It's all happening

One thing nobody could ever accuse us of is not leaping in and taking the opportunity when it presents.

Of course it means we spend a fair amount of our life digging like hell to try and get ourselves out of whatever hole we've managed to fall into this time - but who cares. Life is meant to be lived - not avoided!

So we've bought a new place. It's in Redbank, halfway between St Arnaud and Avoca - a LOOOONNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG long way away from here - about 3 hours away from here, 2 hours out the other side of Melbourne.

It started off as a plan to find something around the Talbot / Maryborough area, but the more we looked around Talbot the less we could find that had potential for a semi-self sufficient property and somewhere to make cider. Anyway - long story short, photo on the web of a few apple trees and some fabulous sheds - and in late October we will take possession of 20 acres with aforementioned sheds, a few trees, some animal enclosures and a little house. House is exactly NOT what we wanted - but it's a huge step up on a shed or a shipping container which I thought we'd probably end up in so it's a win (although we will have to do some construction if we've got a modicum of a vague chance of fitting all our crap into the place - 6,000 books take up a lot of space and then there's the office, and I COOK so we need a kitchen that can handle some equipment and stores - and the various other bits and pieces (did I mention this house has zero cupboard space...) OH well. Expect some serious whinging for a while and we'll cope.

When we move isn't 100% set in concrete yet - we'll wait for settlement and rent from the new owners of this place for a while as we start to move stuff, get some access ramps to the house built (the steps are too wonky for the shepherds to manage to say nothing of me!), and see what state the aforementioned Shepherds are in. I think that's one of the major regrets - we're moving the Shepherds at a very late stage in their lives and Gryphon's Degenerative Nerve Disease has just progressed to another level of problem - so I think that there health will dictate how and when. We're going to miss our vets desperately I can tell you. The new area is a lot hotter and the house is so poorly designed that it has to have air-conditioning (which is making me break out in hives of guilt) - we really are going to have to work out what cost-effective retrofitting we can do until we can sort out building something appropriate for the location - but we'll have to use the air-conditioning for the first summer at least as neither of the dogs are in any state to cope with the increased heat we can expect in that area.

So why are we doing this? Well 20 acres in an area with a council that is very pro-agriculture and openly states you can't be moving into the area and whinging about the agriculture activities around you (YEAH!), the air is CLEAN, the area was blissfully quiet - no imbecile shouting instructions at his kids for hours on end - just outside our front door, the properties are larger, we're surrounded by some fabulous wineries and - from the back of the new place you turn - and you're looking straight at the Pyrenees Ranges. Gorgeous. Sure we're in for a fair amount of disruption and we can only hope that the increased access to the place (no steps for Gryphon to fall down) will make the dogs forgive us for the disruption.

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