At the beach

We've just had a lovely week at the beach - much needed at this time of year. Canberra is horrible - dry and hot and still and empty and boring. The beach is rainy and busy and noisy and fun. Mind you - when I say busy and noisy I mean in comparison with the rest of the year - we are not talking the south of France here. If I see more than eight people on the beach I think it's crowded. We did lots of swimming and went for lots of walks and watched lots of movies and read lots of books. We played Scrabble, and I won every time. I'm surprised they keep playing.



We had two forty-degree days which I've never experienced there. Usually you get a nice on-shore breeze that keeps the temperature reasonable, but it failed us this time and it was meltingly hot. Luckily the water temperature is still arctic, so we could submerge, get cold, come out, get hot, submerge, get cold ... repeat until beer o'clock. It was only a couple of days, and the change had come in by New Year's Eve, so the sandcastle competition was the traditional cool and drizzly weather.



It didn't stop number two son having a swim though. He is the speck on the far right.



For the first time we are renting out our house for the rest of the summer. Or at least we are trying to - we are going through the very pleasant but utterly unfocussed local real estate agents and they haven't quite got round to advertising it yet. I thought it would be nice to use a local business but it may be a mistake. The whole thing may be a mistake to be honest. We didn't really buy it for rental but we're not going to be down there and it seems foolish to say no to some income at the peak time of the year.

So before we left yesterday we shoved all our stuff into the lockable cupboard and scrubbed the house from top to bottom. Which it needed - in three years we hadn't quite cleaned out the freezer or washed the windows or wiped out the cupboards. So even if we don't see a cent out of it at least we'll have a nice clean beach house.