Tiwi Tattler

During Term 3 Eric was recruited by Casuarina Senior College (where Luke did his final years of schooling) to help as a maths tutor. He was quite looking forward to this as it was part time and mostly the hours fitted in with mine spent at the farm. Unfortunately he found there was nothing set up for his role when he first arrived, so he put a lot of time into preparing and setting up. He was to be working in a room off the library and quickly found that he and Bev, the librarian, had a lot of interests in common like cooking and holidays in regional France. For a number of reasons he found that he was spending a lot of time waiting for students instead of feeling fulfilled by helping them so at the end of the term he quit.  Soon after we arrived home we were recruited by School Sport NT into voluntary positions. Eric was to be on the board and become the Assistant General Manager of the Pacific School Games (PSG) and I was to be a manager of the 12yrs and Under Track and Field Team

With Sandy we revisited Litchfield National Park over the last long weekend of the year celebrating Picnic Day when the Darwin Cup is held. We stayed in an AirBnB place owned by one of the families at Alawa School. It is listed as Litchfield Holiday House and was built in the 80's as Defence Housing for the RAAF in Darwin, then relocated to this block only 7 kms from Wangi Falls. It uses solar power and is connected to the NBN by satellite. There are many of these for sale in Darwin and the cost includes relocation, I keep thinking this would be the perfect solution for Adrian to get out of rentals. Each day we went bird watching in the mornings around the block then explored the waterholes in the afternoons. On Saturday it was the Upper pool at The Cascades where the dip in the pool was an appropriate reward for the challenging walk in.   On Sunday we all enjoyed Wangi Falls together and Eric did the loop walk which took him up over the top of the cliff face and back.  The

So now we are back at home and trying to settle into a routine. It is proving more difficult than we expected but for all sorts of positive reasons.  Yve and John, who had been house sitting, dog minding and replacing me at the farm while we were away, made it all so easy. Ali, our dog, was glad to see us back but she now has two more friends who love her, the house and garden were in terrific shape and the farm was ship-shape. John's expertise in irrigation was much appreciated and is still ongoing at the school while Yve became a regular classroom volunteer. There was another occasional visitor to the garden while we were absent and a good thing it made a slithery departed before we returned.  We landed home one day after our first lot of visitors from Singapore had arrived in town. While I still had one more week of term to complete at the farm, Kim and Syd Pink were on their mid-year break already. Unlike us, they didn't have a 4 week break, only 2 weeks and it was mo