Day 186: Clearing out

This evening we met some more of our neighbours while putting out the recycling and trash. We are drip-feeding packing materials for collection week by week (actually we took a load to the old house too last week so we're shifting it quite quickly).

This wasp had a burrow in our front path that was filled-in during the weeding and sweeping process. A few minutes later I watched it re-excavating it - it was shifting a lot of dirt with each trip down into the burrow. When disturbed, it took off and you could see the dry sandy soil being blown around by the down-draught from its wings. Eventually we decided that having a wasp nesting just outside the front door wasn't ideal and dealt with it more directly.

We left our church today - not something we were expecting to do after such a short time of starting to feel settled, but we have joined up with a small group of people who are planning start a new church in the city of Albany for those who find traditional ways of doing church to be irrelevant or worse. It is an exciting and daunting prospect. Leaving some friends behind was something that we could not avoid either way, but having to make a choice has been a strain. We hope that now that the decision is made we can move on with settling back down.

Talking of settling down, we have a few more days of intensive house-sorting before I go back to work and there is hope of seeing the camera again as the museum called to say they think they have found it - maybe I will be willing and able to photograph some fairly finished rooms by the end of the week.