A Happy New Year from (left to right) Valeta, Yvonne, Greg and Carlotta. As last year, we're sending it exactly at the end of the year to be able to include all details.
There are a number of photos in this message. Click on them, maybe several times, to enlarge them. That's why the message is a web page, not a PDF document.
What a year! When we returned to Australia nearly 25 years ago, one of our reasons was to be away from the rest of the world. We were (and still are; thank you, Donald Trump) concerned by global politics, and we wanted to be as far from it as we could. We couldn't have anticipated the COVID-19 pandemic, but the decision proved to be helpful there too.
In particular, we're not just at the end of the world, we're beyond the black stump: Dereel has a population of 533 spread over more than 100 km². We hardly see anybody, and it's not surprising that the incidence of COVID-19 round here is almost zero.
House and garden
We've been in Stones Road for nearly 6 years, and gradually there's not much more to do with the house. We gave up trying to get our rights regarding the problems that still existed, and despite the best of intentions, we still don't have the tiling done on the outside areas.
As mentioned in the last newsletter, at the beginning of the year our air conditioner had been out of action for 8 days over the Christmas break. The earliest we could expect any attention was on 6 January. In fact, two technicians arrived on 7 January, confirmed my report that the controller was defective, and went away to order a replacement. It wasn't until a week later that they finally replaced it. 24 days without an air conditioner! And of course the weather was unseasonally hot.
Greg had reason to believe that a power spike caused the air conditioner failure. For that and other reasons, we had some significant electrical work done on the house. We had hoped to be able to include power surge protection, but that was more complicated than we expected. At least the induction cooktop in the kitchen is now wired in properly.
The photovoltaic power installation has proved to be very good, not just from a financial point of view, but also from a reliability point of view. We did have one outage in late November (a long one in the middle of the night, where the battery ran out), but that's a far cry from the dozens we had each year previously. And as expected, we never got the second battery pack. After gaining some experience with the system, that proved to be a good idea. There was no way that it could have paid off. And since we made only a progress payment ($2000 less than the quoted price for the system with one battery), we seem to have ended up with the best possible setup.
About the only real new installation this year was an an electrically operated gate, which makes life easier for us. And we have finally got round to having a roof over the riding arena, but it's a slow and expensive business. We started looking in March, and by the end of the year we have an application for planning permission waiting for attention by the Shire Council. Yvonne can't wait. Then we can apply for a building permit and the whole thing will start over again. It's no easier than when we had the house built.
Yvonne
Yvonne had planned a number of clinics with Anke Hawke throughout the year, but as the pandemic progressed, she had to reluctantly cancel one after the other. The next planned clinic is on 23 January 2021, and as 2020 comes to an end we still don't know whether it will go ahead or not.
One thing that was unaffected by the pandemic was her research cooperation “Building Confidence and Mastery for our horses and their humans” with Julie Lannen. It's a complex matter involving developing and testing lots of innovative thoughts and approaches. The PIXIO “Robot Cameraman” that she got last year has seen a lot of use.
One recording with the PIXIO that wasn't planned was this:
On 1 November Yvonne was training a horse when she didn't look where she was going and ended up tripping over a tyre, falling on her hand and injuring both her wrist and shoulder. It's more painful than it looks, and she's still not over it.
Greg
Greg has been thoroughly boring this last year. He's still doing the same as the year before. As we wrote then: it's now been over 13 years since he retired. It took a while for him to adapt, but it's probably over and done with now. He's still working with computers, but mainly he sees computers are a way of life, not an occupation, which allows him to grumble about the way the computer industry is going.
He's still experimenting with photography, though gradually he's running out of things to do, so he has started collecting old cameras, like the Nikon F after which he lusted as a boy, supplemented by some surprisingly cheap lenses and, more by coincidence, a Nikon FM2. He has bought film for them, and has spent many months wondering why.
He's also doing more cooking, once again, of course, various experiments.
One of the photo experiments was this year's title photo. The masks are obligatory, of course. Originally we borrowed a couple of greyhound muzzles from Tim “Whitey” Winter, our dog food supplier, and tried attaching face masks to them. The masks were the easy part. Firstly, borzois are not greyhounds:
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Then there was the issue of getting the dogs, especially Leonid, to keep still. Here the best of two separate sessions:
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In addition, the perspective was terrible. We need a photo taken from further away, which doesn't work in this location. So we ended up with the horse photo at the top.
Yana
Our daughter Yana is a “casualty” of the pandemic. She lives in Adelaide, and has suffered as the result of the “lockdowns”. The state of South Australia has had 564 cases and 4 deaths throughout the pandemic, but now that things are finally better, she found that she could finally earn some money over the Christmas break, so we won't be seeing her this year.
Health
Health was a particular issue world-wide this year, of course, with the COVID-19 pandemic. It barely affected us: we're out in the sticks and don't have much contact with anybody, and round the Ballarat area there have been almost no cases anyway, only 58, and it's not clear that there have been any deaths.
And other health issues? Clearly we're getting older, but so far we haven't had any age-related issues. Yvonne had a concern about pancreatic cancer, which we've been following up for nearly 3 years, but it seems that the concern was unfounded, and she won't need another check for 2 years.
Dogs
Our dogs are getting older too. In June they chased a dog and owner walking past the property, and while they didn't do them any harm—just wanted to play—they scared the hell out of both dog and owner. Leonid turned out to be the only one injured. It seems that he has arthritis, and the running around (“trauma”, according to the vet) set off problems in his right foreleg. After considerable treatment it looks as if it won't go away, and he'll be on medication for the rest of his life. He's coming on 7 years old now, so that could be several years yet. No more of this for him any more:
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As always, if this letter isn't long enough, you can read about our 2020 in excruciating detail in Greg's diary. A Happy New Year to you all from Greg, Yvonne, Carlotta, Nikolai, Leonid, Piccola and Valeta!
Maintaining the email list for this newsletter is a non-trivial task. Email addresses keep changing, and we get up to a third of all messages rejected. Did we miss you this year? Please let me know and I'll update the distribution list for next year.