Bottles and bathtubs

One of the really great things about a fire bath (and believe me, there are a great many wonderful things about a fire bath) is that, unlike a normal bath, which gets gradually cooler unless you keep topping it up with hot water, the fire bath just keeps getting hotter and hotter, until you almost start to feel a bit like the proverbial frog in the saucepan and decide you'd better run the hose for a little while.

There's something pretty magical about bathing outside, in the open air, under the beautiful late-wintery blue skies, wedge-tailed eagles soaring overhead. We have all been extremely pleased and indeed surprised at just how bloody good it is.

And this sunday, after we'd all had very very extended periods of wallowing and lunch-eating and dozing and washing and playing in the bath, we used the (still very hot) water to soak the labels off our ever-increasing collection of empty wine bottles.

These will soon be used to build a bottle wall on the eastern side of our dunny shed. Multi-tasking: love it.

Things to keep in mind when fire-bathing:

1. If you don't keep splashing the water all around the edges of the bath, the sides get VERY burny-hot.

2. Bum area can also get quite toasty, so we used an old wooden bath mat, but other people also use towels and/or blankets. Swooshing water regularly also helps to disperse the heat.

3. On a windy day, it can feel a bit like sitting smack bang in the middle of a bonfire/campfire, with attendant ash/smoke issues.

4. Newspaper logs perform quite well!

Would also love to hear from any of you folk with fire-bath experience as we're always looking to refine our technique.

The picnic table that pearl and Oski are sitting on in the bath photo was newly-delivered to us on sunday morning by its maker, Allen. Allen lives and works in Bemboka, just up the road from us, and makes furniture from fallen trees that he cuts up using his Lucas Mill in people's paddocks. I reckon if I was rich, I'd probably buy a Lucas Mill. The thought of being able to turn a fallen-down branch or bit of tree into a piece of timer is a little bit exciting.

Our table is made from Yellow Stringy Bark (Eucalyptus muelleriana). It's raw timber at the moment, though we'll probably finish it with our good friend Bermagui oil to avoid it getting stained by dinner and drink spillages. We've installed it on our new sleeper deck, and we're loving it. Our dining table has always been pretty central in our world, having always been big eaters, entertainers and socialisers, so we often had many many various lovely people gathered around it drinking, eating, debating and celebrating. But now that we're living in a tiny house with no kitchen, our dining table is set to become a whole lot more of a focus in our live as it will now also perform the functions of a desk, craft-space, eating-place, washing-up-place and general hanging-out-and-revelling-in-the-northern-aspect-place.

Olive enthusiastically welcomed the new table into our lives by installing her afternoon tea (a little treat we like to call an egg in a nest AKA a dried apricot with a macadamia nut in it) into a potted succulent 'tree' on the table. Beautiful!