No floor!

On Saturday, we were up and about quicker than we have been recently at the weekend, and managed to hit the road shortly after 9.00. It was a perfect spring day, and we had a really relaxing drive taking the Murwillumbah road.
During the week, Ellen had been in touch from Thailand of all places, because she was worried we might have suffered in the extreme hailstorms that Lismore experienced! Though we had rung Stefan and Iris, and they had reassured us that there had been little hail in Nimbin, we were still a bit worried about what we might find when we got home. In the event, there was no structural damage, and all the trees in our garden were still standing.
The electrical storms had knocked out our trip switches however. This entailed a couple of hours throwing away the food in our fridge and freezer, and scrubbing out the interior of both, and all the containers - but we got off lightly compared to the denizens of Lismore.
During the cleanup, we found an injured lizard hiding under the bean bags. I don't know enough about lizards to tell whether he's just happy in that space, or is unwell and has crawled there to die. He seems friendly, and definitely eats insects -if it's the former, then we seem to have adopted a new pet.
The building supplies place at Nimbin keeps quite strange hours -it's open Wednesday Saturday and Sunday, which was good news for us as Sunday was pencilled in as DIY day: We ripped out the rotten floorboards in the bathroom, and have now positioned the replacement boards over the gap - they'll need to stay there for a couple of weeks to get acclimatised, before they are fastened to the beams and battens. Despite the frustrations, one part of me is definitely enjoying the bathroom renovation project - it will be a good feeling to complete a project where absolutely every aspect of the visible room has had my hand in it.
We had a trial run putting our new tent up - it's relatively simple to put up, and even better, it has 1/2 assembled mode, in which it can be transported in the back of a car, and only requires the addition of one pole to become tent shaped.
We also made it to the Channon market for what must now be the fourth or fifth time. At the Monday evening ante-natal class, we discovered that Jonas and Tanya had also been at the market but we didn't see them there. Both in Brisbane's West End, and also in the Nimbin area, we have started to get to know a few people, but still not enough so that we routinely bump into them when we head out. This contrasts strongly with how quickly we settled in Auckland - by the time we had been living in Devonport for a year, we couldn't walk down the high street without seeing familiar faces, and stopping for a chat every couple of 100 yards. The alienating effect of working in two places and living in two places is stronger than I had surmised - and I begin to understand how it can be that dormitory towns become soulless even once there is as little as 30 per cent of the population commuting.
Instead of driving back to Brisbane late at night on the Monday, I took Tuesday off work and we made our way up the road leisurely on Tuesday afternoon. We took a random detour off the Murwillumbah road, and found a delightfully tranquil valley with a little stream running through it in which to have lunch - it was the perfect setting except for the insects.