RIbbons & Rain!

Firstly a very big thank you to everyone who was kind enough to follow the ESAD Sale-a-bration blog hop and also leave a comment. The three winners were Keegan R., Donna Z. & Charmaine B. so congratulations to all & I hope you enjoy your prizes when they arrive!

I also got a pleasant surprise this week - my talented DH and son spent an afternoon making sawdust in the shed and presented me with this.......

It is a solid jarrah ribbon holder/dispenser for my Stampin' Up! ribbons - as you can see there is room to expand my collection, but not a bad effort considering I only joined at the end of October! It is really easy to add new rolls to the holder or remove them if I need to do so for a class or project.

I recently took our son 3.5yo to visit my Dad on the other size of the country & was unpelasantly surprised to find that their summer wasn't quite what ours has been of late. We've just had the 2nd hottest January on record with the average temperature being just above 33'C each day & we're going for another record of the longest time period with no rain (record is 83days, but I think we're going to beat it) - however when we arrived, they had rain, thunderstorms, howling winds and snow on the high country which required +4 layers of clothing, the electric blanket on all night and we were still cold (although it didn't slow DS down very much as there was far to much to explore on the farm to entice him to stay indoors!), after 4 days we did glimpse the sun though and it did make a nice change (especially since it was +40'C at home for the same 4 days), but it was just weird that two sides of the same continent of similar latitude has such different climate at the same time.

Sadly though the extreme heat and lack of water has had a devastating effect on our gardens. Virtually all of the vegetable beds have been fried to a crisp (like the tomatos & strawberries were all cooked on the plants) and we're barely managing to save the native plants, the rhubarb, half the raspberries and the pumpkins by bucketing laundry water and DS bath water........so we're having to have a serious re-think about what to do garden wise as climate change is definitely here to stay and if we want to grow our own vegetables with the heat and lack of water we are going to have to come up with a new strategy for next summer........ultimately I think we are going to have to sacrifice a lot of it over to natives (not that that is a bad thing as our native animals are in desperate need of habitat since urbanisation has removed and fragmented so much of it). It does make me wonder what effect climate change is having on a global scale if this is what it has done on an incredibly small local scale and how people will respond to it.