Nice rain. Penny say's hi!

How about that rain? Not quite biblical - but I’m not complaining, far from it. The rain started at about 0100hrs on Christmas morning and this morning it is still raining. The Cook measured 19.5mm by dinner time yesterday and we’d only put the new rain gauge out at 1100hrs. By this morning we’d had a total of 26mm (due to no rain gauge we missed the first fourteen hours).

We had a lovely Christmas Day – all started a little later the normal Christmas Day, our recalcitrant visitor refuse to get up early, that didn’t go down well with the kids and all sorts of punitive actions were being discussed when he wasn’t up by 0800hrs. Luckily they don’t have my creative slant when it comes to this sort of thing and the visitor was allowed to slumber – threats from the Cook to the three of us also went some way towards our better then should be expected behaviour.

For breakfast Christmas Day we had our own bacon and eggs. Dinner was the traditional turkey, prawns and ham. The highlight was the home grown ham. It was just superb, the Cook likes the Shoulder ham better but the rest of us will take anything you dish up as long as it’s from our paddock.

Today was a little slow whilst we get over yesterday. The cook took the time to plant a couple of Pecan nut trees she brought at the Murrumbateman Filed Days - that have been sitting in our bath tub ever since. She has also attempted to pig proof the trees, but time will tell how well that will work. Hopefully the pigs will ignore them, yeah right........

I took the dogs for a walk out to the dam to see if we had managed to catch any of the rain – appears not, none of the dams have any water in them, maybe over the next few days we’ll get some inflow. Penny the new puppy was a terror, she barked at every cow, sheep and kangaroo. She’ll sleep well tonight for sure.

I don’t know if anybody else saw it, but ABC2 showed the Australian film ‘A Bush Christmas’ it Nicolle Kidman’s first movie. It was filmed around Rathdowney, near Beaudesert in Queensland. I grew up not far from there and recognised a lot of the extras in the movie as well as the land marks. I also manned a polling booth in the hall they showed the dance in and rode at many camp drafts and Pony Club days at the show grounds. It was filmed in 1983 – now I feel really old.

Mrs Duck Herder, Afternoon Tea sounds very nice and now the Cook has a brand new second hand antique oven she can cook a cake and biscuits. We are home all week, if you talk to Em organise a time that is good for you both and give me a call.

Oh, nearly forgot. This was funny; the Cook discovered that the Kitten we thought was female for the last six months is indeed male. I just shake my head.......