But I do have some excuses 😛
We spent the first week of term – 1-8 February – camping up at Jindabyne to escape the heatwave. We mostly pottered around the campsite, but we did:
- visit Adaminaby and Old Adaminaby;
- mooch around Jindabyne, including the Kosciusko Visitors Centre where there is a diorama showing the valley before the dam was built to flood Lake Jindabyne;
- sent postcards to Nannie Frog;
- visit historic Dalgety and swim in (what’s left of) the Snowy River, potter around the town and visit the garden shop, then drive to Nimmitabel and home via Cooma;
- visit the Gaden Trout Hatchery where we did not take the tour due to the fact that the fish were sulking from the heat, but did have a look at some information and chat to a fishery person;
- swim in the Thredbo River (several times) and in Lake Jindabyne;
- drive up almost the whole way to Charlotte’s Pass and stop to wander about in the uplands scrub and take photos.
We also played pool, made friends with possums and kangaroos, made friends with other transient kids, and spend a lot of time driving back and forth to Jindabyne and wondering about the surge tower halfway up a mountain (apparently it’s designed to release pressure in the Island Bend pipeline – we finally stopped and looked at the diagram and it’s pretty impressive engineering). Ness and Grace from JB came up with their munchkins for one night, and E came up to join us for the last two nights. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves and I am now formulating plans to travel round the Alpine Way in spring, camping in different towns and seeing the sights…
We had a very quiet week at home once we got back, in contrast. We totally forgot about pottery and German this week, which is slightly unfortunate since we’ll be away next week too *blush* B has found a new horsey community online, called Howrse (rather unfortunate name), which she likes because she can breed and raise horses as well as just buy them. On Tuesday she went out to the farm with Nannie, rode Smoko, and on Wednesday got stuck back into her books and started writing a letter to Nannie Frog, then went to Scouts and went canoeing. Today (Thursday) we took the dog to the vet for her vaxes updated before going into kennels next week, then B had to go and collect her several times from Brebner St because she keeps escaping from the back garden. Eventually, B took Z for a walk while I took the other two to the mall to go to the bank and get some shopping. In the evening, we looked at a ladybird she had found on her walk, and tried to ID it from the Common Ladybirds Gallery (and the two other galleries) on the Catalyst Ladybird Survey page. We couldn’t find it listed, so had a look at the tool for identifying ladybird species they linked to. We need magnification to be able to work out all the morphological features needed to identify it precisely, and unfortunately we haven’t got anything suitable, so we gave up on trying to figure it out, but I did find a useful link on ladybird morphology which means now we might have a chance at working out what the hell they are talking about. After that I read her a chapter and a half of her extremely-overdue library book The Red Pony, by John Steinbeck, before she went to bed.