A busy weekend

Well Paul and I had a busy but very good weekend. On Saturday we met up with my cousin Janell and her husband Alex at Gyatt Park in St Lucia (by the river) for a bbq lunch and a spot of cricket. They had invited friends and work mates along for the afternoon. It was a very Wellington summer day really (ha ha - and it's the middle of winter here) - it was about 22-25 degrees but quite windy (it's always windy at this time of the year in Brissy) which chilled it down a bit. Then on Saturday night we had a leaving party for our mate Joel whois off to the states tomorrow. He will definitely be missed! That's 2 out of 3 of the hodges who have vacated Brisbane in the last month - Sam & Joel are gone, only James remains. It's stink when you make great new friends and then they leave :-( Should we take it as a hint ;-) ha ha :-) I guess they're jus that that age really (Joel is 26 and Sam is 22).

After getting up at 10am and reading my book for a while (life is hard isn't it) on Sunday we had a day around the house getting a few things done. Paul painted up the little platform he has made to put his rain gauge on - he's going to attach it to the post on top of the deck. I started staining the pine sleepers that we're going to use as borders for our vege patch. Even though I stirred the can of stain quite well before I started whit an old knife, I obviously didn't do it well enough because the last two sleepers I stained are a different colour to the ones I started on. Not good! Fortunately that was only a 1 litre tin of stain and it's all finished. So tonight Paul and I are going to stop in at Bunnings on the way home from work and get some more. This time we'll get a decent stirrer and a 2L or 4L tin and give it a really good stir to get everything off the bottom and mix it in. I guess you live and you learn. I've only done one side of the sleepers anyway as you have to leave them todry overnight after you do the second coat. So the side I've done can just go on the inside of the vege patch rather than on the outside/path side :-)
Boy did the bull ants get stuck into me when I was painting! We have a major ant problem in our lawn. Next time it's forecast to rain I'm getting out with the ant powder and putting a lot of it on the lawn (it needs to be watered it but you're not allowed to water your lawns because of the drought - so we have to wait for rain - not so good in the dry season!). A lot of the ants we have are bull ants - they're like 4 times the size of an NZ ant and their bite really really hurts! I had these big red welts on my shin for hours afterwards and the bites ached for about 3 hours! Nuts aye! And they even managed to go through my trousers the rotton little sods! So now I have really sore legs as after they had a go at me I refused to kneel down, so I crouched for the rest of my painting - definitely not something my legs are used to :-) Ha ha - probably did me a lot of good :-)

I'm very excited about the vege patch - it's going to look fantastic when finished. Initially we were going to paint the sleepers green or maroon, but Paul's mum pointed out that they might look silly when the paint peels off. And I'm glad we changed out minds about it as they stain looks way better - especially against the green of the water tank and grass - wahoo :-)

Right - gotta do some work now :-) 2 weeks today and Paul and I come to NZ!! Sweet!!