May 2007

We're back on track!

We've sourced timber from somewhere else. This is because Brian, our timber supplier up till this point, was hospitalised with heart problems.It's not the first time, and we really shouldn't be asking him to handle the huge pieces we require for the house foundations (and it kind of let us off the hook too). Trev and I went down this afternoon and retreived the 2 he had cut and brought them back and it was an effort. An effort halved, no, quartered by Trev's amazing invention. Gee, he's not only cute as a button, a household wonder, good in the garden, he's not half clever either. The photo is of his log lifter (the logs it lifts are 200mm X 200mm and up to 3 metres long), which makes them reasonably difficult to toss over your shoulder and throw down our 2.4 metre holes. Hopefully this will circumvent the triggering of back problems like last time.

We've done four so far without the log lifter; now we have 16 others to throw around it will be a lot easier, although we did have some teething problems in the form of the wheels 'falling off'- not literally but they crumpled under the weight and have had to have their resolve stiffened with a bit of additional welding. The contraption is used in conjunction with an endless chain (it still sounds to me like it's one of those perpetual energy machines). Up till recently this term was not in my vocabulary. It lifts the log, which we then drop back down over the base of the lifter just behind the wheels, and run around with it or allow it to dangle while we place it on the back of the ute.

The new timber miller sources his logs from the same place as Brian, so they are still air dried celery top. But we must admit to feeling this wonderful weight lifted off our shoulders (which is good because the paragraph above was pretty heavy on them), when we rung to order them and the timber miller says, 'Sure, I can deliver the lot tomorrow'.

I lay awake last night walking through my 'soon to be completed' house (in my mind), arranging furniture, thinking of what colours of mud I would like to render the walls with, and what will hang there and where it will catch the light, and how on earth we can possibly house Caleb's Lego collection in such a way that vacuuming the floor is not a case of tinkle tinkle, tears, tears, pull the bag apart and sneeze for three days.

Caleb and I have spent the last three weekends sorting his Lego and making a system that will fit into his section of the caravan. We managed it and he's back into his Robotics 2.0 set. He thinks he'd like to build a brick sorter, so next time round when we have bucket loads of lego and need to sort every single piece, we can load it on and let the brick sorter sort it out. Laziness being the mother of invention and all.

While Caleb and I were sorting through the thousands of pieces I said to him, 'You know, building a house is a lot like building stuff with Lego', he considered this briefly before shaking his head, 'No',he says, 'Lego is a lot harder'.

May 18

Yep, well most of the posts are in, and all our discs are still where they should be too. Should have all the posts in this weekend, as it takes four days after we've painted the posts with Grip set 51 before we can put them in the ground. It's a water based product that is safe for use in waterways too. At the moment with the black square posts sticking out of the ground by around the metre mark it almost looks like some surrealist work of art. So even though we have progress, most of it is below ground.

The next big beams have been ordered, they represent almost a third of the whole timber cost of the build they are so massive. Trev mentioned in an email to our architect that, 'you should be able to hear us curse the engineer from our place', while we're fixing them to the foundation posts.

Finally had a feed of yams, sweeeet yams, ohhhhhhrrrrr (Homer style drooling) Trev, after years of my hyperbolising, thought they were great too, but a lot more like potatoes than he expected. Just with a finer texture, and of course, they aren't as sweet as the yams of my youth. You get that. Caleb, yes, well maybe telling him they looked like an old mans toes, was not a good strategy and he wasn't up for eating them.

The pic below, beside or wherever it appears on the page is not a surrealist impression of Uluru but Trev's dried chillies once ground. The dent in the hills is where he stuck his wet finger and spent some time walking around sucking cold air over his burning tongue. It's a mediterrean climate here, and not surprisingly we have a mediterrean garden with masses of tomatoes, onions, chillies, basil and garlic. Still waiting on the olives, but going OK with the fetta cheese.



May 20

We're on the home straight with the posts - all up they've cost just over $2000 (for the timber) around $400 for the Gripset, and a couple of hundred for Trev's contraption. I've posted a couple of pics of Trev manouvering another post into the hole. This is the shortest post we had, the rest were all over three metres. The next lot of timber are 12" by 7" (300mm X 170mm) huge. And will take more effort to erect. Caleb, after some time on site, has decided that building a house is definately more difficult than building Lego. He has his head down most days making working winches, plotters, robots and things with light sensors etc.

On the book front, it's currently out of print, but is at the printers for the third time. Hardie Grant has made an alteration to the front page, it now reads tried and tested strategies for sustainable living. Which is preferable to the old thingo about the family that changed their world from their own backyard. We're still selling Living the Good Life from the website, especially since we currently get only 5% of the no-GST price of those sold in bookstores. So around $1.30 per book. Really makes me wonder about the publishing industry and how I should have an agent!

Poor Nuju fell off the back of the ute during the week, and while Trev was driving 80km and concentrating on all the curves in the road, and didn't notice Nuju dangling by a short rope off the side. Nuju was fine, however he did something interesting that I didn't realise dogs could, which was to exude a terrible stench, the smell of fear. It was almost identical to the smell that exuded from the injured wallaby we picked up off the side of the road a while back. It had a badly broken leg, and we plopped it into a cardboard box and rushed it off to Parks and Wildlife and to a fate unknown. We thought that all wallabies must stink, but realise now, after Nuju's run in with a major bout of terror, that it must be a common animal reaction. Maybe we too, as animals, do something similar. Funny thing that whole, 'are we an animal?' issue, because, of course, we are. But most people baulk at the concept that we share something in common with 'baser' forms of life and somehow we live outside of the natural world and its natural order. Including having to live by the basic premise of a limit to our population.

Australian Population clock

World Population clock

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