We have had so much rain recently that the dams are perpetually full, and the driveway is beginning to get soft and muddy underfoot (which it has never done before, it generally drains fairly well). Mud and thongs – generally the only footwear we wear when perambulating around the garden – are not a nice combination.

(Just to demonstrate my psychic powers – I know my mother is looking at that photo, focussed not on the level of the dam but on the car hulk, and grinding her teeth. Don’t do that Mum, it’s not good for your blood pressure.)

We had a technician come out today to inspect the phone line, as for the last week we have had NO INTERNET. It has been most distressing. It was so distressing, in fact, that I was forced to go and buy a wireless modem so I could have a little bit of access to tide me over until it was fixed.

We were a little concerned about a technician inspecting our phone line, as we have done some slightly unorthodox things to it. This, combined with our general laziness, means that the phone socket in the house is not actually in the wall, but is hanging out by some wires, residing on a stool. I was standing behind the technician trying to come up with a good story (“It was like that when we moved in… the cats pulled it out of the wall and we can’t figure out how to put it back in…”) but he didn’t comment, not even when one of the cats strolled over and vomited a hairball next to his feet. Welcome to our house, Mr Technician. He did look slightly puzzled while tromping around under the house looking at our “improvements” to the phone line and getting his boots covered in mud, but he clearly didn’t feel the need to ask any questions.

However he established, much to my relief, that the fault with the line was not on our property, but up on the road, and therefore Telstra’s problem and not ours. And then he fixed it, restoring sweet sweet internet access. I have been glued to my computer ever since.

I was hoping that the water and wasp nest that he removed from part of the telephone pole would improve our somewhat slow and erratic internet access. It has already ground to a halt once since its restoration, but behaved again once the modem was rebooted, so perhaps there will be a slight improvement. And if there’s not, there’s very little we can do about it – that’s what comes of living at the end of a street a considerable distance away from the exchange.