The weather here is now changing drastically, with the day-time temps down into the mid-60's. As this follows some weeks of WELL above average temps for the time of year, this is welcome relief - although the locals are walking around all wrapped up, and shivering - they don't know what a winter is here! It does make it much easier doing all the work outside - and there's plenty to do. The land hasn't been mowed for at least ten years - so that's slow going with the mower running at max height, and slowest speed for the first pass.

The land has old fencing around three sides, which has to be renovated, and then the fourth side fenced from scratch. None of this is cheap - and isn't something that can be done too quickly.

Then I am looking forward to getting my shed, so that I can finally get all my tools out of the house and more readily available - and gain brownie points from the wife at the same time (fellas, you know what that is all about!).

But now is not the time to be sitting on a computer - work calls.

The end - and the beginning

Well, the house was moved on June 1st, and now, more than 4 months later, the contractor has finally finished his work. It's hard to believe that about 3 weeks work can take this long. Is this the end for us - no chance. Now we have to build a deck on this side of the house. We bought the deck way back in the spring with the expectation of building it during the summer. Oh well, perhaps we will collect the wood from the woodyard soon, and get on with the building work - so it's still going to look like a construction site around the house!

Apart from the house it has been quite busy subbing on the buses. There is one particular route that is a headache - largely because the regular driver doesn't bother to control the kids. It makes life very difficult when you only drive the bus one day a week, particularly when I expect good behaviour from any kids that I drive. A few days of verbal warnings didn't seem to do the trick, so I went for the write-ups to their principals. This seemed to have the desired effect - for the time being anyway. In this country it seems to be the norm to carry all ages of students on the buses (and I can understand why - but that's another story). Strangely, it's the young ones that are the biggest problem - they completely ignore the driver - but as I say, that is largely the fault of the regular driver.