Strawberry Fields Forever

And so the strawberry glut of 2008 begins. What a terrible position to be in right?

Ho ho ho

This lot were picked on Thursday.

And this lot came off yesterday. (just as well - as today it rained, hailed, snowed and sleeted along with various bits of intense sunshine. What a day! ...guilty secret....I lit the fire and it's toasty in here!) So far, 5.6kg in all.

I have 8 jars of jam in the cupboard. The latest pan of jam is on the stove right now bubbling away.
How good it smells.

I gave away a jar of jam when I gave my speech at the aged care meeting on Wednesday. I held a guessing competition for the volunteers to guess the weight of the old reel to reel tape recorder I brought in as a curiosity (as no one uses them anymore) and the jam was the prize. This little group of oldies - mostly over 60, and a few over 80 - spend their days thinking of ways to raise money to increase the quality of life and pleasure for the 50 or so old folk who live in the nursing home they're allied to. My MIL is part of the group, but at 66 she'd be one of the younger ones. They sell raffle tickets, cater at the eisteddfodd (crazy welsh word I can never spell), cater for a Melbourne Cup luncheon, do fashion parades, cake stalls - you name it. The state body - United Auxillary Ass (I think that's what it's called) reported that this year, they collectively raised over one million dollars. Their latest scheme which evidently happens each year, is to sponsor and organise a gift basket of toiletries for the oldies in the home for Christmas. Each person will receive powder, shampoo, soap, etc to the value of $50. One of the aged care nurses reported that many of the residents end up using the same pump soap hospitals provide for everything - body washing, hand washing, hair washing etc. So a few extra nice things would make a big difference.

Being a very small part of this gathering made me question the amount of volunteer work I do in my community. At present, I'm involved in our playgroup association, our local volunteer bushfire brigade and I do a little here and there at school - but not at an official level. I wonder what else I can do?

Apart from jam making, I have a tiny wee knitted hooded jumper with just one sleeve to go. And, we are now the proud owners of a $10,000 hole in the ground!

They came.

They drilled.

They found what we were looking for at a rate of 500 gallons per hour which is apparently on the better side of average.

At this point, our only plan for this water, is to replace it as the source for our irrigation and firefighting tank along the driveway which gravity feeds the three hoses in our yard, and the petrol firefighting pump and the rooftop sprinkler system. This tank is presently filled up by pumping up out of one of FIL's dams, which while convenient and FREE...was never a long term solution.

The task now is to run power to it (DH is a sparky) and to buy a submersible pump and the various bits of stainless steel frippery that go along with it.

Thank God Christmas is pretty much taken care of already, or else we'd be up that particular creek so many of us are familiar with - sans paddle! We did have a small celebration, DH & I, the night of the main drilling....we cracked open a bottle of carbon unfriendly french bubbles that's been sitting in the fridge since Christmas waiting for just the right moment. It was perfect!

I'd like to post about the garden too. I have the photos all ready to go, but I'm thinking of leaving it for the morning, as the jam is just about ready and that knitting is calling me.

Sorry to have left it so long between posts. Apart from the usual busyness of life, I've been back on the little mouse wheel of medical drama as the experts argue over what's wrong with my shoulder after my 2006 head-on car accident. All I can tell you after Monday's 2 x MRI's is that the MRI business is $1500 richer; laying in a tube for 50 minutes really is quite awful; and the images didn't tell them anything they didn't already know. So I'll pop some more painkillers and pretend nothing's wrong.

Oh, that's maudlin isn't it. Life's not so bad really. You can only envy me the aroma of that jam - believe me! Lisa x