What have we been up to in the past couple of weeks?

Friends often ask me that question and it's always hard to answer.  If someone were to ask me what day of the week is it I would have to think about it.  Weekdays run into weekends without us sometimes even noticing and don't even go near what the date is!  We just seem to be always busy and falling to sleep at night is never a problem.  I just seem to be constantly tired.  We had a friend visit us last week and we were talking about the kilometres we have on our car's odometer......40,000 in just under two years.  He said that him and his wife have 14,000 kms in the same amount of time so it just goes to show how much travelling we do.  I do have to visit Cairns quite a lot, probably averaging once a fortnight and we go to Port Douglas on average twice a week so that would click up the kilometres as it's 160 km round trip to Cairns and 60 km round trip to Port.

So getting back to what we have been up to......

Philip has been busy dismantling the old timber cattle yards in readiness for the new ones that "should" have arrived two weeks ago.  (Don't get me started on incompetence!).  I love the look of the old timber yards but they were well and truly past their "use by date".  We had a young bull in one of the yards a couple of weeks ago and he was simply rubbing his head against the gate and the whole gate fell to the ground!  The bull took a step back as if to say "what the hell just happened!" 

The old yards

 

So we have had a contractor come in with his bobcat and remove all the old wooden posts and then we laid down many loads of gravel to make sure we now don't have to walk up to our ankles in mud!

Prior to the yard dismantling, our lovely old Eudia Tree gave it's final breath and fell to the ground.  You might remember we lost half of it earlier this year.  We thought it might recover after a heavy prune but it wasn't to be.  We love these trees as they are the host tree for the Ulysses butterflies.  Fortunately we have planted a lot more Eudia's to entice the butterflies into our garden.

The fallen tree fortunately missed the cattle yards and the machinery yard!

The soil that was removed from the yards has now been stockpiled for future use by the gardener.  We "may" have created a monster as this "may" mean more garden beds!

Last weekend we hosted a Spanish night for our friends.  Two of our friends have a farm at Millaa and are running a herd of Brangus cattle.  They are keen to learn as much as possible so Philip took them mustering the day after the party.  They had plenty of questions and hopefully Philip was able to answer them.  

Getting back to the Spanish Night, I decided that we would have a Tapas style dinner.  We started with Marinated Olives and Prawn Pate on Crostini.  Next course was Prawn wrapped Chorizo with a lemon dipping sauce and Sweet Potato and Leek mini frittatas.  Third course was Empanadas - two ways.  The fourth course was a Seafood Paella and lastly was a Spanish dessert called Crema Catalana.  We started eating around 5.30pm and I served dessert at 10 pm.  It was a lovely night with beautiful friends and we are looking forward to the next time.  Sorry....no photos.  Cameras and alcohol are not good friends ;)