Riding the Rails

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On Saturday we had a day out that was very close to home. The town where we live is one end of the Victorian Goldfields Railway, the longest broad gauge heritage railway in Victoria. Although we have lived here for nearly 2 years this was our first trip on the steam train. It was a glorious day and we thoroughly enjoyed the trip.

It was a special occasion to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the opening of the heritage railway between Castlemaine and Maldon.

Two different first class carriage interiors.

Ready for the return trip.

Rounding the bend and almost home.

It is good to be able to mix responsibilities at home with community volunteering and days out as well as our more extended holiday adventures.

Home From Holidays

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We arrived home from our holidays on Wednesday and I am pleased to report that in less than 24 hours after our return I had completed a significant piece of organising.

I had sorted, curated, numbered and labelled all of the photos from the trip. To be fair, I had begun deleting and curating them during the time we were away but the biggest portion of the job was after we arrived home.

There are a total of 135 photos from our 3 week trip and this is how they are arranged within a folder.

The naming convention I use is 001, 002 etc followed by a description.

We have looked at them all on the large television screen which definitely provides the best experience, apart from being there in real life.

My ability do get all of this done fairly promptly has reminded me that I should go back and do the same with all of the other folders of photos from various holidays.

Checking In

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I did not expect to make any more posts here until we return from our holidays.

However, this is a brief update on Cyclone Alfred which, whilst not particularly strong, is inching ever closer to Brisbane and the equally densely populated Sunshine Coast to the north and Gold Coast to the south. There are over 4 million people in the region who are under threat of strong winds, torrential rain and storm surges over the next 24 hours or so.

Brisbane is my hometown and I have friends and family who are directly in the path of the cyclone/hurricane right now, including one of our daughters and our 2 teenage granddaughters.

Please take care.

Completed Curtains

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It is over 4 months since we made our first enquiries to get some screens and curtains. You can read about the initial contact and see the curtain fabric sample here. There have been a couple of significant delays. The fabric I chose for the curtains was not in stock and secondly, we changed our minds about the screens for the existing large doors in the front lounge as we decided to change the doors and therefore, the type of screens required.

The new doors were installed about a week ago.

The old ones being removed.

The new doors with the curtains drawn back. The configuration of the doors are the same, however, they are aluminium framed rather timber framed. This means they a much easier to slide, screens were simpler to fit and of course, there will be no constant maintenance of the timber. This is a significant issue as they face north and receive the full force of sun as well as wind and rain. Finally, I was actually surprised at how much more light is let in due to the narrower framing.

Here is a view with the curtains drawn.

And a close-up of the fabric.

I have made curtains before but I was not prepared to tackle a job on this scale. I was very happy to leave it to the professionals to make and hang these.

There is one more job to be done before these room is totally finished. There is a small window in the other corner which we having replaced with louvres to maximise the ventilation. That will installed later next month then I will order a new blind. I am thinking of choosing a plain colour – possibly a darker blue as seen in the curtains.

A Successful Experiment

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I have been occupied with some non-blogworthy business so not a lot to share at the moment.

However, the dehydrator has been working overtime as I dried a couple of lots of sliced nashi pears. This has been a raging success and I will definitely be some more over the next few days. The pile of fruit spread on the dining table is gradually reducing.

This is what they look like.

More importantly they taste absolutely delicious.

We went out to lunch with friends today and had our main meal so didn’t need too much for dinner. I did not take a photo but we had a small platter of crackers, dip, camembert cheese and the dried pears which was very tasty indeed.

Netted Nashi

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I showed you a few months ago in this post that we had netted the entirety of our three espaliered fruit trees – one nectarine and two nashi pears. That decision proved to be really successfully with us not losing any fruit to the birds and other wildlife.

We have removed it gradually as the fruit ripened on each tree. First, were the nectarines, then one nashi and a couple of days ago we removed the netting completely and picked the nashi pears from the last tree.

There were well over 100 fruit.

GMan had stewed and frozen all of the fruit from the first tree and did about another 40 of these. I am now experimenting with dehydrating slices of them for snacks and have given some to the Community Pantry.

The next job was to fold the netting up and put it away for next season. We spread it out so that we could remover any leaves or debris and it noticed a jagged hole of about 8cm across in the middle of the netting. I am not sure whether it was caused by an errant branch growing through or a possum munching through it.

Anyway, I decided to mend the hole before packing the netting up. It is nothing fancy but will work well.

A few days ago I saw an ad on Facebook for a hands-on workshop on ‘Summer Fruit Tree Pruning’ in a town about 45 minutes from us. This seemed like a perfect opportunity so GMan has signed up and is going along on Friday. Hopefully, he will be able to apply his new-found knowledge to our trees.

Stocking the Pantry

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Today has been a mixed bag, as usual.

Bed changed, 2 loads of washing done, some volunteer admin work and visitors this afternoon for wine, cheese and chat.

Somewhere in between all of that I made time to make another batch of tomato sauce for the pantry.

We have almost finished the last bottle from last year and this is the first time in several years that I have almost run out. I am hoping to make more batches to stock up.

I had less tomatoes than the recipe so I did some quick calculations to reduce the other ingredients proportionally. I took a fairly easy option by chopping the tomatoes and onions in the food processor before simmering them with the sugar, vinegar, salt and spices. You can find the actual recipe here.

We are expecting tradesmen tomorrow to remove and replace some doors and windows so I will hopefully have interesting before and after photos to share before too long.

Acquisitions

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I have had my head down working on an admin project for a volunteer job that I am doing so there is not too much to report on the home front just at the moment.

However, our next door neighbour kindly dropped in a box of home-grown tomatoes and a zucchini a couple of days ago. I plan to make some more sauce with the tomatoes and the zucchini will be used in a meal in the next day or two.

Meanwhile, I took a break today and we went to Castlemaine to do a couple of things and I had time to pop into one of my favourite op shops. I found these small glass serving plates for $1 each. There are 7 of them and I will use them at a function next week at the local film society. Other than that, I think they can live in my sideboard and certainly get some use. They could be perfect for those occasions when a huge serving platter is not really required or appropriate.

The other thing to note is that we are finally enjoying some more moderate weather than the heatwave conditions we have endured recently. In fact, the forecast for tomorrow is only 17C which is much better than 37C (or more). The next 7 days are looking rather pleasant though some rain would be nice for the garden.

Refurbished

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There are many things that we can repair, mend or upcycle ourselves but some are just beyond our range.

What do you do with shoes that are no longer wearable? This was GMan’s dilemma recently. The first step is to examine them and understand why they can no longer be worn. A pair of casual leather shoes looked to be in perfectly good nick at first glance but the soles had worn to the stage where there was no remaining grip on the soles and they were positively dangerous. So, a full retread was in order.

We have had this sort of work done on a couple of other pairs of shoes previously, however, we have moved interstate since then so it was a matter of finding a quality bootmaker/cobbler in Melbourne who could do the work. GMan was fortunate to find The Cobbler’s Last. They have turned these shoes that were only good for the bin into wearable footwear with a long life ahead of it.

The cost of this work was $95 which is not insignificant, however, that is about half of the price of a replacing them with a similar shoe. Additionally, the savings created by not seeing these end up in landfill is immeasurable.