Rodeo

One hot spring afternoon we go to a nearby town to watch a charity rodeo.

With my liberal, citified, vegan/cruelty-free sensibilities, I'd naively managed to assume that all rodeo activities would be creature-friendly. I don't quite know what I'd imagined this would look like - the cattle being calmly petted, perhaps?

The reality was very different. I found it rough to the point of violence, and spent most of my time averting my eyes. But when I could bring myself to watch, I took photos: bearing witness to what I saw.

Coffee and scones

One of the greatest attractions of the country town where we found Tea Tree Cottage was the fact that one of my siblings and their children lived there.

Amid the jumble of working out what needs to be done to the house, priorities, and how to source everything that would be needed to do it up, we find time for family outings. A nearby coffee shop offers tables covered with white paper and a supply of pens and crayons with which to decorate it ... As well as excellent coffee and fresh scones.

Chaos

For the first few weeks of our tenure of Tea Tree Cottage, all is chaos and wonder. The internet takes a couple of weeks to connect, despite being organised weeks in advance, as there would be three of us working from home. 

It's our first taste of the patience and innovation that would be required while living in a tiny country town. Equipment that couldn't be found in town needed to be ordered online and would take at least a week or 10 days to arrive; the alternatives were typically driving a couple of hours to a larger town, a 7-hour return trip to Sydney, or waiting for the next visitor willing and able to bring supplies up with them.

A few days after the internet was finally up and running, my phone died with no notice. With it I lost all my first photos of the Cottage.