Living in a new house: One week in

As you are reading this, I will have been living in my new house for exactly one week.

There are a few benefits of living at work; mainly that you don’t have very far to go to get there; you don’t have to spend very much money on fuel or time on driving. That extra 90 minutes that I now save each day that used to be spent travelling to and fro leaves so much time for other activities.

Such as:

1. Learning to play guitar.

   

   Practicing chords. Progress is slow but I’m getting there…

   
   I might have mentioned to my boss once that I would have liked to learn the guitar but never had a chance. The next day he turns up with his old instrument and says “here, get some lessons. If you like it you can buy your own and give this one back” (in a thick German accent). So I sit down with my boyfriend, who has been playing since he was six years old, and I’ve now conquered Old McDonald and Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star picking-style, and I’m working on Old McDonald using chords next. For someone with no musical talent other than liking country music, I’m finding it relatively easier than I expected. Relatively. I tried to figure out how to play Incey Wincey Spider using a chord/lyric sheet off the internet and made a terrible hash of it. But I’ll get there.

2. Chasing mini stallions around the paddock.

   

   He’s cute, but if there’s a halter on the agenda, he’s surprisingly nimble for a fatty.

   If you ever come to visit Banalasta and the animals are feeling sociable you might be lucky enough to get a chance to cuddle them. This generally causes great excitement because, apart from two donkey jacks whose names are long and complicated – I call them Frank and Alex for short, although which is which I do not know – we have a camel named Candy and a mini stallion named Richard. These two are definitely the most popular, as well as the friendliest. Richard is a gorgeous, and very friendly little man. “Oh, you want pats? Sure, here’s my neck.” “Apples? Yes please, I’ll love you forever!”

   Until it’s “What’s that behind your back? A rope? Why do you have a rope? Aaaahhhh!!!!” *insert little bay pony running away in mock-terror here*

   Now, he is not actually scared of the lead rope or halter. He just doesn’t want to be caught. Which would not be a problem if he wasn’t running in a paddock that is something well over several acres in size (I haven’t explored to the furthest boundary of it yet, but it’s definitely bigger than 24 acres). I’m trying to reason with him that I’m not that bad, that it’s for his own good since he needs his feet trimming badly, but he just won’t listen.

3. Getting swooped by magpies.

   

   He’s got his eye on me. All. The. Time. He hates me.

   Here is an interesting little fact about me. I have never been swooped by a magpie. Ever. Even when I knew there was a magpie in a tree with a reputation for dive-bombing passers-by.

   Until this past week.

   I don’t know, maybe the magpies around these parts have some other sort of mindset or criteria for who makes a swoop-worthy target, but out of all the magpies I’ve ever met, which like any Aussie is a fair few hundred or so, it’s only ever been these ones that have wanted to swoop me. Not only that, but they do it multiple times a day, from a distance that I would have thought would be out of swooping-radar range. I’ll hear that tell-tale siren call and look up and see a flash of black and white coming at me with a vengeance from well over half a kilometer away! I’ve now learnt to carry a broom, or a stick, or an old lead rope with me any time I go outside to swing at them if they decide to attack. I have no wish to hurt them, I just want them to leave. Me. Alone.

4. Making my own furniture polish.

   

   So much nicer! I’ll upload another post another day with proper before and afters 🙂

   Having no television and all this extra time on my hands every day has led to some very fun things going on in my kitchen. Mostly cooking chicken soup and prawn and avocado toasties – the recipe for which I made up myself – but also creating non-food items. Normally it would be lip balm, but seeing as I’m waiting for a new batch of containers to arrive, this week it has been furniture polish.

   I have an old tin of lemon myrtle timber and leather polish back at home that I absolutely adore. It smells great and, once you’ve wiped off any gunk from your timber, a little bit of polish and some time to sink into the wood leaves the object looking rich and new again. It’s not too shiny, and it won’t alter the colour of the timber other than bringing out the richness that often gets a little lost through ordinary wear and tear. If you like your timber products to look as natural as possible, this is definitely a good polish for the job.

   So, with a rough idea of a recipe in mind and a bit of a google to get some more info, I set about creating my own version. The beeswax in the mix helps create a protective layer on the timber, and gives it a slight (but not too shiny) sheen, while the mixture of oils I chose are both nourishing and cheap. Once the polish has all soaked into the wood and is no longer sticky to touch, it can then be buffed off, if you like, or you can apply pretty much any other timber polishing product over the top if you like a waxier finish. This stuff is great for those maintenance polishes in-between doing your full upkeep routine of your piece of timber. You can use it to help revitalise old leather as well, although I don’t currently have any unpolished leather here to demonstrate this with (I polished all my boots just a few days before I made this polish). It also smells lovely with lemon myrtle essential oil added to the mix, which was the first one I grabbed out of my collection, but anything like tea tree, lemon, eucalyptus or any sort of woodsy scent would also smell great.

Meanwhile, it’s back to the grind of daily life: work, enjoying the peace and freedom of living where I do, getting swooped by magpies, dreaming up new recipes to concoct in the kitchen and trying to catch that damned pony. I only want to get his feet trimmed….

~Laura 🙂