Late Beach

It's 7:00pm and just got back from a beach stroll which took 90 mins which included a 1hr sit down. There was hardly anyone about.  We saw one neighbour who was doing a water walk way out about 80 metres.  Another day of Christmas preparation with more lawn mowing and edging. One of the christmas decos failed that we had strung out along the deck but fortunately we had a spare, however it is an hour's effort to remove the old one and put in the replacement.

20 metres of linked LEDs in the bin

New beach towels

Lipton's Tea

 I am making space for the guests to come into this room so boxes are being moved and opened.  I found a small box that started pouring out perished cellophane. There were a hundred or so packets of all sorts, 10c 20c or 30c each. Other oddments like the stamp you could find inside a Lipton's tea pack.  Now I vaguely remember this and wanting to open the tea to get at the stamp, well before the tea in the canister had been used. So we were stuffing tea into other containers.  You had to keep kids amused some how, like the Stamp Gang.  Those were the days.

Clean Clean

I spent the day on windows or 5 hours of it at least.  The robot does a good job but you need to be present while the action is happening.  For instance you can be preparing one window ahead as well as going back to the previous window. There are many obstacles from the inside of the house, like venetians, fly screens, security blocks, window sill decos including plants, figurines etc.  Now we have christmas decos as well ,covering all the deck glass so I am not moving those.  In the end I could not get it all done as the three cleaning pads I have got dirty and that was from the inside of the windows only.  We have over 100 panes of glass in this house, not counting mirrors. By the time I got to the deck upstairs, the robot could not slide across the glass any more. I had tried to clean the pads quickly but some how I must have greased them up so they wouldn't work. If you get three days of clarity before a seaside smear builds up then that's OK.  Christmas day is still three days off.

Asher gets some Doh

 Play Doh that is.  For some reason PlayDoh is where we start at the moment. It used to be book reading and before that the inside dolls house.  The clouds went away so there was another long water play which is basically a series of deep dishes and the hose.  Debbie whisked her off for an hour so. The afternoon snooze takes a bit of doing with trains whizzing passed but I think I did get 20 minutes.  She knows what Santa is all about and there is an Elf on the Shelf that has been checking how good she is each day. 

The Closers

 We have to fit three extra families in here next week and Debbie has cleaned three bathrooms like new today.  I have been measuring up this study area and I can fit a queen bed in here with a bit of rearrangement. We also got the pud cooking last night after our day of travelling around.  Tomorrow's trip to Melbourne will be back in our own car after I retrieved it today. At least the warranty was good for this problem, as there were numerous parts installed and labour requirements but all the items added up to zero dollars. I still had time to finish off a book that I traded a box full for, last week. I have read this guy before whose specialty is detective stories.  He has the knack of hiding who the killer is and it is the 11th time in 11 books that he has got his man.  Detective Bosch is also an Amazon Prime TV show.

3rd day of Christmas

 We travelled over to Watsonia to the RSL just down from James & Heidi's.  It is a good venue close to home when you have a few presents to open and some of them were large, like a wrapped wheel barrow. Asher had the playroom all to herself but I did have some trouble getting thru a few of the pipes.  I had steak for lunch so after that there was no playroom for me. Heidi took Estelle back for a snooze  so we retreated there for a coffee and there were even more photo opportunities as Asher was busting to close to Estelle as were the rest of us. Estelle is a real cry baby when she sees James leave the room. Don't leave me.

smiling Estelle  

Estelle is too cute I want a cuddle

loud Christmas shirt

Shopping Day

 It's the annual Christmas Shopping Day which means everything that needs to be bought is bought on one day and I am not tagging along as I would just slow down the train. So in the meantime I have mown some lawns, as there will be no time tomorrow with the luncheon in Watsonia and this is the last green bin before Christmas. I also tried the swim earlier but it was to windy and the water had also been stirred with a lot of grass particles. It was hot enough to get cooled off but there were other floaties draping across your face as you went.  We picked some produce like large zucchini as well as a few strawbs. The lemons are on sale out the front again with all gone except three left on the tray. $0  each. In the Sunset below notice it is almost at its most Southerly reach, up the ridge, and well away from the water.

I zoomed a few kms for this shot of a red slash