It's been a while!

 It's been quite a while since I last wrote on my blog, a fact that I've been acutely aware of!  Like many other parts of Australia we've had various extremes of weather over the last couple of years, most recently extremely wet weather, though we've avoided the terrible floods that have been and are still affecting many areas of the East Coast.  Most of my work has been cleaning up fallen trees and branches, and with our grass growing at an unprecedented rate, lots of mowing!  I'm sure that nobody is interested in reading about that any more than I'm interested in writing about it!

A New Fence

A while ago I had a short section of post and rail fence built near the middle of our property and I showed this in the previous post.

Like most of my other fencing this one doesn't actually serve any useful purpose, other than it helps to define the area that it's in and also to display some of my collection of enamel signs!  Eventually I hope to construct an old-style machinery shed behind this fence and having the fence in place helps me a lot when planning exactly where to put the shed.  It's a particularly cloudy and drizzly day today and the tea-tree bushes in the background look unusually grim.

I have finally finished the installation of this sign, which I really like!  It's a reproduction available from a very talented signwriter, and is very hard to tell from an original.

This sign is 'The real McCoy' and is one I've had in storage for quite a while, it's very exciting to finally have it on display.  Being original it already has various screw holes for attachment, but these didn't really match up with the fence rails, so I had to figure out the best way to hang it.  I decided to build a hardwood frame to attach the sign to, which gave me the flexibility to attach the frame to the fence rails at the height that looks best.

Plume brand petrol was sold by the Vacuum Oil Company here in Australia, and was eventually re-branded as Mobil.

Hopefully, from now on, I'll be able to find some interesting updates to write about, and it won't be another two years until the next post!

A different year

 It's been nearly a year since my last update on this blog, and what a year it's been!  We have had bushfires nearby and a continuing ever-present threat of more, an on-going severe drought, a wedding on our property (our youngest daughter) which couldn't have been better, a funeral, a birth (second wonderful grandson) and of course this wretched virus.  In between all of that I've been focusing on improving the infrastructure of our property, generally tidying up, and finishing some projects on my long list!

We built a much-needed new entryway to the property in time for the wedding, but the gates had to wait.  They're now in place and I'm extremely pleased with them!

Although our main track through the property was massively improved for the wedding, it has required some fine-tuning to improve it's appearance and really integrate it into our bushland property.  So I've been chipping away at that and am very pleased with the progress.

Another project that I've wanted to do for a long time is to construct a suitable fence as a first step towards developing an as yet un-named part of the property further in, and this first step has now been taken!  I love all aspects of old machinery, old cars and associated signs etc. and have taken the opportunity to mount one of my signs on this new fence, photographed during a visit of a friend with an appropriate classic car, a Citroën ID19.

The trains and the Trainbarn generally have not been neglected, though progress has slowed a little with everything else taking priority.  One of my sons-in-law is a professional photographer and we've had several sessions in the 'barn photographing and filming the trains, which has been very interesting indeed! Here are a couple of close-ups, though the railway has advanced a bit since these were taken.

Although this year has been, and continues to be, an extremely difficult one for so many people, we have largely escaped unscathed so far.  Our daughters though are having to contend with various logistical challenges due to the lockdowns and limits on travel generally, but we've had the wonderful pleasure of having our two grandsons unexpectedly living close by and that has been a real blessing.  The eldest, now two and a half, is absolutely captivated by tractors and machinery generally, which I enjoy and appreciate very much, of course!  If this time has taught me anything it's to enjoy each moment, each day, and to try not to be too concerned about what the future holds, although that certainly isn't easy!