My Bright Field

  Isn't it lovely to see some blue sky after months and months of grey weather. This is a photo of the canal running through Thornton Estate where we have our new unit.  The signage says the canal is to provide storm water management as well as providing a pleasing public feature.  I certainly like it and it is a favourite with young men who fish for carp which they catch and throw back. Not surprisingly there seems to be some confusion as to where we now live.  So here is an explanation. We sold our home in the Blue Mountains but still have our home in Kandos.  The Penrith unit provides us with a city base - we have lived in two places for over 30 years and I am not quite up to settling down to just one in the country yet.  We also have a bush block in Clandulla which is a small village near Kandos where we have a shed and store our caravan.

  This week we moved into our new city apartment in Thornton Estate in Penrith.   It gives us a city base in addition to our country home.  So you will be hearing from both the city and country from here.  I am not yet sure what the balance of our time between the places will be. We are excited to be back in the buzz of the city and while the view is very different from the mountain vistas at Kandos, it is nonetheless very pleasant.  And there is no garden for maintain!  But I do miss being able to go out to the kitchen garden to harvest whatever I need for dinner. 

  It was very cold outside this week so I mostly did indoor activities.  Cleaning out the kitchen cupboards and reoganising the pantry kept me busy for a while. Of course I discovered all sorts of items past their use-by-date in the back of the corner cupboard. This time I settled for simply not using the deepest recesses of the cupboard. Do you have a good solution for the corner cupboard? 

  Having had a little bit of constipation after his recent operation my hubby said this week "I just wasted a penny", a reference to the old days when there were penny slot machines on the cubicle doors of public toilets.  I can only vaguely recall seeing these, I think at Central Station. This got us reminiscing about other coin machines. Postage Stamps: The photo above is of an old postage stamp machine at our local post office.  (Amazingly we still have a stand alone post office in our little town).  Of course, back in the day we all wrote letters. I exchanged letters with my parents every week and rarely telephoned. Public Phones:  Do you remember those old push button A, press button B phones?  Trunk calls were really expensive and the telephonist interjected during the call "three minutes are you extending?". Who could have envisaged a day when public phone calls were free as they are today. Coin operated petrol pumps:  Petrol stations weren't open 24/7