Holidays

We've had a lovely start to the winter school holidays here with this raging wind storm that's been going on for the past couple days. Thankfully, touch wood, there has been no damage to us personally and we hardly even lost power. They reckoned this storm was meant to finish up yesterday afternoon, but alas, it's still howling outside.
     Tuesday night Dad and I had a few jobs to go to and ended up getting to the calf feeding job about an hour later than usual - it's no problem though. However, the road we have to drive down had just had a new layer of gravel laid (originally we had to go through a "pot-hole dodging process" because it was that bad...) and the ute got a puncture. It was so bad that it actually split the tread away from the tyre. Luckily, Dad has a compressor installed in the ute engine for times like these, so once we were done with the calves he pumped it up again and had to drive home rather fast before it lost all the air. By the time we got to the rugby club - half way home - we had to stop to pump it up. But...the compressor wouldn't work, the wind was going for it and it was pouring down with rain. Oh yeah, and it was about 5:30 at night which is pitch black in winter...We tried and tried with the compressor, but it turns out that it blew a fuse, the only option was to change to the spare - not the best option as it is a smaller tyre than the others. Eventually we found all the gear to change it, then realised we didn't have a screwdriver to undo the wheel cap. By now, we're soaked and there is no service either. Excellent - no?
     Thankfully there was a house up the road with the lights all on, so I sent Dad up there to ask them for a screwdriver. They were goodsorts, and lent us two to use. About an hour after it began, the tyre was changed and I got to see, for the first time, how the spare tyre system on a ute works. Quite clever really!

From Sunday to Tuesday we had my Aunty, Uncle and three cousins staying with us. They were traveling around a bit for their school holidays - as they always seem to do - and saw us, my sister, nana and some of their friends, while also stopping at the university where my cousin George is considering going to next year. On Monday night we had a game of Trivial Pursuit - parents v. kids. It was pretty unfair really, considering they've got 20 odd years on us. With us being 90's born, we had a lot less knowledge of the questions. They ended up winning three times over, before we gave up. The rule was so because they were at an advantage, they had to get into the middle five times and get the answer correct, so that we would have a chance too. We managed all of our wedges, but then we gave up.


Also on Tuesday we had an electrician here to wire up our new oven. Get this, Mum's owned her oven for about 20 years and cleaned it a couple weeks ago, after she cleaned it, Dad agreed that getting a new one might be a good, safe idea. How rude! Well hey, atleast it'll be clean when we dump it at the metal recyclers! The old one was a fire hazard, the door wouldn't seal properly anymore, which lost all the heat and was burning the cupboards on either side. It was also wasting power because of this and one of the elements was a bit dodgy. But hey, it did 20 years!
     Harvey Norman were having their mid year clearance deals so we scored a really good deal. It's a three door compartmentalised oven, with an induction cooktop. Induction is amazing, things heat up with about a minute and the element only heats up where the pot is touching, so you can use a small pot on a large element without a worry - it's some magnet technology. The pots have to be magnetic (none of our existing ones were...) for it to work. So with the oven, we got a free roasting pot and new pots for less than half price. Unfortunately only one of our roasting dishes and the muffin trays will fit in the oven. None of our really good baking trays and other roasting dishes will, because they're slightly too big. It's a shame. However we did some cooking in it yesterday - we cooked up a storm (lol) - and wow it's amazing! Mum made a sponge, we thought it was going to be really tough but it was the lightest sponge she's ever made. Also, because you can control the temperature, the fudge we made was perfect. Of course it's taking a little bit to get used to, but it's pretty cool :D