Termites!

The good news is... I'm moving on from my Brisbane job. I'll be upping the hours on my home-based contract, and cutting out the weekly 6-hour round trip. Expect more sanity, more feedback, and more photos on the blog.
This has been a particularly busy week, and has really brought home how much I need to cut back my hours - I've been up late this evening doing the crossword for the local paper, I was up late yesterday proofreading a friend's thesis, the night before that I got up at 2:45am to catch the train to Brisbane - what I really hate is that I'm starting to let people down because I'm too tired to concentrate on the things I need to get right.
The bad news is... we have a termite infestation in our house. The buggers are eating our bedroom floor. A professional will be coming along in March sometime to inject arsenic into the wood along with some other toxic stuff I don't want to think about. Embarrassingly, it's the same guy who did our house inspection 18 months ago - and have I done all the termite-risk minimisation work on the garden he advised me to do? Have I hell.
Fran has got our garden pond to within a few hours' work of finished - we drove together up Gungas road to collect large stones to cement around the edge, and Fran re-pointed the bottom of the pond itself - we should be filling it with water and seeing how it goes within a week or two - expect excited posting of boring fish when that happens. The gardening energy levels were fairly sustained all week - herbs were planted, pots were purchased, weeds were pulled up, and trees were earmarked for destruction. I'm excited about how much we'll be able to get done this coming winter when things grow a bit slower and we can get ahead of the bush. We even (finally) made a call and called the tree guy to confirm we wanted his team to come in and chainsaw down our five "problem" trees - that will be a manic and exhausting two days, probably in April some time.
I was tired from driving to Bangalow and back for the market, so I took the train to Brisbane this week - now I'm here I'm realising that I'm gonna miss the little city pied-a-terre. Onwards and upwards.