Rain

Heavy rain in the past day has taken Canberra's rainfall over the monthly average for August. The bathroom exhaust fan, which we thought after two years of battles was finally fixed, leaked again.

Mowing the Lawn

I've been feeling like I'm on a treadmill stuck in a rut lately and I'm spending too many nights trying to get to sleep while my mind keeps trying to sort things out. Last week was particularly depressing, from the complications caused by a well-meaning but cheap gift to hearing in my half asleep state one morning that the reason for the paint tin in the middle of the floor in the entry was a big spider with fangs. If I'm not tossing and turning sorting things out I'm tossing and turning analysing Where We Went Wrong. Building a dream home with less storage than any previous home was not the brightest idea. That was compounded by the shower leaking into the largest cupboard, the walk in wardrobe which also served as the linen cupboard, so that was a lot of stuff to cram in elsewhere and undoing it is proving to be like a Rubik's cube. The situation was further compounded by husband's initial refusal to believe the statistics that leaking showers are one of the commonest faults in new houses, not to mention the evidence in our own home! Further compounded by taking the seemingly financially sensible decision of making the builder come back and fix it, which has cost us very dearly, as anyone who has gone the route of evaded phone calls and bandaid fixes will sympathise. The en suite ended up being renovated years ago but we're still working on consequences and side issues. Last spring was going to be the big let's get the house in order project, and then the drought broke and we got next to nothing done.

Except for deciding the time was right to sow a new lawn, which we did in autumn.

On Saturday my husband mowed the new lawn for the first time. It looks good from a distance but there's a patch that has a lot of clover in it. It doesn't look like the desired strawberry clover which is said to add nitrogen to the soil, discourage lawn grubs and give the lawn a lush green appearance through all seasons, while only producing a few large pinkish flowers if you let it grow long enough. No, this clover while still fairly low has produced a lot of tiny white flowers. So I'm not sure what we're going to do about that. I guess I'll think about it tonight... in bed...