Child of the Planet

I'm very pleased with myself after I fixed a flat tyre on a wheel barrow. This involved removing the old tyre and inner tube, and fitting replacements on the wheel hub. Not an easy task as the new rubber doesn’t stretch much. I remembered once watching a guy remove a car tyre from it's hub using lengths of metal as levers. So I attacked the wheel, prying sections of rubber onto the hub with a screw driver and a crowbar. I was surprised that it worked, and I managed to complete the task. A new wood burner for the church has been purchased, so a group of us drove out to the Corimandle to collect it. The stove out to be a large mass of very heavy matt-black cast iron. There was five of us bent to the task, but moving it through a narrow doorway, and onto a trailer parked outside was very hard work. We placed board underneath the body and employed a jack from the car, to raise it up to height with the trailer. While it sat straddling the board, we removed the spin...

My latest adventure has been up in the roof of this old school house. Steve, a cranky old curmudgeon of a builder has been hired to do the refurbishment work on the property. There is a photo of him here . He is patent, and happy to teach so I have a great time working for him. There is now a new fireplace installed in the building to heat the two rooms with high ceilings. Our mission was to install the flue to carry the smoke away. Punching a hole in the ceiling for the flues metal tube should have been easy. But after breaking a couple of drill bits without leaving much of a mark, we decided that the white painted surface was made of some 'crazy' durable material. It turned out to be some sort of sheet concrete, and the only thing that got through it was a grinder. A brush like disc was fused to the spindle of the grinder we pulled out of the tool box, so a half day was wasted driving into town to score a replacement tool. I start making jokes about asbes...

I've been back here at the timber trail ( Click here for previous post ) doing everything from painting (which I hate) to building stuff (which I'm enjoying). The drive here was a bit of a slalom coarse. The storms had brought down slips on the roads. It's around half seven and the rising sun is just starting to glow behind the curtains. I've decided that my brain finds writing easier in the mornings, so this is the best time to bash out some words. A train has just rumbled by on the railway line that runs past the village, just on the other side of the road. Long freight trains grinding past sends vibrations out through the earth. Feels like an earthquake. Sometimes the trains run quite late in the evenings, or quite early in the mornings, but I don't think one has roused me yet. The world outside this room is frosty. The valley the property sits in usually warms up by lunchtime. I'm glad I bought some Long-John's (known as Thermals he...

Remember that Swastika etched into a glass window on a shed at Awhi farm? We had to disguise it to alter it's meaning ( click here for previous entry... ). I found this example of something that reminded me of our efforts, pinned to a board in the bathroom here. It's some graffiti, snapped by Fred in Italy.

Deb took me out on an excursion to collect their milk for the week. She drove a short distance out of town and pulled onto a farm. We stopped the car outside a shed. Once inside, she pulled two large jars out of a gently humming fridge. Each jar had a really thick layer of real cream floating on top of of a taller layer of milk. She left some money in an envelope as payment. it turns out that this milk is half the price of the stuff in the shops. I'm told that this farm has more then eighty clients. Each has a 'pick up' day of the week assigned. We had an apple Tarte Tatin for desert that night. It was so novel to watch deb ladle cream out of the top of the jar for drizzling over our wedges of pie. Deb and Fred get most of their produce locally , and grow a bit out at their properties. The eggs we picked up from a mail box up the other end of town.

The local library in Wanganui is pretty cool. Great Wifi, they serve coffee, and have engines on display...

Woke up to a sunny morning and the river at the bottom of the garden was a bit swollen from the nights rain. I sat on the back balcony scoffing porridge and watched branches and the odd tree float down towards the sea. Jess the dog killed a mouse that was hiding in the garden bags that were piled up out side the garage. We dug up several fruit trees from the neighbours back yard  The couple next door wanted to thin out the numbers of fruit tree they had out in their garden. Previous owners had gone mad and planted peaches, plums, and apricots in any spare space they could find. I had to carefully dig out one large plum that was inserted In a gap between a boundary fence and the wall of a greenhouse. Shifting soil with a trowel at one point in a effort not to break a pane of glass. Some of the tress are headed to the river side property. The others are being planted out at a communal living situation that is being established on the edge of town. Deb and Fred have got ...