With apologies to The Bard, I feel a nod to his Sonnet 98 is in order – with a twist:

From you I have been absent in the …autumn

With two long weekends (Easter and ANZAC Day) taking care of a couple of Fridays, the first world horror of shopping for a Homestead Mobile replacement, and a stretch of really good weather to enable the undertaking of a few priority chores, time just slipped away but today…

The perfect sort of day to sit down and update you all on, for example,

and that Farm Girl’s eye is behaving well above expectations after surgery. Rather than undertake another bout of surgery, her specialist has instead opted to monitor her progress with bi-monthly appointments so impressed is he with – well, I guess, his own work. Either way, we call this a win.

Things have gone totally doo-lally in the chicken coop. Sylvia and her babe have now been integrated into the flock but only to make way for Kitty and her chick

whom we suspect may be from one of coop songstresses, Dolly Parton, eggs

Another brood container had to be unearthed from storage when Olive was discovered, having been feared missing in action, in a corner of the barn with a few surprises of her own

I happily report that of seven hatched, six (two yellow, one white, three brown) survive but she is so fearsome a mother it has been impossible to date to photograph them.

And because life is a circle, we also sadly report the loss of sweet little Luna

who I truly thought had conquered her ailments

We’ve also celebrated The Princesses birthday (of course, no photos), celebrated Easter with a Casa Kimberley afternoon tea and a Homestead egg hunt, stacked eight cubic metres of firewood (our preferred pine/beech mix) so that’s winter sorted, filled, sanded and ceiling whited the sleepout, swapped the sheep and goats over for premium paddock health, taken down, dried and folded away the pool and have almost finished getting the winter vegetable garden sorted.

See, we haven’t been mucking around…but we have been absent from y’all.