Hello from the Goldfields.

It's been a while, again. I've been busy helping hubby for a week. His garage now has custom shelving units built in around all three walls. Pretty handy with recycled materials. Didn't cost us anything except a few screws. Most of those were recycled, too. For those of you who don't know, we live in a small rural town, and any time we need anything like hardware, clothes, shoes etc., we have to drive 120 km round trip to the next town. The hardware store there now also has a timber shortage (so there goes my kitchen/dining room extension for a while), so hubby used cover sheets that we got for nothing (they get put on the top and the bottom of the timber to keep it as free from gouges as possible during transit) some time ago, and some round steel poles that we found laying around dumped in the bush around town, stripping pallets down and de-nailing them so we could use them to prop up the shelves.

It has been really hot here. Summer is definitely in full swing. When you go outside, just breathing burns your throat and lungs. You walk out the door and the heat hits you right in the face like a brick wall. And, even though summer is here, we're getting ready for winter! Yep. Cutting up wood, and now hubby has a new thing about making paper bricks - sort of like the enviro-logs you can buy. Again, because we needed a paper shredder, we had to drive to the next town - this town never has anything! Shelves are becoming empty here, too, at the moment due to flooding damaging the main road into our state, as well as the rail line. I took a photo of the cat food section - thank God I got heaps from the other town when we were there. But I digress.

Hubby and I have had a few businesses over the years. Here in Australia, you have to keep all your tax records for 7 years. Well, the time is up for most of them, so I have what seems like a never-ending filing system with paper coming out of my ass! I have been shredding paper and receipts like there's no tomorrow - after I pull out all the freaking staples! Anyway, we now have about 22 really big logs that look more like big loaves of bread, and about 16 actual brick-sized ones that will probably take the rest of summer to dry out! I'm crossing my fingers that these burn for a while when we get to the middle of winter and it's zero degrees outside. The photo are of the bread-look-a-like ones.

Our peach tree fruited for the first time this year. They're bloody delicious, too - nice and juicy, and so sweet - nothing like the hard cardboard ones you get in the supermarkets! And some of them are freaking huge! Apricots fruited for the first time just before Christmas, too They were also sweet and juicy.

Okay, so now I've caught you all up on everything, it's time I did some more writing. I'm hoping, fingers crossed, that I can release at least 3 books this year. Considering 2 months of the year have almost gone, I better get my ass into gear and get these fingers flying over the keyboard.

I hope everyone stays safe and well.