There's light (or rather warmth) at the end of the tunnel

Well, as the temperature drops into the minus fives and minus sixes, we move ever closer to getting the shed up and getting into some warmth. At the moment, the caravan is the same temperature outside as inside. We sometimes wake up with the top blankie damp-brrr. The council inspector came out very early on Tuesday morning to inspect the footings of the shed and inspect the site for the house, garage and stables. Thankfully, she said everything was okay and gave us the go ahead for the next stage on the shed. James is now organising the concreter to come out and put down the slab. This should hopefully in the next week or so. The materials like gravel, sand and all the crap that goes into a concrete slab arrived today. We're still waiting on quotes to come back on getting electricity from the transformer to the house and shed. Oh, what a luxury that will be when we can just flick a switch for a light or the tele instead of having to go outside into the freezing cold to turn the generator on and off!! We still will not have any plumbing in the shed but we will have a water tank outside that will become our dedicated fire fighting tank. And thankfully we left quite a lot of trees around the shed so we'll still be able to go to the loo behind them :)

On a sad note though, our dear little dog Spud is not well. At first we thought he was depressed (why not have a depressed dog when we have an anaemic horse and a paranoid budgie), but in the last week and a half he's deteriorated. For those of you who know Spud, he was such a hyperactive dog and a good hunter. Now, he shows no interest in anything, not even hunting, is very unco-ordinated and even accidentally walked into the dam the other night. He's now off his food as well and we're having to hand feed him little bits of "people" food that he can swallow without chewing. We took him to Sydney Uni this week for some comprehensive blood tests and they suspect he has some sort of lesion on the right side of his brain. The blood tests have come back negative which means that we now have to go back up to the Uni for MRIs and xrays next week. The vet is putting Spud on steriods until we get up there to help with the pressure in his brain. It's very distressing to see poor little Spud like this but here's hoping they find something that they can fix.