It's the most beautiful time to be at the farm. The sun is shining, there isn't any wind, at least in the morning, and the nights are cool enough to have a fire. First thing this morning we went for a walk in the hills, and were greeted by two kookaburras, sitting in a tree not ten metres away and laughing their heads off. If you've never heard a kookaburra laugh in the wild, you're missing something special. Same goes for magpies, which are bountiful at the moment. There are also lots of galahs, and while they're amazingly bright pink, they make a horrible screeching noise.

There was a fire in the hills a couple of years ago (which was pretty scary, as a wind change would have taken out both the houses), and there's a lot of regeneration. By far the most active regrowth is the prickly acacia. They're not a particularly attractive tree and they're wickedly, well, prickly, but they're native to the area so we're happy enough. And their green foliage looks pretty good amongst the burnt black trunks of the big old eucalypts.

From the very top of the hills we could see to the gulf, which is about an hour and a half drive away. That's close enough that we should get over there more often. I'm supposed to be holed up doing research coding but we might take a day off and drive over there.

The old roo is still up there too. He stared at us as we walked by, a hundred metres away, but it was obviously too much hassle to hop away like most of them do. I hope to take some cues from him this week; breathe slowly, relax, don't get too worked up over things.