Gutter and a Slow Cooker

Hi everyone,

 

Good Lord, what a beautiful spring day it was here!  I think it got up to about 25C, and warm sunshine to boot.

 

I started out the day giving the dog a good long walk: he was kind of begging to head out from the moment he heard movement inside the house.  As you can see, he felt it was a perfect morning for a swim -

 

 

The cattle, too, seemed to soaking up the sun and the promise of a spell of not freezing.  As you'll see from some of the pictures from my run in a little bit, the least hint of Spring feels like it's making the countryside to wake up from a chilly slumber.

We do need more rain on the place.  This was the dam the dog and I passed on our walk.  Probably because it's a bit sheltered by high banks on two sides and being in the middle of a large stand of trees, this is the fullest one on the place.  A lot of the others are either low, muddy or dry.

After I got back I got stuck into the combing rail and tie-rail of the truck with a wire brush so that they can be given a dose of Kill-rust and a quick coat of pain.  Shortly after that Barry S arrived and he and the old boy went over to Rushworth to cannibalise one of the trucks on the place there so to restore this one to health.  While they were gone I got into the overdue job of cleaning the gutters out, in the hope that we'll get a bout of rain, with the gutters can channel into the water tank.  I didn;t think they were that choked when I started, but I can tell you I ended up with a nearly full wheelbarrow of leaf litter and muck that I pulled out.  Happily, these plants in the guttering were a one-off.

When I finished this I was able to come back in and have a quick bite of lunch and then start setting up the slow-cooker I bought the other weekend.  Some of the meat we've now got in a defrosted condition is silverside, so I used a recipe for corned beef that Second Oldest Sister gave me and let it go.  By then my phone was on the charger (so no pictures) but I can sum it up by saying the recipe called for the meat, half a cup of malt vinegar, an onion and some cloves.  When I got it out this evening it was absolutely melt-in-the-mouth tender.  I may have cooked it with either too much water or too little spice (it was a little bland), but the basics are clearly solid: I was very pleased with how it came out.

The afternoon was heavily taken up with work on the truck, although I was able to get in a run of a bit over 12 kms in 1:15.  It was on one of my favourite routes, over the hills towards Miepoll, that let me soak up the sun on the way.  The crops are coming up all along the way, and the road was deserted: I felt like I had the whole world to myself.

 

 

The evening has been quiet: dinner and ironing shirts.  Looking forward to sleep tonight!

 

How are your weekends going?