Just so that Adam's 3 weeks off, and Eric's arrival wasn't all play and no fun, we did take a day off and wandered over to the Chinese Museum in Ararat and then onto Halls Gap for a quick look.

Over the next few weekends we've got to do a bit more sightseeing around and about.

Ararat's the only Chinese founded city in Australia - out of the gold rush days and the Chinese Museum there - Gum San - is really interesting and very well laid out. For more: www.gumsan.com.au

The museum sits up on the high side of the street - approaching it makes it look like quite an imposing building:

Gardens and statues at the front as you work your way up the steps (or around the sloping path):

A trip to the roof is well worthwhile after you've been through the museum to see the impressive pavilion:

A look back towards the Mt Cole / Ben Nevis area:

The roof detail is beautiful although we couldn't for the life of us work out the significance of the roosters

From Ararat we headed up to Halls Gap - Eric is hoping to do some climbing and/or hiking in the Grampians:

The fringe of rocky mountains that surround Halls Gap are very imposing, and very very close.

Here we were parked at the Aboriginal Centre just outside Halls Gap, where we had a really nice stroll around the pond - and saw some of the damage from the high winds recently, as well as met some very nice kangaroos.

We were particularly pleased to run across this very quiet kangaroo - with a very cheeky joey. It's not the greatest photo in the world as she wasn't too interested in staying still at the right angle, but the joey is busily engaged in having a feed of grass - without the need to move from the pouch:

The only roofline around here that didn't have a tank attached to it was the pig / chook sheds.

Which seemed sad as that's right beside the vegetable gardens and should be able to be utilised without the need for the big electric pump on the farm shed over the other side.

So we took out the fence between the pig paddock and the vegetable garden area (we wanted to do that anyway as it was a bit of pest where it was).

And installed a brand spanking new tank - which thanks to a very very very wet weekend, two weeks ago, is getting darn close to full already. (Tank is 4,500 litres).

We've been frantically busy over the last few weeks - Eric's arrived and Adam had some holiday time, so it's been heads down and getting on with some infrastructure projects - so I'm behind in noting down what's been going on.

Simple things to start off with - mulberries are in. These are now dual purpose - yummy fruit and eventually shade for the hot house.

We've had these boxes stacked up in the winery shed since we moved, and we've really really really needed to unpack them.

I was starting to suffer severe withdrawal from cookery books, and there are so many birds I need to identify, to say nothing of desperately wanting the John Seymour Self-Sufficiency and Forgotten Arts and Crafts books so we can work out how to sharpen that scythe we picked up in Talbot the other day.

Besides, I feel a little lost without my beloved books.

We decided that the second living room would be the perfect place to build in some shelving - mostly because it's pretty well an unusable space at the moment:

So my wonderful man spent a few days building some bookshelves!

Custom built into the available space, there are now 3 walls completely covered with shelving:

(Yep - there's more )

And we ended up with something absolutely wonderful!

A couple of extra bookshelves were still required - the two in the main living room now hold reference books and cookery books, and S-Z ended up in a couple of bookcases in the office, along with assorted collections of Agatha Christie, Nevil Shute, Isaac Asimov and other hardback groupings.

All in all a wonderful 3 days of effort, even if special trips to the chiro were required

One thing that you have to be really careful of around here is water. We've already had one episode prior to moving in where a failed plumbing fitting caused us to lose half our potable water storage, something that was very sobering as we juggled the remaining water storage between the tanks on the sheds and those on the house.

Part of the water management is the use of pumps. We don't have the geography to use gravity to provide pressure, so there is a pressure pump on the house that provides us water at mains pressure.

I've been thinking that since it uses electricity it is a vulnerability during outages - no way to get the water out of the tanks short of lugging the fire pump across and dumping the suction hose into the top of the tank. Not a pleasant thought as the most likely times it will be out are during storms and fires.

Luckily we've had some experience using solar powered pumps before and I figured it wouldn't be that hard to hook one up to act as a backup. So we need some:

Solar panels (a 16 and a 24 watt panel mounted on an angled frame).

A controller - this is a really cheap one that still does the job pretty well.

A battery - this is a deep cycle gel cell - so no maintenance, no mess, and very good performance.

A pump helps as well. This is a ShurFlo unit that is designed for campers and caravans to provide mains pressure, although only can provide enough flow for a single tap at a time.

How big is it? Tiny really:

That is the pump house of the electric pump in the background and the little box in front is the pump cover for the solar pump. And there is a lot of spare space in that box (as I'd built it to cover the transfer pump between the shed and house tanks).

Oh, that reminds me, why would you put in an electric transfer pump between two sets of tanks that are essentially at the same height? Gravity can do the work, and I've reconnected everything so we can turn on any tank or any combination of tanks to balance water or connect to the pump.

We'd tried the solar pump out for a few days and decided that it was more than enough for our needs, so why pay for electricity when we can use the sun? As it turns out it was a sound move as recently we had an 8 hour power outage due to massive storm damage in the area. We sailed through it feeling just a little bit smug