Lightening Online

A short time ago, the lovely Frogdancer participated in an interview style meme. You put your hand up to be interviewed and that blogger sends you 5 questions to be answered on your blog. I love answering interview questions. It’s always interesting to see what people will come up with in the way of questions. I had no doubt Frogdancer would come up with some interesting questions and she did not disappoint.

1. You’re a city girl who has decided to live on a farm in what looks
like to be a fairly isolated part of the country. While I’m sure that
there are lots of compensations (what with the husband, fresh air and
freedom from nosy neighbours and all) what was the absolute hardest
thing to deal with in such a big change in lifestyle?

Firstly, I should probably point out that I never really “decided” to live on a farm. More like dragged kicking and screaming! After all, I did attempt to tell my now husband that there was no way I was ever going to marry a farmer!!!! The things we do for love, I tell you!

So, what was the absolute HARDEST thing to deal with? Definitely the lack of shops! I had shopping withdrawal for many years and just the thought of travelling to Adelaide was enough to get my heart beating fast in anticipation of all the shopping I could do. These days, large shopping centres kind of overwhelm me and I’m not as in love with shopping as I used to be. Although, I have discovered the awesomeness of online and catalogue shopping.

2. You insist that chickens aren’t scary, even though I think that
anyone can see that their beaks are sharp and pointy and vicious
looking. Is there anything from the Animal Kingdom on the farm that IS
scary and gives you the willies?

SNAKES!!!! My single biggest fear about moving from the town to the farm was the snakes. And in our first summer out here, we had almost as many snakes near the house as my mother-in-law saw in her entire time on the farm! It was a REALLY bad year. Most years we’ll have one in the house yard, two in a bad year. That year we had 10!!! It was a horrible introduction to farming life.

And no, chickens really aren’t all that scary - as long as you’re not a worm!!!!

3. If you could have your time over, would you use different names for
your family on the blog? In fact…. what would you call them if the
names you are already using were banned by the blogging police?

The names I do use for them fit them perfectly so the blogging police would have a fight on their hands if they wanted to take them from me!!!! It was hard enough to come up with those names in the first place given how terribly uncreative I am. I’d probably resort to calling them DS10, DD8 and DS5. At least then people would know their ages. Lleyton is the only one that knows what I call him on the blog and he LOVES his nickname. He’d be devastated too. Would the blogging police really take away a 10 year olds dream????

4. Does the thought of using caravan park toilets for months on end
freak you out even slightly? (Or is that just me?) You’ve blogged
about what you’re looking forward to, but what are some of the things
that you think may be a challenge when you experience your trip?

Ummm….yes. Most caravan parks maintain their facilities well but you do stumble on the occasional nightmare (like we did in the Snowy Mountains where we had to trudge up a steep hill with inadequate lighting to get to the spider infested girls bathroom). When we first bought our camper trailer 12 years ago, I wasn’t sure how I’d go having to use public bathroom facilities. But it doesn’t worry me as much as I ever thought it would. Once I even met up with an old family friend in a caravan park bathroom!

As for challenges, I expect there’ll be many but here are a few that come to mind right now:

• Needing to pee in the middle of the night! I hate that when you have to cross the caravan park in the dark, especially if it’s cold (lucky we’re spending most of our time in Queensland so it hopefully won’t be too cold). I remember once camping in the Flinders Ranges in July when I was pregnant and threw up whenever I got cold - having to go to the toilet in the middle of the night was no fun!!!
• Deciding how independent we’ll allow our children to be when it comes to going to the toilet and showers alone. It gets kind of tedious having to take them every time but well, you never really know who might be lurking and is it really worth the risk?
• 5 people cooped up in a caravan for such an extended period of time. What happens when we have a fight? No bedrooms to stomp off to and slam the door on! Curtains just don’t have the same satisfying sound when you shut them!
• No constant internet access!!!! Aaaarrrggghhh!!!!!
• What we’ll do if there’s a family emergency while we’re in Far North Queensland (eg. a funeral). Will we leave the caravan and fly back or what will we do?
• Getting sick or injured while we’re away.

5. And finally….
If for some reason (like a random someone interviewing you on your
blog) you had to pick one single experience you had which was the BEST
EVER, what would it be?

Oh, this is really HARD! The best day of my life so far would HAVE to be my wedding day. It was AWESOME. My heart was so full to overflowing that I never thought it would be possible to love Farmboy any more than I did that day. I was wrong though. I’m very thankful that our love continues to grow. I know it’s something I can never take for granted.

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If you’d like to get involved, all you have to do is put your hand up (via the comments section or contact form) and I’ll send you 5 questions for you to answer on your own blog. Once you’ve done that, you also include the offer to interview any of your readers and that way the meme goes on and on and on (as memes have a tendency to do). If you don’t have your own blog and would like to participate, let me know and I’ll publish your interview here on my blog.

Oh, and one more thing. Given I LOVE answering questions, if you have a question you’d like me to answer, feel free to leave it in the comments section below (or via email/contact form) and I’ll answer those questions here as well. BUT, be kind okay.