Not a wally

If you've read the posts from my old blog (see below), you'd probably think that I'm a bit of a wally with water...... with the sprinkler system and saturating mice....... but I'm not.

I just wanted to clear that up. I am well aware that these are trying (and drying) times. Water is such a precious commodity, and I am one of the many who prays for rain. Adam and I are very water-wise, and try to save water wherever possible. We have a couple of green patches on our front lawn and out the back, but not through wasting water.

We have:

• Buckets in the shower that we empty into a basin that has a hose to the front lawn
• A timer in the shower, and a water-saving shower head
• A hose from the washing machine to the back lawn, which we use to fill buckets to water the plants out the front
• A bucket in the kitchen sink for clean-ish (not black-water) to water the plants or rinse dishes
• Obeyed the water restrictions, and haven't even watered the garden with the hose for months (and no, its not just that I keep sleeping in....)
• Plans for getting a water tank to save the water off the roof.

Hasn't the rain this past week been glorious?

The pied piper

Entry from old blog 7 April 2006

I'm not a huge fan of mice. How could anyone love the mess they leave as they reek havoc throughout your kitchen or the **sarcastic tone** joy of catching the little blighters?

When we moved we brought with us the small aviary that I had bought my hubby for his birthday, which is a smallish 1.5m x 3m job. A couple of months after the move I was talking to the birds when a small movement at the edge of the wire caught my attention. As I stood and watched, a mouse ran from under the planter box next to the cage to get seed that had fallen on the ground. As soon as I moved it ran away.

Not long after, I was wetting the compost bin contents when all of a sudden I saw a mouse running on top of the pile trying to escape the water. My first reaction was to chase it around the inside of the bin with the hose until it was really wet, after which I picked it up by its tail and threw it over the back fence. Hoping that it would hit the ground and run away or get caught by the neighbours cat I was horrified when I heard a small thump. Looking over the fence I could see that the mouse had landed on top of the neighbours rain-water tank, and it was running along the top looking for a way down. It must have been scared witless because it did not take the leap of faith of 2+ metres, but stayed on the top of the tank.

Being such a warm day, I kept watering my vegies, sneaking a peak at the water tank over the fence to see if the mouse had magically disappeared. No such luck. Every time I looked I could see it drenched and shaking sitting in the same spot. Pity struck me, and I knew that if I didn't do something the poor thing would die of heat stroke, so I grabbed one of my tomato support poles and balanced over the fence trying to knock it off the top (all the while hoping that the neighbours wouldn't see me through their kitchen window). I eventually knocked the mouse off, and it ran away as I had originally hoped.

I saw a mouse (it could have been the same one) a few more times in the compost bin, and one time after drenching it I picked it up by the tail and started to look closer at it. It was then that it decided to go for my fingers, so I flicked the mouse away from me. Wrong direction though - this time it went running towards the house, with me bolting behind it trying to divert it away. Successfully too, I might add, as it eventually ran back for the safety of the planter.

A few other things have happened since then, such as baby mice being born, and me witnessing a mouse climbing up the inside wire of the aviary about half a metre off the ground. One mouse got caught in the wire and died, and I was glad that I wasn't the one who had to clean it up (it's not my aviary after all!!) It was after that that we, or should I say, I, decided to get a mouse trap. We caught the first mouse in less than two hours, and overnight caught two mice in the one trap. The next day we caught one with no bait, and another one that night. All up we caught six mice, plus the one that got caught and died, so that's seven less mice to play with our birds.

I haven't set the trap again, and I am kinda worried that the mice will just keep on coming...... (I wouldn't mind so much if I wasn't the one who had to empty the trap!).

Sun + water = fun!!

Entry from old blog 17 October 2005

When I was a lot younger, my brother, sister and I looked forward to the hot summer days when mum would let us drag out the hose and sprinkler and play under it on the lawn. We'd run through the water for hours, screaming due to its coldness and in delight, and mum would let us do this until the ground got muddy underneath our feet......

We've not long moved into our house, and the previous owner told us that there was sprinkler system in the backyard. It hadn't been used for a few years due to water restrcitions, so he wasn't able to demonstrate it due to the grass that had overgrown the jets. The best he could do was tell us where he thought the jets were.

Being such a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon yesterday, and having been concerned about the lack of green in our grass, I set out on a mission to discover our sprinkler system.

There were four levers for the system, so the first thing I did was turn them all on. Of course, if you turn on all four at once, the water pressure is so low that nothing happens. So I tried just the first one, and was rewarded with some growing puddles in various sections of the lawn. Having found the area where a sprinkler head was, I searched the area until I found the overgrown jet, and then cleared the grass around it and twisted until the water flowed the way it was meant to.

It took me over half an hour to find all of the jets (about 20 in all), after which I was absolutely saturated from the waist down - its a bit hard to avoid the 360 degree coverage each jet. It was a lot of fun though, and the grass didn't even get muddy under my feet!

Mission possible

One of the books that I read over summer was Stephen R. Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. After reading that book I decided to work on the first draft of my personal mission statement. I found it to be a really good way to discover who I really am and what is important to me. One of the goals that I have is To be heard without needing to raise my voice, hence the name of this blog.

Welcome to my new blog. The next few posts that you see above are actually posts that I had on another blog site, but never actually gave the address to people to look at. Hopefully this time I'll be brave enough to share my thoughts with others. As my mission statement says, I will try to be brave enough to make decisions, and to give anything (within reason) a go.......