It absolutely bucketed rain in Southern Victoria yesterday.

It has rained a little at the new place - nowhere near as much as we battled through to get there yesterday mind you, but rain nonetheless.

It was raining yesterday morning when we loaded the ute with plants and outside furniture and took off.

Good grief.

It rained, it blew a gale, it rained, it blew. It rained a bit more.

It rained the whole way to Waubra and then it mizziled from then on. (The wind on the other hand, let rip).

We unloaded the ute and did some of the initial repairs on the chook house, but we were a bit twitchy about the weather back here so we thought we'd turn around pretty quickly and worry about chook house work on Sunday.

Only we didn't quite take into account the trip back. Which was long, wet, windy, slow and bloody hard work. The ute's not the easiest thing to drive at the best of times - and put it in a flood and it battles through bravely but it's hard work.

So we decided we wouldn't turn around again today - as it was we didn't wake up until well after 9.00am, but we also just heard that the Western Highway's flooded at Caroline Springs and, well, life's too short.

Adam's going to head up during the week for an overnighter and a bit of chook house work, and I'll go back to hauling loads in the 4WD.

Talking about it yesterday - after seeing how much outside stuff we couldn't fit in the ute in one trip (and with the kind agreement of our lovely landlords), we're going to slow things down again a little. (I know, hard to believe you could move house any slower than we can!)

He gets a couple of weeks enforced leave after Christmas anyway - and this idea of rushing around like bloody lunatics on the weekend before Christmas doesn't appeal to me - as much as he'd like to be in by Christmas. So we'll be in by New Year, and still coming and going from here until the end of February I'd imagine. We want to paint the front room here - you can see the brown spots where German Shepherds have leant against walls over the years, and there's some flooring to be laid and a bit of tidying up to be done around the place.

Doing it this way means we can take the time he gets off and use it to maximum effect, plus we're not trying to unplug servers, move DNS entries and cart furniture around "the day job" which will undoubtedly be frantically busy in the lead up to Christmas.

Of course - the other big problem is Christmas Day. I've done absolutely bloody nothing. Zilch, so I'll have to sort out a menu soonish (we don't do "traditional Christmas" here - we have a go at a different cuisine style most years and generally have a nice / relaxing / go nowhere / lie on the couch day). We were originally planning the great Australian BBQ at the new bush retreat - but the BBQ's up there and we'll be down here so I'll have to get the thinking cap on.