Carmel James

I can’t believe it has been so long since I last made a post on this blog. It’s only because I’ve been incredibly busy!
For most of November however I didn’t even have my computer. I only had a small notebook to work on. No fun making posts when you can’t quite see what you’re doing. My computer was at the doctors because it had a strange habit of rebooting itself when I didn’t ask it to. It was at the doctors for so long because they wanted to see this strange behaviour, and guess what! It didn’t do it! Not once! My guess is the 3 hour trip on a rough dirt road shook the loose parts back into their correct places. If I had known that, I would have just dropped it out the window at home .. to fix it

My next excuse for not blogging is that I started spending every night of the week talking with new friends in China! Yes, really! I found these people on a web site called Lang-8.com They can all speak Mandarin, and they are learning English. So we agreed to help each other. Amazing how much time you don’t have when you decide to do something like that every night. But that was only quite late at night after we had finished doing things around the house.

Because it’s summer here, the days are very long. Naturally J and I have things to do outside, things like putting an electric fence around our house! We did that in the week before Christmas, and then we went away for almost a week and stayed with J’s cousins, the ones that grow hay at Dungowan. Of course we had a great time, lots of socialising with neighbours and family. Sad when that was over, but then we had my family to look forward to.

The next week we had guests at home. My twin sister and her husband drove up from Sydney. It was a great week, especially when our sister joined us for a few days. She brought a tent with her and camped in the back yard! So still no time for blogging. No time for my favourite hobby either, that is, studying Chinese.

Since they all left and we’ve been alone, I’ve found a little time to study, but we have had another important job to do. We have to paint the roof of our house!!! After decades of wanting to, we finally bought a solar hot water system .. and a solar power system. Both have large panels that go on the roof. They can’t go on there though, until the roof is painted because it badly needs to be painted! It’s a tin roof and the paint is peeling off. We collect drinking water off the roof so it’s about time we repaired it. Because it’s summer, it’s hot during the day, too hot to paint a roof, so we’re doing it in the early morning and late evening. Just a little bit every day, well most days. Today it’s been raining … so I have time to write this blog!

And that is why I haven’t written anything in a long time.

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