Which is a huge pity as Adam finished the flooring at one end of the house (all we have to do is paint the tricky bits in the bathroom and that part's done).

At the other end, the ceilings are now all painted, the laundry is finished (except for a couple of tricky bits that I'm about a foot too short to reach and stay precariously perched on a ladder - you do all know how terrified I am of heights!).

So we got an awful lot done this last weekend, including a short shopping trip into St Arnaud on Saturday morning. But the reason for no photos is there are a couple in the camera - but the batteries ran out, so I'll have to get some new ones before I can retrieve them.

We also had a play with a new video camera. I'm not very good at video camera operation - couldn't remember which way to push the zoom if my life depended on it. But we did get some nice shots of Jedda trying to work out that bloody great big dog water bowl. No swimming in the dam this weekend, but lots and lots of circling it.

Adam's back on his way up this afternoon - he's got to run some tests for something or other to do with work on Thursday so he's decided he'll spend tonight and Wednesday night up there, work during the day and do a bit more painting and flooring of an evening.

Hopefully we'll be onto the chook house repairs soon (needs the door replaced, better perches inside for our big boofy Aunty Jack and some air-conditioning (ie holes in the walls), as well as a renovation to the back of it so that it can be cleaned without having to be a contortionist).

Anyway - it's lovely to see some progress still ticking along. Hopefully at this rate we'll be close to in by Christmas and fully sorted by the New Year.

This time of office stuff - it's astounding the number of bits of paper that make up a companies operation - but just about all of that guff is now moved. One more load of odds and ends and all that will be left downstairs will be a few desks and the servers.

Lovely to see the Wedge-Tail Eagle circling down low over the paddock at the back of the house when I arrived, although the magpies were less than impressed - so I wasted 10 minutes watching them chasing it away. Hot up there, but still water around on the ground. Hopefully when I go back tomorrow there might be some of those showers through. (And you never know - I might remember the blasted camera).

We started emptying furniture out of the office this weekend.

It started with a "bit of a good idea" - we hired a furniture trailer to pull behind the ute (which is the only car we've got with a tow bar). Those furniture trailers are very very heavy - even before you get anything in them. The poor little ute pulled it all the way to Redbank and back - but not much over 90kph all the way.

Still - we got one of the desks, one of the couches, the stationery cupboards, one large white board and assorted other odds and ends up there. We want to clear out the office as the new owners have bought more floating floor to replace the water damaged floor down there, so the sooner we can clear the room the quicker we can get somebody onto the flooring.

Mind you, the very very large desk is still to come out - along with a couple of smaller desks and a couple of bookcases - and then the heaviest printer in the known universe. So it might still take a little while

But the "good thing" is that it gives me more smaller boxes and things to cart up there this week so I'm going to try for at least 2 trips during the week, and we'll probably stay over again next weekend - we didn't do any painting or flooring up there over the weekend needless to say.

(Oh and it rained up there last week - it was damp on the ground!)

OK, maybe not. But the satellite internet service is now in and it seems to work fine.

The installer was caught up at another site and the 1:30pm appointment quickly became 5pm, so I filled in the time doing more flooring. Now I've nearly finished one end of the house with perhaps an hour of work left to finish and do the final edging. So it wasn't all wasted.

*Warning Geek Speak follows*

According to the paperwork that came with the satellite modem there is a quarter of a second round-trip delay introduced, which doesn't seem too bad. I already need to cope with a 300ms delay to servers in Sweden. I've logged on to the corporate VPN and it was stable and worked. IRC lag was showing at between 1.3 and 2 seconds most of the time, which is acceptable. Web browsing is pretty fast, certainly as quick as my current ADSL connection. What I was dreading was using ssh, and I needed to check on the system status of four servers before I could go home, so I gritted my teeth and fired up cssh to the servers, waited probably 5 seconds or so for the sessions to stabilise (which may have been the corporate network, I've seen similar times before), and then typed in top and saw it come up in all four windows in under a second, so that is far better than I thought it would be. Email started off quickly, but started to get "sticky", which could have been anything. I had read that you need to optimise network settings to get the best performance out of the link, and had not done anything to that end - this was taking the laptop and plugging it in with no prior setup.

I'm not sure how Karen is doing multiple single-day trips a week. The drive isn't too bad, but 6 hours of driving per day certainly takes it out of you. Music up loud and lots of coffee does seem to help though.

Today I get to stay home and himself is heading up to Redbank.

The satellite installer is going to be there this afternoon. Woo HOOOOOO

This means that we can now seriously start moving things over. Of course we still haven't finished the painting, or the flooring, or the chook house adjustments, or the Jedda Proof Fence. But it's another big step forward and I suspect will probably be the tip over the edge that makes us pick a final date here.

It rained most of the way up yesterday and there was heavy fog all around Ballan which isn't completely unknown from what I remember - although somewhat startling after such a dry dry drought.

In the meantime it rained A LOT in Maryborough and areas yesterday - there was water on the ground as I drove over there from Redbank. Typical really - so many farmers had to cut crops and bale them for hay and so much of that hay is sitting in paddocks. I bet there's some farmers wondering what on earth they've done to the universe.

Still - the smell of the wet bush as I headed over was fantastic.