Furniture and a trip out west

 The last couple of weeks I've been working on the sitting room at Lake View, documenting the furniture - furniture's not really my thing, and I have to keep referring to various guides to nineteenth century chair designs to correctly describe the styles, but in among the props used to dress the house I was amused to come across a set of volumes by Hannah More, a nineteenth century conservative Christian moralist, that had evidently been given to a young woman, a Miss Webster, as a Christmas present in 1841 (or possibly as a school prize as the handwritten dedication says that  that it was given by the Misses Harding in recognition of her industry and good conduct - unfortunately I can't trace an early school run by any Misses Harding) looked more or less unread, with the bindings still tight ,,,

It's moments like these that make you wonder if Miss Webster, like Jane Austen's fictional Catherine Morland, would have preferred something a little more gothic...

Up at the Athenaeum, we've been discussing data  management with no real conclusions other than it's a good thing and trying to put together a little event based around the 1925 commemoration of Hume and Hovell's 1825 journey  from Sydney to somewhere near Corio in what is now Geelong.

In 1925 they built various monuments to commemorate the centenary of the trip and carted various worthies, including the Governor, to dedicate the cairns.

However, my morning at the Athenaeum was cut short by worsening weather - what had been heavy rain turned into a mini Ragnarok, battering the garden, and of course the power went out,

We'd had the sense to start cooking a vegetarian stew for dinner just after lunch, meaning it was more or less done by the time the power went out.

By early evening we were still in the dark (literally) and dug out our old gas camping stove to heat our stew on the covered area of the deck outside. 

As it was still raining we reckoned we'd probably better  eat before the sun went down, but just as we lighting our battery storm lanterns the power came back and stayed on.

Fortunately the bad weather had cleared by the next morning as we had booked a skip, so for the next couple of days we did nothing but work solidly on clearing the inevitable accumulation of junk left over from renovations and so on from the converted garage which will eventually become a second studio for J to do smelly things like oil painting and also give me a second work area for genealogical and other miscellaneous nineteenth century research.

As if that wasn't enough  I've been down a bit of a rabbit hole about serious crimes on railways in the nineteenth century, and traced the story of a railway crime in rural Scotland which occurred not to far from where by grandparents and great grand parents had a farm at the end of the nineteenth century,

Oh, and we played hooky this week and had a mad dash out west to look at Lake Tyrell and the salt flats...