Jack and Jill went up the hill

 

We have been moving a water tank instead of fetching water. But we definitely had hills involved. 

Note the two tanks below the retaining wall on the lower right of the image above. There is third tank up by the house. But, since, we are mostly using rain water and we are in a fire zone, we want more water on hand. Those lower tanks are in the spot where we want to put the larger concrete tank. We just emptied and moved the white one. This involved Scott doing a lot of digging to free it from the surrounding grasses (tenacious things) and then careful dragging it to the new site.

The new site was on a hill so we moved sand from the first area to the new one and packed it under the tank.  Betty (the truck) again came to the rescue and we were able to tilt the tank just enough to work sand under it. 

We haven't yet tried putting water back in it. Hoping the travel across the lawn didn't damage the bottom! My legs are saying it is time for a break. 

While Scott was digging out the tank (earlier in the week), I spent most of my time cleaning up the formal garden (the walled are in the photo below). 

We have so many plants that are new to me and are well established. We also have some invasive plants that are similarly well established. Currently, I am taking lots of pics to identify plants and then researching what the fruit trees and other "good" plants need, cleaning up the gardens to remove flammable plant stuff and figuring out what to do to remove the "bad" stuff. I have a whole slide deck (of course) of pictures and notes. We spent last week poisoning blackberry bushes and I need to do a bit more of that, as well. Plus fertilize the fruit trees before we move into the dormant season. 

We had a quiet Easter (outdoors doing the stuff above) and didn't try to do an Easter meal or hide Easter eggs. Brooke and Daisy decided it was not a good time for travel.  We are definitely feeling the impact of limited oil and gas. Betty runs on diesel and that is way up in price. Some stations have run out of fuel, at least temporarily.  The government has released stores and lowered the extra taxes on petrol and diesel. Shipping is going up as is the cost of running farm equipment. This is going to hurt the economy here for quite awhile. I know it is hurting you all, as well. 

We did get up to Moruya last week to try and get approval for Scott's pacemaker procedure. We got forms signed but the four day weekend is making it unlikely that we will have things approved to have it done this coming week as was the original plan. Insurance is wanting to call it a pre-existing condition with a longer waiting period.  However, while there, we did make it to the bookstore. Found an amazing little book: 

An excerpt:

Our livestock are doing well - the wombats, kangaroos, skinks, water dragons and birds, I mean. 

This golden whistler was hanging out in the scrub up the hill, along with the fox duo.

They look quite at home, don't you think?