SUNDAY 17 APRIL     PUNGALINA

Our day off!

We still had to go up to the house to water the vegie garden and other plants. But we could sleep in – to the extent that the heat allowed. It was still very humid and hot.

I still had to do the daily washing of the clothes I’d soaked overnight in the dish. Since John strung the hose from the water tank to the van, I now only had to cart buckets of wash and rinse water from the hose outlet at the side of the van, not all the way from the creek.

We were getting our camp looking rather settled now and functional for us. The shade cloth that John rigged up around the sides of the annexe area, made a sort of shaded cave inside.

We had already found that there was – in the late afternoon – shade from the trees close to us, where we could sit for our happy hour. There were birds visiting those trees again, after the upheaval of our arrival, and we enjoyed watching those. Very peaceful.

John had set up yabby nets in the camp creek. He had caught a number, but I was insisting that the smaller ones, which was most of them, were put back in the creek, to grow up. That was, if the resident water monitors did not catch them first.

We had another friendly critter about the place. A large green frog had lost no time setting up abode in the toilet – and I mean in. Every morning “she” was there. Every morning I carefully fished her out and relocated her to nearby bush. Next morning she was inevitably back! I did hope that, when we had guests staying, they were equally considerate of her! Unfortunately she did seem to make a lot of mess. I would clean the toilet every day, but after Gertie spent the night, there was always plenty of evidence that she’d been there.

I was still feeling vaguely sick most of the time, with no appetite. Was sure I had picked up some sort of bug. Maybe it was a reaction to the heat, but I was no stranger to that.  I was living mostly on cup of soup – bland ones, and dry weetbix. John seemed fine and had a healthy appetite. As it turned out, this was to last some six weeks from our arrival, before it gradually wore off sometime in June.