And this time I can’t go with my family because they all have some concert to go to that I’m not particularly fond of so they can’t come and I get to go with a good friend. That’s even better, though I don’t want to tell my family.

We are going to take a tent and camp, as I would normally do with my family. It’s a really good tent, about 10 foot square and canvas and really good quality so worth taking. It’s heavy but I have a lighter tent that’s smaller but it’s forecast to rain and I want a good tent that will keep the rain out. You’ve got to have a good tent.

There’s going to be plenty of driving first, we leave at around 5 am Friday morning, so we get going really early. Really early, I don’t like to get up early.

As much as I hate to get up early if you’re looking forward to something you just get up and go anyway, so it’s not so much of a problem really.

Unfortunately my car is pretty old and I’ve got all my fingers and toes crossed hoping it makes it up ther4. It’s done 540,000 miles so it’ done a lot of work, but it goes fine.

Saturday will be a day of doing nothing. It’s planned that way so that’s how it is. I want to go fishing, I really like fishing, even though I’m a girl. So I’m intending to take the gear along, though it is forecast to rain. In fact I bought a new fishing rod today, because I broke my old one a while ago.

My old broken rod was one I made a long long time ago. I bought the fiberglass blank and all the runners and made it all myself and I’ve used it and used it. I was pretty impressed with myself that I managed to make my own fishing rod. Tha’ts normally a guy thing.

Ive used that fishing rod for a lot of years now, and it was a sad day when I broke it. I don’t even know how I broke it really, I was just walking through the trees and suddenly I noticed the tip of the rod broken off hanging in its own. Boy was I pissed off.

It wasn’t as if it was worth a lot of money really. It was just the sentimental value to me because I made it myself and I’d broken it. So today I went to a fishing gear shop and bought a new one and it’s good.

New fishing rods cost almost nothing. I paid about 25 bucks for a new one so not expensive really is it? But it isn’t the one I made.

I suppose they’re all made in China now, that’s why they’re so cheap. Hope it lasts. So that’s my weekend coming up soon. I hope I get a few fish and it doesn’t rain too much. Ill write about it soon.

If I remember, I haven’t written much here have I?

5 in the morning is too early for me. Way too early. At 5 am even the birds aren’t awake, I’m certainly not. It is completely dark and feels like it’s about 1am. It’s pretty hard to get out of bed at that time, though when you’ve got a weekend to go to it’s still worth getting up. Something to get up for.

I decided to pack the husband and kids, hey wanted to come too, and we got started. There was a lot of gear to load into the car and we took longer to get going than I thought was a good idea. Because we were meeting  some other cars there and the meeting was at 9am, so we had to get started and get there on time.

It was raining by the time we got there which was really annoying. That was a shame as it has been such good weather lately, the one weekend I want good weather its raining. But that’s weather, you cant do anything about it can you?

And when you’re camping in a tent the last thing you want is heavy rain. Rain is the worst thing because when something gets wet it’s wet for the whole time unless it gets warm again. Luckily the rain was heavy but when we were putting up the tent it eased off a little. Some luck at least. And it was a long drive in the rain.

And along the way there were all sorts of new speed limits which held us up a bit.

But even despite all this it was a good weekend. I did some fishing and caught a fish and we had it for dinner which was nice. Fresh fish tastes great. I love it.

A nice weekend holiday all round.

I have a small boat. Just a simple aluminum boat, about 13 feet long. Its got its own trailer so I can tow it, I dont need to put it on the roof of the car.

It was raining and blowing hard when we went away last week. The kids had school holidays so they said they didn’t want to spend the whole time at home, so we went away for a while. And though it was raining hard at first it soon stopped and got sunny so it was really nice.

The holiday place was nice. I chose it because it had lots of things for kids to do. Kids always need to be occupied, so if you go somewhere where there arent any kids facilities then youve got a problem. Bored kids.

Bored kids can be the worst thing you can do for your holiday. They are grumpy and unhappy and keep hassling you all the time to play with them, when all you want to do is to sit and relax and read a book. Kids hassling you doesn’t mesh well with bored kids. Bored kids, stressed parents.

But the kids were happy over the weekend thank god. There were so many things that they could do, including jumping up and down on this huge plastic thingy, and they just loved that. That alone kept them happy.

And in the games room there was something that the kids loved too, a massive tv that had a kids movie showing every night so they just sat in there all the time in the evenings. Like all kids mine like tv.

And of course there was the swimming pool. I can’t believe something as simple as a swimming pool keeps kids entertained for so long.

And more about my boat. It was great for a number of reasons. Firstly it was a great way to get the stuff transported. The kids bikes are too big to take in the car but if you have a boat along then you can just throw them in the boat and they’re taken care of.

So it was really worth taking the boat along. We spent some time on the local river puttering up and down looking at the scenery and having a good time. We stopped and spent an hour or so having lunch while the kids ate and had a swim in the river and it was a little cold. And we got to sit and read a book in the sun.

And the lake was great too. Last summer I bought an inner tube and rope and towed the kids around with it so I brought it along this time too and they loved it just as much. In fact it was difficult to get them off it, they lived it. They just wanted to spend the day there.

So that’s our holiday with the boat. My husband didn’t want to get a boat but now he loves it. It’s a girl thing too.

But one of the good things about the country is the birds. I love to see birds around.

There’s really a stunning number of birds out here, so many you can’t believe it. Maybe it’s because there’s so many trees in the country. The birds live in the trees and pick off the pods from the leaves and eat them all, you can see them doing it all day. They pick them off with their claws and hold them to eat.

Although I do like birds they do make a mess of my trees which is a shame. When they break off a small branch to eat the pods they drop it on the ground and it looks like a battlefield under my trees, bits of branch everywhere. Just mess everywhere.

They have wonderful. They’re parrots and all parrots have stunning colors I think. And they like to sit on the window sills and verandah posts around my house and look in at me, and I find that if I sit really still then they don’t fly away, they just sit there, and that’s such a treat. I love having them around and Iv’e got one sitting there now.

There’s damage to the trees like I said but it’s still great having them around and I love it. I could frighten them away when they start damaging the trees and then I wouldn’t have the damage but I’d rather let them come and sit on my veranda. If I send them away they might leave for good.

Its got to be so much better out here. Ill bet there’s no birds like that in the city. Too many people to scare them off and no trees for them to come along to eat from.

And it’s not just birds, there’s so many animals, and as I love animals I’m happy. I’m surrounded by animals and birds too. And cows.

I think it’s really good for you having animals and birds around. It’s nature and nature is important. It’s like life for everything else around us.

So give me the birds and animals around me and I love being around nature. Ah, now I’ve just had one of those parrots perch on the veranda right in front of me right now.

Ahh, give me the country life, you won’t get me going back to live in the city. Who needs it?

Just pull back a little that’s all. Nothing more.

The best time to pat them is when you feed them hay. They just love hay, and when the grass growth is getting slow because winter is coming you need to supplement their feed with hay or something else. I have hay so that’s what I feed my cows.

Now of course if you are feeding the cows hay you’re committed to feeding them every single day. Every day even if you’re not feeling like it, or maybe it’s raining. If you don’t feed the cows they starve which isn’t good. And if you are feeding them hay that’s the time to pat them. My cows love hay.

I feed them the hay myself. I like my holidays though so when you go away you have to have something to do so that the cows are fed. I do this all by myself. You have to take care of your cows.

I have various paddocks each fenced off with good fences. 6 in total. So when I have plenty of grass in the paddocks I lock one up and leave it with the long grass in it. Then when I go away I open the gate to that one and the cows discover that the gate is open and head in there. It lets me go away from time to time.

And when I open the gate to the paddock with the grass they’re in there as fast as they can, because they’ve seen all that grass when they look through the gate. Cows aren’t stupid you know.

Then when I come back I shoo them out of that paddock and back into the one with no grass and I start feeding them the hay again. And pat them.

Right after breakfast I feed them their nice hay. They get about 2 1/2 bales of hay every day but if it’s too cold I give them 3 bales of hay and they eat the lot. And they’re not silly, they know when feeding time is, they’re waiting right out the front of the shed for their hay. They know.

In fact this morning I gave them 4 bales. But it’s getting warmer soon and the grass is beginning to grow and that’s good because I don’t have a lot of hay left. But that’s ok because I’ve got more grass coming so I’ll have more hay soon, so 4 today.

And my cows are always happy when the grass is getting longer. And the grass is getting longer now, so my cows are happy. And if they’re happy I’m happy too.

But I’m not sure that I’m any good at it, I just like it. I’m never going to be the next Hemingway.

I went to university when I got older but I made a mistake. I studied what I thought would be good to get a job, not what I liked. But when I should have done was to study what I liked, writing. If I had it all again I’d study writing and see how far I got, though maybe it wouldn’t be too far. Writing doesn’t pay well though.

I have no idea if I would ever have become good enough at writing to make a living at it, but I would have liked to have tried. You never know unless you try, and I wish I had tried some time. I would have given it a really good go, and would have made a difference.

Would I ever have made money at it? Who knows?

Writing well can be learned I’m really sure. It’s a skill. It’s not something that you’re born with. It’s a skill that anyone, including me, should be able to learn. I think the most important thing is that you enjoy it and if you enjoy it you’ll keep at it till you’ve learned. Love it and you’ll learn.

But if you love it like I do then writing is just something that needs time to develop. It is a skill that you have to work on every day. I work on it every day. Right here, and in other ways.

So this is where I plan to write. It’s my website, probably no one will read it but me, but who cares, it’s all about me. I don’t care about that, I’m not writing it because I want someone to read it, I’m writing it because I like writing it. So if you’re reading it then you might be my first reader, after me. I like that, to think I have a reader.

Welcome my reader, I hope you like it.

I came to bike riding quite a while ago. Well no not that long ago actually, considering that I’m not all that young. I knew I had to do something to keep fit and keep fatness away.

I tried swimming but it just never worked, I never took to it, in fact I didn’t like it at all. I just found it really boring and it was a real effort to get up in the morning and go swimming. You just go up and down and down and up and up and down and a minute feels like an hour. It’s dreadful.

There’s that black line underneath you. You just go up  and down the black line. Its mesmerising. Its meaningless, its so boring. I can’t believe how boring it really is. I hate the black line.

So after trying swimming I knew that wouldn’t work. I knew I couldn’t spend 3 or 4 days a week putting some swimming into my day. Because if you’re going to keep fit you’ve got to do it about 3 or 4 days a week  or more or you’re really just wasting your time.

And you’ve got to do about a half hour minumum. Less than that and its a bit of a waste of time, and like I said, it seems like a whole day.

So I was in a bind. I used to jog and found that as boring as swimming and so I was a little stuck. But then I started to think about cycling and it just stuck.

I didn’t have a bike although I used to ride to work many years ago. My old bike was up at the shed  but its so rusted that its unusable. I knew I had to get another bike. And a new bike isn’t cheap, in fact it’s quite expensive.

So I went and talked to some of the people in the local cycling club and found out that there was a new recreational cycling group starting up and that I could join it. So I figured that I’d found my passion and it was time to just go out there and buy a new bike.

So I joined the group and got cycling. I loved riding. They did long rides and short rides and I did them all. But after while I started to get a little frustrated with the pace of the riding. It was slow.

I’m not exactly young but despite that I really felt that I could ride harder than the recreational group did, that it was a good social situation but I wanted to get fit and do a workout and it was too slow for my liking, way too slow. So I started riding on my own to get a faster ride in and workout more and get fitter.

So after a while riding on my own I found that it was nice to ride hard but a little lonely. I was getting a workout but on my own, but I could go faster. So I made some enquiries and found out that there was a riding group that rode out of town a few days a week that used road bikes and rode hard. It went sundays and I decided to go along, and it was a good decision.

But the bike that I had already bought was a half mountain bike and half road bike, called a hybrid, and so I had the wrong bike again, I needed a road bike. So again I had an issue with no bike that would do the job, but by then I knew I really liked riding so I bought a road bike and joined the Sunday group. They ride pretty fast and sometimes I keep up, occasionally I don’t keep up.

But it’s fun trying.

But of course its a hard workout, exactly what I need.

So that’s my cycling career. I love it, I ride 4 times a week and I’m getting fitter. And I’m not fat either!!

There’s just so much to life in the country that you just can’t find living in the city. One example for you. I love cycling and do it heaps out here in the country. It helps keep me fit and that’s important and I definitely need to keep fit. And it gets me into some beautiful outdoors locations, places that it’s just a privelege to visit.

Around me there’s so much to cycle past and see. Fields with cows, sheep and goats. Horses too, though I don’t like horses a whole lot. But I love cows and sheep. I have my own cows, each with its own calf, and I love them dearly. They’re my pets, not farm animals.

There’s so many advantages to living out here and cows and calves at my place is just one of them. It’s nature and I love nature.

Its summer right now and its very hot. We’ve had some really hot days lately. Now of course if I lived in the city it would still be as hot. But here I see the cycle of the seasons so well. I feel more at one with the seasons and with nature now. I see the grass die when summer comes, I see the grass regrow and get green again for winter. It see snow, I see drought, I see rain, I see life.

All the leaves turn such great colors, and they fall off and they look so good all on the ground around the base of the tree, and the trees drop seeds and new baby trees start to grow underneath them. I get to see the old and the young, all cycling, all turning over as the creator intended.

All of these things cycle, just like I cycle. They go round and round and I really see what the seasons are.

If I lived in the city I mightn’t even have a garden at all. I mightn’t have a tree at all. I might have a lot of concrete, I might have a balcony on my house and a BBQ, but I mightn’t have a tree or a blade of grass or a shrub.

Apart from the temperature I mightn’t even know what season it is, and that would be terrible.

The city is so sterile. I spent a lot of years there so I know what its like. Now of course that’s just a personal view, but that’s how I feel about it. As it’s my website  say what I feel.

Even the rest of my own family live there. My brother loves it and he’s single so I suppose he needs more social life than me, and there’s probably lots more social life in the city. But I don’t like it, so that’s that.

I grew up in the city and spent most of my life in the city. Then it was fine but it really feels now as if I wasted a lot of time in the city, I wish I’d been born in the country instead. I feel a little like I wasted a lot of my life in the city, that’s sad isn’t it? I don’t suppose I wasted it, but it feels that way.

I didn’t really waste it of course. I should ask my brother if he’d like to live here but I doubt he would. He likes the city. That’s his prerogative.

Give me the country any time, and give him the city.

I don’t know much about it but it sounds fun, but in a while I’ll tell you if it’s fun or not. Well I’ll write it here and see if anyone reads it, maybe no one will.

But that’s ok because I’m writing here just for me. I want to see it on the internet, I want to see that I can do it, it doesn’t matter if no one reads it. After all, who cares?