Up, down and then up again

Well as I said last night I have had a hectic three day weekend working on our cottage.
So first up I did some framing work on one of the bathroom walls.

Then I shoehorned in the first of the windows I ordered.
 We have a bathroom window!


And from the outside.
 
Woo hoo!

But then a real downer, on Saturday I began on the diagonally opposite corner of the house, at what will be our bedroom.
As I began tearing the old weatherboards off I found the bottom wall plate was completely rotted through, here…

And here...
 (the blue piece of timber is a temporary prop to hold up the corner of the house)

The old boards have been leaking, possibly for decades and a lot of the frame is rotted.
This means more expense and more time. Sigh.
But by Saturday evening I had shot an hour’s drive down the mountain to collect some replacement timber and managed to salvage some of the original timber to reuse.

Sunday morning saw me working on reframing the bedroom wall.

Then as it began threatening rain I started covering the wall in insulation foil.

This will be the view out our bedroom window. I have to say I love the mountains and the way it feels as if you are in the weather.

So just before dark I had the foil over the wall finished. It will keep the weather out for the coming week.

Next weekend is Easter which means four days in a row working on the cottage!

Despite the weather

I didn’t manage a post over the weekend because despite wintry weather Deb and I went away for the weekend.

I won’t say much because I’m only just home from work.

However I will promise more in the next few days and say our action packed weekend featured:

Verdant but windswept islands.Unique Aussie wildlife.Glorious sunsetsQuiet walksPounding wavesAnd mountain streams.Stay tuned

Winter.

While I was away on holiday at Merimbula I was posting photos like this.

And this.

Then I was grumbling that despite the gloriously sunny weather I was cold.

People enjoying their Northern hemisphere summer looked at photos like this

and for some strange reason they didn’t take me very seriously.

Fair enough in tropical parts of Oz it never really gets cold.

However, it is winter down in the bottom half of the world and here in the southern end of Oz it gets wintery.

This Aussie for one thinks it is cold.

Now I have proof of the cold down this way.

On Saturday I took this

and this

See, I’m not just grumbling :-)

Snob?

Well I have had a hectic day at work again. The reality (unfortunately) is that services for homeless people get busier in tough economic times.

Overall Oz has fared well in the difficult times that have raged around the world. But things haven’t exactly been rosy, and Victoria is the state that has fared the worst. Which means with unemployment increasing, homelessness has increased.

But enough doom and gloom for one night.

I want to thank everybody who has commented for their feedback on the two versions of my blurb. What you guys have provided is invaluable.

Thank you.

Well now for some fun with some piccies!

I want to share some piccies I took the weekend after my trip to Beechworth.

They were taken at a place called Snob’s Creek. The creek rolls down from the highlands near Eildon about two hours drive from home.

The piccies I am sharing were all taken on my camera, but the credits for these piccies have to be shared between me and Lu, my youngest.

To get to the falls you have to climb down a couple of sets of stairs. Lu paused to turn and take this piccie back up the path.I took a similar one also aiming to capture the roots of this smallish Mountain Ash as they grow over the boulders of the slope. The path parallels the creek as it tumbles down a series of small cascades towards the falls.
At this one I set up the camera to take some long exposure shots in the dark under the forest canopy.The blurred figure in the fore ground is me. Once I set the camera I went around the front to look up into the tree branches.
Lu started clicking away to try and capture me. But of course the exposure was far too long for portraits so I was just a blur.

Another shot from the same position.A third zooming in on the lower cascade.
A fourth looking at the upper cascade.Lu took the camera as we continued down. She paused to take this shot looking down at a small rotting stump.Then, budding photographer that she is, she took another after removing the bottle cap. Can you see she has inadvertently caught her toes at the bottom of both shots :-).

After a bit of a struggle I prised the camera from her hands to shoot this rather attractive boulder in the middle of the stream.Finally, I took a pile of piccies at the bottom of the falls.
And me being me, stuffed nearly all of them. I didn’t notice I still had the ISO set for the dark of the forest so nearly all of the piccies in the relatively bright conditions at the bottom were hopelessly over exposed.

This is the only one that is worth sharing.
But in an effort to be an optimist I am going to take this as a good thing.
Because I stuffed so many exposures, I have the perfect excuse to head back (in the not too distant future) to get some more.

Not that I really need an excuse.