The guys were busy in the carport cutting planks for the renovations when they become distracted by a mother duck and her two fluffy little ducklings. They were running backwards and forwards under Colin’s car, looking cute as hell, but worrying the hell out of us in case one of the little ducklings should slip through the storm water drain under the car. Unfortunately, (or actually in this case, fortunately), one of the two did just that – plop and she was gone.

The hole is about a metre deep, and well cushioned with debris and soft sand. The little baby was cheeping away calling for mum, and mum was clearly very worried. Colin moved his car as we shepherded mum and the remaining bub away from danger. The guys had lifted the heavy grate in no time. Paul carefully jumped in but to his surprise there was not one, but seven fluffy little ducklings down the hole. No wonder mum had been running backwards and forwards under the car.

All but one had been rescued and re-united with mum. The remaining chick headed down one of the small offshoots of the drain. Mum promptly decided to lead her remaining seven babies to safety. Firstly she was heading towards Bussell Highway – not a good idea during the morning peak hour traffic.

I shepherded the family back to the scrub on the grassy verge hoping mum would stay near whilst we watched the drain hoping the remaining chick would find its way back to where it too could be rescued.

A few minutes later the traffic on both sides of the highway had stopped. Fortunately drivers keen to get to work weren’t in too much of rush to stop and watch a family of ducklings safely crossing the busy road. The little family reached safety on the other side, and continued on towards the wetlands. We still watched for the remaining chick, hoping she would return to be rescued.

I heard a few distant cheeps getting louder and louder. She peeked out but quickly shot back again. We gathered some thin cardboard to block off her escape route, hoping there would be another opportunity. There’s a maze of drains down there, and she could have headed off to who knows where. Clearly she remembered where mum last was though and out she came again. I patiently waited until she was well clear of the tunnels, before blocking it off. Paul again dropped down into the hole, and gently lifted and passed the last chick up to Colin, who placed it in a box we’d found for the purpose.

Paul set off with the frightened little baby safely boxed in his arms hoping to be able to track down its family. I’m pleased to say that about 15 minutes later he returned with an empty box. Mum and her babies had found the safety of nearby farmland. They weren’t keen on Paul approaching but he managed to get close enough to add the eighth duckling onto the end of the line and off they all went across the farm.

I hope they found the nearby wetlands without any more dramas. How fortunate the seventh duck disappeared down that drain before our very eyes. If it hadn’t I’m sure the other six would never have been discovered and rescued. A feel good start to our day that’ll have us softly smiling for the rest of the day I’m sure.

Perhaps I’m a bit weird. I love composting. I’ve never subscribed to the normal rules of composting, the layers of garden refuse, vegetable scraps, dry material and whatever else people suggest should be added in a particular order. I take a much more random approach, throw everything that once was vegetation into the heap in whichever order you come by them, all in together. Water if it’s dry, add shredded newspaper if it’s to wet, and add a bag of chook poo which seems to get it all breaking down. Turn it over whenever you feel like it, and take out anything to mulch the garden with that looks like it’s sufficiently broken down and loamy.

I’ve always just had the one heap perpetually going, adding to it, and taken from it on a weekly basis. It’s fascinating to see vegetable peelings, weeds, and spent plants turning from recognisable scraps into beautiful, sweet smelling loamy soil. I found out long ago that it’s best to look after the soil, and let the soil look after the plants.

Recently we’ve done away with our compost heap. Instead I’m trialling trenching. I save some of my vegetable scraps, but none with seeds – no pumpkin seeds, and definitely no cucumber or tomato seeds.
When I have enough I give it all a quick blitz in the blender with some water. It looks like soup. Then I use the trowel to scratch A trench somewhere in the garden and pour in the compost soup, then scratch the soil back over the top.

I’ve only been doing this for a week or two. Hopefully it’ll bring the worms and help the soil along. Time will tell – I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’ve developed a bit of fondness for succulents. Whilst I was researching them last year I came upon a Succulent fairy garden built into broken terracotta pots. I decided to have a go at building one, only instead of a fairy garden I would follow my general decor theme of eclectic/coastal. Here’s what developed.

We already had the knarley old fisherman/lighthouse keeper statue (hard to see, but he’s to the left of the top white pot). We found his little home-made pottery cottage on line, and the light house, fish, and other coastal bits we picked up here and there. The big broken pot came courtesy of Bunnings. It was all a bit of fun. I’m not sure how long I’ll keep it, I guess for as long as it doesn’t look scraggly.

Here’s a few other things from around our garden.

A spiral succulent – mine is the one on the left. They have to get quite big to spiral properly. The one on the right shows how I’m hoping it will look as it matures. It’s been in about a year, and is just starting to get the spiral effect going.

And last but not least, my bed of asparagus. This was planted after reading a fabulously inspiring book called, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. If you haven’t read it, I would recommend highly. This is the second season since I planted the asparagus, so I have to wait one more year before I start to pick any. Then I should get more than ten years out of it – a definite indication of permanency.

And won’t it just be a pleasure to be picking our own home grown asparagus.

I’ve just had a quick peruse through some blog posts of a blogger new to me. It looks like M.R. has been on a bit of a roller coaster with her living arrangements, and has, I think, landed herself in a place where she now finds she doesn’t want to be. It brought back a few roller coaster memories of our own.

In 2011 we moved out of our house of thirteen years. I won’t go into the reasons why we moved, suffice to say the move didn’t achieve what we’d set out to achieve, and not for the first time, I would have welcomed the gift of foresight. We had two houses in mind to move to. We chose the wrong one.

Two years after that move we’d found a block of land in Busselton. We sold our house of two years and found a new, rather nice strata unit in a block of ten. The units were age restricted (over 55). Our plan was to build on our block located three hours away, and to spend our week-ends and holidays in Busselton until we retired from the workforce and could move there permanently. That didn’t happen.

We had plans drawn up for the Busselton house. Problem was the land was close to the ocean with a shallow water table. There wasn’t mains sewerage through, but it was coming. No-one knew when, but it was coming. To build immediately meant a very expensive septic system was needed, and that system would need to be de-commissioned shortly after the mains went through. We decided to postpone the building.

Living in the units was proving to be less than desirable. Approximately half the residents were considerably older than the minimum age, and had been the first to purchase their units. They had moved in about a year before we had. The ones that were last to purchase seemed to be, like us, younger and still working. I’m not sure how that happened, perhaps with the units remaining vacant the method of advertising may have changed so as to appeal to younger people. The consequences were that the established residents seemed to be full bottle on all the rules, some real and some imagined, and seemed intent on the newbies towing the line as to how they thought the line should be towed. That didn’t sit well with yours truly. I hadn’t reached the grand old age of 57 to suddenly be told what I could, or couldn’t do. The Strata management Company were no help at all. In fact the management company seemed to favour the residents being at loggerheads with each other. I think the idea was that if we were fighting each other we’d never unite against them. Their fees were far higher than they needed to be, but while we were divided they had us conquered. (Reminder to oneself – never consider another unit with strata management!)

If the building of the house had gone ahead as originally planned the unit would have been tolerable. But with no date for building in sight, our thoughts turned to other things. One thought led to another, and it wasn’t long before we’d change course altogether. 11 months after moving into the unit, December 2013, we had sold it, and along with the unit, we’d also sold all of our household goods. We were homeless and living in our fifth wheeler at a caravan park. The plan now was to bring our retirement forward by four years. I finished up my little job at the end of 2013, and Paul finished up at his place of work in February 2014. We were going to keep the land and build much later, after we’d done a few years of travel. The plan was to pick up a bit of seasonal work as we travelled. We hoped to be travelling for at least seven years.

Mmmmm, that didn’t happen either. Don’t ask me why, this story is too long as it is, and it would take a book to relate all the reasons why the full time travel stopped and our course changed again. We sold the block In Busselton and we purchased a house in Tassie which we renovated.

We found a tenant for the Tassie house, put the caravan into storage and headed for England. Pauls dad was sick. We stayed for six months looking after him. He was still sick when we left, but immigration wouldn’t let me stay longer than six months. We returned to Australia and attempted to continue on with our Gray Nomad life. However Pauls dad really wasn’t doing well in the UK, and we anticipated more rushed trips to the UK. We were finding it hard to settle into the transient, nomadic lifestyle.

Putting down roots started to appeal again. We saw a little house in Busselton on the net. There were two possible problems with it, the first being it was age restricted (over 50s). This conjured up thoughts of rules, regulations, management companies, strata fees, and people minding every bodies business except their own. A little bit of investigation proved that wasn’t the case – no strata fees or management company and no special rules (with one exception – you must be over 50 to live there). We could paint, plant, extend, decorate or change the house however we wanted to without seeking any approval with the exception of normal government approvals. If we decided to sell, the house and land would be ours to sell without any exit fees. That sounded pretty good. The other possible problem was the house bordered a busy highway. We pulled up Google Earth and took a look. There is a big verge of trees and shrubs between the house and the highway. We figured that would provide a buffer to the highway noise, and so sight unseen we took a giant leap of faith and we bought it. We moved in, in October 2016.

I can’t say we settled immediately into the house, we certainly didn’t. The house is definitely free of any of the restrictions we encountered in the strata unit, perfect. The highway – well the traffic noise has been more of a problem than we’d thought it would be. Between adding more plantings and a couple of water features, and just learning to ignore it, that’s become tolerable. We’ve stayed put now for four years, and we’ve almost made the little house our own. Somehow by just staying in one place long enough, roots have automatically started to shoot down to anchor us. We’ve put a lot into our little cottage by the sea, and I think we’re now here for the long haul.

There’s good and bad in having lots of moves. You get a chance for a good clean out that’s for sure so that’s a plus. New places are exciting too. But moving is expensive, that’s definitely not on the plus side. For me though the biggest negative is not being around to see a garden that I’ve sweated over, watching it evolve from a drab piece of land to something beautiful, and then not being there to see it mature and realise its full potential. Or worse, a drive by that house that we once owned, and to see knee deep weeds where once my beautiful garden stood.

We’ve planted a couple of trees. They won’t be fully mature for at least ten years yet. I think we may just stick around and watch them grow.

A couple of weeks ago a five year memory flashed up on Facebook. We were in Tasmania renovating our little old cottage in Deloraine.

History repeats. Five years on, and Paul’s again helping our local builder, Colin, with our latest project. He was dubbed, ‘youngest apprentice in Tassie’ then. Now he’s been dubbed the ‘youngest apprentice in Busselton’.

I watch Paul watching Colin as his mind works overtime to learn. At the end of the day I can see he has a few aches and pain he didn’t have the day before, but I can see he’s as happy as a pig rolling around in the mud. It occurs to me it’s because our minds don’t grow weary with age, not as long as long as we’re not fuddled by disease or medication. We remain young and eager to learn, and eager to do. It’s only the aging bones that sometimes prevent us from keeping up with our spritely minds.

I think I can definitely see the young apprentice Paul once was as he watches the masters of this trade that’s new to him. He’s always had a healthy respect for people who have learnt a trade and apply their trade well. He’s happy to watch, copy, and learn a few new tricks from the masters of a trade. He loved his own trade as a sheet metal worker, a trade that relies on precise measurements and accuracy. That’s Paul, precise and accurate. The little bits of knowledge he picks up from other master tradesmen, makes him a great handyman to have around the house. I often think how awful it would be to share your life with a man who didn’t know how to put a screw in the wall. (Hope that doesn’t sound to sexist) Yes, for me its a real pleasure to be sharing my life with this jack of all trades and a well respected master of one.

In readiness for the new bedroom we have purchased a water feature for outside the glass sliding bedroom door. Our little house is close to Bussell Highway, so when holiday times come, so does the traffic. Our new bedroom will be closer to the highway, so we figure a water feature outside will aid in creating a tranquil ambience that will rise above any traffic noise and aid a restful nights sleep.

As the traffic noise can ramp up considerably at times, our thoughts were, “let’s go big, there’s no point getting a boy to do a mans job”! We were up in Perth for a few days so chose a big water feature from Pots and More (three hours away from where we live).

It wouldn’t be ready for pick up before we left Perth, and they don’t deliver outside the metro area, so we paid a sizeable deposit and arranged a pick up for a later date. The plan was to hire a trailer and do a round trip all in one day to bring it back. The pieces were going to be heavy, so getting them off the trailer at the home end was going to be a problem. We’d deal with that when the time came. We hadn’t anticipated the problems we’d encounter before that.

The day before pick up was due, we phoned to check it would all be ready and waiting for us to pick up at ten o’clock the next morning. “Yes”, we were assured, “it’ll all be there ready for you”.

We rose at the crack of dawn and were on the road by 7am, arriving a few minutes earlier than 10. No water feature, and no-one there who could operate the fork left. Never mind, we were a little early. No cause for alarm bells – yet! Fifteen minutes later the bosses son arrived. “I was told 12 o’clock for pick up” he says. Well that’s not actually what he said – every second word in that sentence was an expletive that I won’t put into print. Two hours we waited while he tried to find all the parts, swearing and cursing the whole time. I mentioned to the office girl that he wasn’t a happy chappie, but added that I didn’t blame him as it was supposed to be made ready for pick up the day before. Her reply was that he was the one that was supposed to have readied it for pick up. Mmmm, we were seething, but kept ourselves well in control. Self preservation had kicked in, and I’m sure any venting on our part wouldn’t have ended well. It was clear we were dealing with a rather unsavoury character, and from the language and attitude, I’m sure fists would have answered any venting without hesitation.

After two hours of searching I suggested that maybe we could just get our deposit back and call it a day. Yes he agreed. Only he wouldn’t reverse the deposit on the credit card, instead he’d arrange for the accountant to transfer the deposit back into our account. Alarm bells definitely rang. I suspected we’d never see our deposit of nearly $1000 again. I figured the best we could do is choose another water feature. Fortunately that idea met with acceptance.

He dismantled our second choice From the yard and loaded it onto the trailer, we paid the difference, and were in our way with a promise to ourselves never to return. Getting it off at the home end is another story. The base weighed approximately 600kgs, but Paul, and our kind neighbours managed. Phew, though what a job.

Here’s the new water feature. All set up in place and working. The garden’s fully planted around it, we just have to wait for it all to grow. It looks lovely, but being approximately a third of the size of the one we picked, only time will tell if we’ve bought a boy of a water feature to do a man’s job.

(This post was written a few weeks ago. It was a post that I’d originally thought wouldn’t be published owing to the poor formatting. I can’t do anything about the formatting, but have decided to publish anyway. So Margaret, you’ve probably guessed what we’re up to on the home front, but if you haven’t, read on. Here it is – warts and all.)

A few months prior to Covid we had a garage sale, and we advertised some things individually on Facebook market place. The world was much more affluent then. Items advertised for a fair price hung around for days, often with barely an enquiry. Some things eventually sold, usually after much bartering, and we were lucky to receive a tiny fraction of the original purchase price.

Fast forward about twelve months. It’s now approximately seven months since Covid arrived in Australia. Some people have lost jobs, others fear losing their livelihoods.

However being retired our income remains reasonably static, and currently prices for home renovations are competitive. After a favourable quote for some work, we’ve decided our man cave is to be no more, and in its place we’ll have a new master bedroom suite.

Consequently we’ve needed to have a cull of the man cave furniture. With some trepidation we advertised a few items, a coffee table, two lounge chairs, the fridge, and a few other items. The result indicates there has been a major shift in people’s mindsets. Clearly the affluent, ‘ buy everything new’ mentality has gone. There has been no bartering for lower prices, and most items have sold within half a day of being listed. We even lifted the laminate flooring from the man cave and advertised it. We photographed it and listed it prior to lifting it and had a committed buyer almost immediately.

Recognising the shift in attitudes we’ve taken our cull further and have moved out into the garden. A couple of portable fire pits (now replaced with an Ozpig) have found new homes, and some potted plants that I had been using as gap fillers in the garden have also now been off loaded.

Everything was advertised for a fair price, but I still expected a considerable amount of bartering, and I expected the selling process to take weeks. I anticipated some things wouldn’t be saleable at all and would either eventually go to charity, or to the tip. Everything sold, and very quickly.

Whilst the reason behind this shift in mindsets has been brought on by a downturn in circumstances, or a reduced sense of security in general, its good to see a shift away from the wasteful society we had become. A silver lining perhaps…..

Anyone who has been following along with me on my blogging journey will be aware that I’ve been frustrated with the application of WordPress of late. Recently I was so frustrated that I made a hasty decision to discontinue blogging. I switched off all the auto re-news and was set to just let the blog drift off into the ether.

However, one of my blogging friends wrote a post recently on blogging, and why she blogs. Whilst Amanda’s reasons for blogging didn’t particularly resonate with me, one of the comments added to that post has prompted me to re-think my hasty decision. The reason I started blogging in the first place was so as friends and family would be aware of where we were,and what we were doing as we travelled around this great big country of ours. The full time travel stopped but the blog continued becoming a bit of a personal diary, a record of our daily lives, and at times, my personal thoughts.

Originally, the blog was supposed to be a travel blog with the ‘ow’ in lifeofrileyow.com representing ‘on wheels’. Our home at the time was where ever we parked our fifth wheeler, anywhere in this big, beautiful country of ours. When we settled back into a house, the original purpose of the blog had disappeared, but the blog was still serving a purpose. It had become a place to record our day to day lives, and our favourite photographs. The blog became as eclectic as I am, a record of my fibberty jibbert personality and a record of our life, I wanted the ‘ow’ to represent the things I write about, and as I write about whatever takes my fancy it seemed appropriate for the ‘ow’’ to represent ‘on whatever’.

So, after a re-think, the blog is to continue. However, it’ll change from now on. I’ve thought long and hard about why I like blogging, and why I was going to stop. I like blogging because I enjoy writing. I love the diary aspect of my blog, the recording of my day to day life and, at times, my thoughts. I sort of lost track of all that when I started writing for my followers. That’s when I started to feel pressured into keeping up appearances. When the technical side of blogging became frustrating (I’m a techno numpty), I became agitated and was feeling the pressure of presenting sub-standard posts for people to read, and I decided I wasn’t up to this blogging thingie. But you know what – I’m just going to continue writing for me. Anyone who follows along is very welcome of course, but from now on I’m not going to try and keep to a theme (like I could anyway), I’m not going to worry if my content gets repetitive (Broome year after year after year), and I’m not going to worry about tags, or categories, or photo alignment. I’m not even going to worry to much about spelling and grammatical errors. I’m just going to continue to write on ‘whatever’ without the pressure of trying to appeal to my followers. And then writing and blogging will return to being the pleasure it once was.

It is with much sadness that I’ve made the decision to discontinue blogging, and am going to cancel my wordpress account. I used to get a lot of pleasure from blogging but that isn’t the case any more. I’ve never seen eye to eye with technology but the frustrations of trying to post blogs over the last few months has been causing far more pain than pleasure.

I’ve tried asking for help from WordPress, but I can’t even begin to explain what the problems are. When I try to explain it to them it’s like I’m speaking in a completely foreign language to the language they speak. The last problem I sorted out with them took literally months. I don’t think it was a difficult problem to fix, the only difficulty was getting them to understand what needed attention. And something at their end did need attention – but like all call centre staff, they listen, not to the full story, but for a key word and then go to their robotic scripting that relates to what they deem to be the key word.

Every time I try to complete a blog there seems to be more changes to the process. I try to add photos the way I added them the last time, and I can’t. So I click all over the place trying to work out the new procedure. I try to break my writing into paragraphs and to place images in the appropriate place between paragraphes. But no, it seems my two paragraphs are inside one block, so images will only go after the second paragraph. I try to change the blocks – but have no idea how to. I keep trying – the image appears irrelevantly at the head of the post. I re-click everywhere and keep trying. Another hour of trying passes. I put the blog aside and decide to try another day.

Another day comes. I try again. Sometimes it works easily, and other times I return to the same frustrations. I can’t get into the flow of it anymore. The blog post has taken me around two hours to write and to do a rough edit. It’s time to add images and getting it formatted for publication. And that’s when the problems start, and it can take me anywhere from one hour to ten hours, or not at all. Today I tried to add the images to a post I completed a few days ago. I tried, and I tried and tried. It was when I almost hurled the computer through the window that I decided this is madness. Enough is enough – the problems I’m encountering have taken all the joy out of blogging, and it’s ceased to be a pleasure.

So this will be my last post. Now all I have to do is work out how to cancel my account….