, and my daughter, who has. While we did enjoy the day – the sun shone from a blue sky – and loved looking around the old house and grounds, the ‘opera’ was not quite up to previous years. For one thing, there was only one aria sung, with some other more contemporary stuff. We – along with many others – ended up leaving during the break.

Sometime in the next month or so, I’m hoping to have solar panels installed on the roof of my home. Luckily, I received my letter of approval from the Federal Government, for the solar rebate, before they axed the grant. I’ll only be installed panels to generate 1kw hr of power, but better than nothing – I estimate that it will save me a good sum every year off my bill. They are also supposedly going to install some gadgets that will, if I want, turn things off after a time lapse to save power. One of them even turns the appliance back on when one comes within 40 cm of it! I guess these are for those of us too lazy to turn things off at the wall ourselves.

In the meantime, I took advantage of the state government’s ClimateSmart program, where for $50 an electrician comes to one’s home and: installs a water saver shower head [I have my own water and love the hard rush of water my old shower head gives so I declined this one]; changes all the bulbs in the house to the new energy efficient ones; checks power useage and advises where changes can be made; and installs a wireless gadget that tells one how much power is being used by each appliance, in kw hrs and also in cents per kw hr. [For the first week or so I had fun going around turning things off and on to see which appliance is responsible for my huge power bills. Unfortunately, it’s not any one thing, but a combination of small things, a few cents here and there that add up alarmingly quickly.]

My youngest daughter and her husband are somewhere in the centre of Australia. They left SA Sunday 26th July and seem to have vanished. They were going to call into Kata Juta (the Olgas) and Uluru, as well as Alice Springs and King’s Canyon on their way up to Humpty Doo (near Darwin); mobile reception is probably pretty sketchy out that way, but it is worrying to have almost a week go by without any word. When I was travelling Australia with my two small daughters in the 1970’s, pre mobiles or the internet, all my mother got was a letter or postcard from me every month or so. I don’t know how she managed to stay sane. Come to think of it, her hair was much greyer by the time we returned.