For Older People with Sense

Lisa Camellias are so delicate and beautiful!  When I lived in the hills I had three in my garden, a pure white, a deep blood red and a pale pink.  They were all doubles so the blooms were huge and oh so frilly.........unfortunately where I live now is just way too hot for them to survive so I just have to grow roses instead......lol.

Talking of gardens, I was out pottering yesterday and noticed that my jonquils and daffodils are already starting to poke their green tips through the ground.  Then I check the huge pot that I mass planted with ranuculi and noticed that they too are beginning to come up so it looks like I am going to have a good showing of color through the winter months.  When they are in flower I'll post some pics.

We are in that strange period at the change of seasons where we can get huge thunder storms one day and the next it's humid and hot..........sort of like the weather is trying to make up it's mind........lol.  At least it's not days and days of heat and the nights are quite chilly and I have already put the extra blanket back on the bed.

Enjoy your weekend all!

Love n hugs.   Chrissy

Carole LA has much the sort of weather as our Brisbane does although I think Brisbane gets a bit more rain.  The winters are pretty identical from what I see and I know Camellias grow there all winter as well. I live South Central fairly near the edge of the desert so I get the real heat like the desert and in winter it can be bitter cold and it has been known to snow.  I lived here for awake as a child and do remember it snowing although it didn't stick for long.

This year, because of a couple of huge rain storms, we have already had our yearly rainfall so I'm expecting a bumper crop with my fruit trees next summer as there is still more ran to come throughout the winter season.

Barbe I can't imagine just looking at white for many months!!  I think I would find it fascinating for one season but not sure I could live with it.

Thanks Sas!

Nancy with the roof edging on it's really staring to look like a little house!  I am fascinated by the way you build your roof, it's almost like ply wood that is then covered by a shingle.  What are the shingles made of?  I guess the roof needs to be fairly light weight to handle the weight of snow in the winter.

The strange oddities of weather are doing there thing here again......lol......for the next few days it is going to be very warm bordering on hot and then on Thursday the temp is to plunge again.........ah Autumn!  Don't you just love it?!

Lve n hugs all!    Chrissy

Barbe our roofs are made of corrugated iron or clay tiles over a timber or metal frame.  Under that and on top of the frame work is lain a fire retardant sheeting that is also an insulation.  In the roof space is placed other insulation to help keep the heat out.  We don't have attics and only the some of the very old (over 100 years) houses have cellars.

A lot of the houses have an outside shed of some sort that is used as storage both for our cars and for things that are no longer used in the house as well as tools etc.  My house is an old one but at some time in the past the cellar was filled in but I do have what was the stables as my storage shed but it faces the wrong way for me to park my car in it.

When I did my trip over to the USA, I was fascinated with the different styles of homes and the other architecture in general.

In Australia we have a huge termite problem so a lot of the new houses are being built with metal frames........let's see the little blighters try to sink their teeth into that!........lol.  We also use clay brick and what you call cinder block as building materials for basic construction.

Cellars became very expensive to dig and the 'modern' thing was to have a shed in place of it......much cheaper and did the same thing for the storage side of things and a cellar was no longer needed to be used to cool store food as the refrigerator was far easier accessible and again cheaper than digging a cellar.

The outdoor sheds are usually a deep olive or avocado color green or just the shiny silver color of the corrugated iron that they mostly built from although I have seen some pretty horrid other colors that somehow got past the councils but that was more in the country than the city. 

 I LOVE that sign!.......lol.......perhaps I should print it out and take it to a few of the paint stores here!

Sas, the soils here are very varied.......some are really sandy so are unstable, others are almost pure clay which expands and contract too much for a cellar and then there is volcanic rock and limestone.  

Where I live is limestone and even the trees have a job to get through it.  I have a couple of fruit trees down the backyard but they are now stunted and they don't produce much fruit as they have hit the limestone so struggle.  I really should cut them down and pull out the root, recondition the soil and plant some others but I neither have the strength nor the energy to undertake such a job.........a few years ago I wouldn't have thought twice about it.

Wren my house trim needs painting but because I live in a Heritage Listed area there are only a few of the heritage colors to choose from........at the moment my trim is a very deep avocado green and cream and if it's gets painted I would do it the same as I rather like those colors against the old stone work.  My house was build in about 1845 so is very old.

Barbe that sounds like heaven!  I would love to be able to walk out and see my garden weeded and trimmed!  I can do a little bit but DH is pretty good if I tell him what needs doing...........the only thing is, if I don't tell him then it doesn't get done!!!!......lol.  How come men don't see weeds or dust?