Friday evening was online board games night. However I went out with my wife for dinner first, to the local Greek restaurant. I tried their duck dish for the first time, in a traditional orange sauce, with vegetables, and it was pretty good.
Yesterday was very warm, and today was hotter, 28°C and 29°C. A blast of summer in early spring, well above the average temperatures for this time of year. In another sign of the advancing seasons, the channel-billed cuckoos have returned from their winter migration north. One has apparently laid an egg in a currawong nest just outside our bedroom window, and it’s hatched. This morning at daybreak I heard the raucous calls of the cuckoo chick and the more melodic calls of the currawongs feeding it. It’s probably going to be a loud morning every day for the next few weeks.
I didn’t plan on doing a run today, as my wife goes to the gym early and I wanted to stay with Scully, and it would be too hot to run by the time she got home. So instead i took Scully on an early walk before the day got hot, to the hardware store in search of that elusive offcut piece of wood for our planned laundry shelf. They had a bunch of offcuts, that were tantalisingly close to the size we wanted, but just a bit too small. So I left them.
I’m baking sourdough today, as we’ve run out of bread, which meant I had none for lunch. So we walked out to a nearby cafe for lunch. They had a special chipotle chicken burrito which I’ve had one before and liked, so I had that.
After we got home we looked at the laundry and discussed options for things. My wife suggested making the shelf a bit narrower than I was planning, and inly using it to store stuff like laundry powder and cleaning items, and putting a new laundry basket on top of the washing machine instead of up on the shelf, so it would be easier to access. This sounded goo, do I re-evaluated the size of the shelf… and realised that one of the pieces of offcut board I’d seen this morning would be big enough! I quickly dashed to the car and drove over to the hardware store, hoping the offcuts hadn’t been cleared out.
I found a piece the perfect size. Melamine coated particle board, about 600 mm long and 350 mm wide. I don’t even need to cut it to the right size – it’s basically perfect! I also grabbed two right angle brackets, and a new laundry basket, a foldable cloth one with bamboo frame that is wide and shallow, to replace our old wicker basket which is tall and narrow. I’ll attach the brackets to the wooden board with screws, and then after we get the place repainted next month I’ll drill holes in the laundry wall to mount the new shelf.
Th major spring clean proceeds. We cleared out some of the book cases today, which had shelves of old photo albums, from the pre-digital days. I’m going to scan the photos and then we’ll put them into storage boxes and store them away, freeing up a lot of shelf space. There’s a lot more cleaning and reorganising to do, and it’ll get more hectic as we approach the repainting.