Books books books...

A love that Dustin and I both share is our love for books and reading.

We can go wandering around the shops all day and not spend any money, but if either of us wander anywhere near a Dymocks, Angus and Robertson or a QBD bookstore we find our bank account quickly diminished and our arms weighed down with hours of reading material. Whilst we both have our differing preferences for fiction novels we have found we both also have a love for non fiction. We have reference books on all sorts of subjects from Astronomy to The Mysteries of the Mind and from Ancient Egypt to the Lipizzan Horses in Austria. 

While we both Google to find out modern facts and knowledge we find it is so much more fun sitting down and reading a book about all sorts of things. 

When we were first married we found we did not have a book case for the books that we had gathered before we met and so we went to Lifeline and bought a second hand bookcase for $20 that we thought would hold our books and the many more that we would buy during our marriage. As it turns out, we have not been married yet for 5 years and already our bookcase is overflowing and collapsing with our collection. We both hope that one day we will be able to have a library in our house with all the walls full of books with places to sit and enjoy reading them. I guess we will need another bookcase or two before that happens. Whilst we will eventually get more bookcases I don't think we will ever get rid of the first one we bought together even though it is water damaged and only holds half the shelves it is meant to as it holds sentimental value for both of us and symbolising a love and hobby we both share. Does that sound crazy to anyone else or just sappy and sentimental?

A second man hole

It all started with parents who were nice enough to think of Dustin and I sweltering in the heat and so they bought us insulation for Christmas. You need to have been here in summer to understand our house is like an oven, and all occupants are the turkeys baking away.

Dustin and I got up on New Years Day morning and decided to install it ourselves as that was my first day of leave and we can't afford to have someone else do it.  

After two hours of installing with me crawling into all the smaller places where Dustin couldn't get to and him passing me the insulation, we were covered in sweat to the point where we were dripping, my nose was running and full of black stuff from all the dirt and dust etc up there and who wants to know what else... and yet we had only just completed an area the size of what we think was the study (hard to tell in such a small space up there)

We came down for some air, by then my legs were cramping and my vision was blurry as my eyes were full of dust and sweat and alas when we gained enough courage to climb back up the ladder the pictures depict the result of what happened...

I was attempting to pull one of the bags along the roof, lost my balance, went butt first through our roof over our lounge room and ended up half in and half out of the roof hanging between our house and the roof right over our couch in the lounge room. After laughing at my predicament Dustin helped me out of the hole which I became stuck in due to me being bigger than the hole my butt created. The hole was actually a lot messier than it looks now... after laughing at me, my dad came over and cut the hole into a square along the beams so it can be fixed. As my parents started wishing they had bought us something else for Christmas we started working out the cost of fixing the roof and playing eeny meeny miney mo as to who was going back up in the roof to finish the job.

As it had gotten too hot to be in the roof by the time the drama was finished, mum and my sister Sam came around at 5am yesterday morning and helped Dustin and I finish the job. As Dustin is too big to climb around up there mum and I climbed around and laid the insulation and Dustin was passing us up bags, water bottles, towels and tools etc through our newly made manhole. I must say, whilst having a hole in your roof right in the middle of your lounge room is not exactly what we started out to achieve, I must say, it made the insulation installation go a lot faster as everything did not have to be passed through the manhole in the garage and then carried to the other side of the roof and it let in so much more light that we hardly needed torches! Not to mention it is so much cooler in our lounge room now with all the heat escaping though our new manhole... Dustin and I are now thinking that hole is the perfect spot to install a skylight!

Ahh.. the joys of owning your own home... so how did everyone else's holiday period go?