I am starting to seriously look at buying a house, however my enthusiasm for the process is about on a par with going to the dentist. I wish I could just pick a house out of an online catalogue and skip all of the tedious looking/inspecting/negotiating bit.

An assortment of pretzels and some fruit salad, please.

What the place really needs is a couple of moving billboards and a board advising of upcoming roadworks that scrolls through the information so you never manage to actually read it all. There’s nothing like increasing the visual clutter on the roads to enhance safety.

I’ve had a good result with beetroot and a couple of other root vegies - I have a few beetroot ready to pull up now. I need to do some more planting, I haven’t really gotten onto doing any of the leafy veg yet, but I keep intending to.

My pumpkin vine has put out a bunch of new female flowers, it must feel like it’s in with a chance for more fruit than the 10 currently ripening. The squash and zucchini are also making a late fruiting run.

The snow peas on the collapsed trellis had some dried peas so I’ve planted those on the remaining trellis and will hopefully get some new plants growing, and also harvested some fresh snow peas from one plant which decided it’s just going to keep growing on the ground. The climbing bean is also being pretty productive at the moment, so even though I didn’t get everything growing in the garden I would have liked it has been a fairly successful year.

I think I got a bit overexcited putting in my grocery order, nearly got up to $500! Normally it’s around $350-$300 for the month. It’s probably a touch of anxiety making me want to stock up, I got the stuff to make a big batch of canned chili and some canned chicken. Plus a lot of nuts and dried fruit which are always a touch expensive. Hopefully they will actually have most of the stuff, they do have a tendancy to not actually provide the meat I order and if that happens I’m going to have to hunt down some mince for the chili from elsewhere.

I just had this converseation with someone at work! I feel like I’m running late when I arrive in the dark, I do not like it.

A bit on the wet side today. Mr Woof did get to rock his flouro yellow raincoat on our walk, not that anyone was out to see hin anyway.

Driving down to Melbourne without all the traffic was pretty nice, cut about 40 minutes off the trip. Plus all the clouds meant I didn’t have the usual problem of the sun straight into my eyes, so I’m counting it a pretty good day.

I managed to get through my to-do list. It was a bit of an overloaded day, but I did a big batch of cauliflower soup (15 serves!) a batch of yoghurt, a sandwich loaf and a cheese and herb plait, chopped veggies for snacking on, prepped all meals for the next two days, mowed the front lawn, folded the washing, assembled a small cupboard and did my exercises.

Lawn is mown. Soup is simmering. Yoghurt is straining. Bread is baking. Washing is folded and put away. Vegetables chopped into snackable sticks. Why do I still have lots left to do today?

Lovely looking day out there again today. I plan to mow the front yard (back was done yesterday), make some cauliflower soup, sort out meals for the next few days at work, and lift some heavy things.

Personally I find it a bit of a sad intitement of our society that we equate shops/services being closed with ‘nothing to do’. Are we really that unable to entertain ourselves?

I’ve always thought public holidays are a great thing because it gives us time to do things together - get together for a bbq or a picnic, play board games, have a movie night, whatever you like. Don’t just feed the consumerist machine.

My fruit & veg box has arrived for the month. I have lots of cauliflower (destined for soup) and a huge amount of grapes. The lettuce however was extremely tiny, which is probably a good thing as I still have more than expected left from last month - the change to cooler weather has slowed down my salad intake somewhat.

Pakige on board for delivery.

I think this is my new cast iron griddle pan, which will help me make bigger tortillas (amoungst other things). I also got lots of stuff yesterday, most notably a new tofu press, and also a lot of pairs of cheap sandles to wear around the house. I might have gone a touch overboard on those, so a few pairs have been put away in the cupboard for when the first lot wear out.

-27.5 hours

I also saw one with cows set up as mobile communication points.

I wear that sort of thing when I’m at home, but the bigger problem is when I’m at work. When I’m there I have to wear a uniform and I’m also contending with wildly inconsistent heat levels in the building - even without hot flushes people are constantly having to take jumpers on and off, this has just upped the difficulty level!

I am really over this hot flush thing.

🥵🔥🔥🔥

I bought some magnets recently and can’t find them anywhere. I think I must have thrown them away with the packaging by mistake. 🙁

I’ve been working on updating my budget so that I’m tracking a lot of things in my spreadsheet that I was using multiple bank accounts for previously. It will make it easy to change over to a home loan with a single offset account in future and should also make it easier to provide the bank details when I apply.

I’ve been trying to make things as automated as possible so that I don’t fall behind on tracking and can still see the balances of the different savings categories easily. I’m most of the way there, and have also been able to simplify a few areas that were getting a bit out of control - it’s amazing how chaotic a spreadsheet can get when you keep tacking new things on here and there.

It is frustrating how many places still make changing direct debits difficult. My main credit card it looks like I have to cancel the debit and start again with a new one which isn’t too bad, but BankWest still make you send in a paper form.