roof and walls to boot!

After weeks of rain, John finally managed to get our roof on and stop the rain.  I hope we haven't triggered more drought.  It's rained every week John has been working on our house, making things very slow. Roof's up and the sky is blue.

Inside our new bedroom, lined with Charlie's signature ply, exposed recycled hardwood framing will provide shelves for our precious objects.

crimson grapes and red delicious apples

Hazy Jane made it to our shopping collective pack and pick up last week.  Here's her box of goodies.

It was so lovely to see her with baby and husband in tow.

We were short delivered on yellow zucchinis and tomatoes, but what we did get was absolutely beautiful and (red) delicious!

Bogged down and totally loving P&C admin for now...

It's only been two weeks and already the P&C seems to be taking all my time.  I think I'm just so excited to have a new avenue to use my skills in community organising. 
It wasn't until a week after I'd been elected President of our P&C that I realised what the P&C was all about - I've been in a working mum vacuum for the past three years of Gully's school life, but with River and Gully both at school, I wanted to be more engaged in the direction of the school this  year. So, here goes!
Reading the 2010 P&C Handbook and the latest P&C magazine on train on my way to uni last week, it dawned on me - we're a lobby group, campaigning for free, quality, non secular public education. It's that simple.
One week in and I've met with over 8 P&C executive members, past and present, to quizz them on their priorities and legacy; done a full day's work in the school canteen; hung outside the school in the rain on Saturday night, to personally inform parents of a cancelled fundraising event; published an information flyer for our school parents and staff about the role of the P&C and put together a survey on survey monkey for staff, parents and keen students to fill in - to inform our new P&C 'business plan'.
I so hope this process attracts an active parent community for our lovely, tiny school..
Certainly feel like I'm jumping in, but also feel really comfortable using my skills in a positive and hopefully community empowering way.


You can visit 
www.surveymonkey.com/s/LWMV9FH to view our P&C survey.

blue bower

we visited Sim and Matt in the Blue Mountains a few weeks ago.  they've just purchased a block of land and are embarking on the grand adventure of building their home.  This blue bower was nestled in their garden - see how the Bower Bird has shaped the grass - so beautiful!

market

i went to market myself for the inaugural order of the new jasmine greens shopping collective.  headed down the highway quite late and hit all the peak hour traffic.  got to the organic warehouse five minutes before closing time, thankfully they let me snoop around and spend up.  i spent way too much money, one of the drawbacks of being in a huge warehouse full of organic food.  got home with beautiful fresh produce. here it is on the palette. i don't want to make a habit of going to market. the round trip took me six hours & it's near impossible to do it under four. much prefer to pay Trevor to bring our order up from market on his semi-trailer.
next delivery is this Friday.

loripeets

Gully called them that when he was little and it's stuck.  we have five totally wild,noisy and crazy 'runners' in an avery up the back of the garden - our small way of assisting Judith with her Wildlife Ark bird rescue.  our lorikeets have psittiscine circo virus, more commonly known as beak and feather.  their flying wings have not developed, hence the name runner.  they can't fly.  we rescued our first bird, Jasper about august last year.  i was on my way to pick Gully up from school when i heard a commotion and saw a crow and a kookaburra attacking him in the mud below a mangrove tree.  Judith showed us how to care for him and lent us her spare avery.  because the virus can spread to other psittiscine species (parrots), we offer a local isolation recovery ward for lorikeets.  Jasper has long since recovered and flown off.  he was so tame when we first got him, we could hold him and could have focussed on taming him, but we decided to let him stay wild in the hope he would recover. here he is enjoying fresh flowers picked by Gully, River and Akira.  at least two more of our birds are recovering and growing their flight wings the other three don't look so promising.  we named our first two birds Jasper and Jack after Gully and River's cousins.  the new ones are baby one, baby two, baby three and baby four.

cucumbers and chillies

Charlie and the boys harvested our first hand of bananas today.  they're strung up outside Charlie's office in the back yard.  tiny little finger bananas - we'll keep them on the stalk and hope they ripen.  cucumbers, chillies and pumpkins are all thriving, rhubarb is making a comeback, lettuce doing well, eggplant and capsicums are in flower... parsley, borage and rocket are sprouting.  there are eight lemons on the maya tree, two on the fruit salad citrus and three ruby red grapefruit coming along - the few that survived the baby fruit cull. i tried to pull off the baby fruit for the first two years while the trees establish, but it felt so sad pulling off over thirty plums, and all the other baby fruits on the trees, i left a few lemons on the maya tree.  the grapefruit snuck under the radar, i'm so pleased they did.