Ever'body must get stoned...

Another one of those 'where did the day go?' days... what DID I do with this 26th of October of 2004?

Let's see. Did I move the last five tractor bucket loads of bush stone from the roadside where I had saved them from my beautifully constructed culvert before the road gang decided to move the concrete pipes closer to the macadam? No, that was yesterday.

(Talk about double handling: first I spent days collecting the best-shaped stones on the hillside behind the garden, making sure not to disturb any existing habitats - i.e. carefully replacing the stone when even one single inhabitant scurried away - and loading them into the bucket behind my ancient Leyland 154 tractor for transport to the roadside.

(There, I spent days placing them in position as retaining walls extending from each wing of the headwall around the 450 mm pipes in a perfect a drystone formation as I could achieve. I planted bulbs along their tops, so that the flowers could signal the edge of the access road... The other week the road gang foreman told me 'the culvert is too high, it is not on the right alignment, we'll have to dig it up and move it forward, and bury it deeper'.

(Considering the work already expended, I prised the stones loose and piled them up at the fence on either side of the gate.

(Eventually, as the dozers moved to my side of the road and the culvert didn't seem to require

the same retaining walls in its new position, I went down with the tractor and spent two days loading and ferrying them up the hill close to the frog pond oputside our kitchen, where Blackie the red-belllied black snake hunts or lazes in the spring sun. I have in mind to provide more shelter for the dozens of frogs that have emerged with the recent weeklong downpour by constructing a retaining wall around the unprotected sides of the pond - Blackie permitting...

(Between hauls, with the old tractor leaking some oil from the hydraulics due to the immense loads I subjected it to, I rested while painting the third of a series of beehives for Bianca's apiculture venture.)

Long hauls, long rests

So, that was yesterday - what about today? Ah yes: from moving 20 - 40 kg bush stones I graduated to picking up, from a stinking wet mess of plastic next to the garbage bin, hundreds of precision-moulded small nylon building blocks from a Fischer-Technik construction set I had bought back in Germany for our eldest, Marco, some 35 years ago.

Now, I can't see good stuff going to waste; there was lots of cunning thinking embedded in the plastic parts, wheels, tracks, girders, connectors, axles, gearboxes and what have you! So when Bianca cleared out the decaying Mazda delivery van behind the shed and found the afore-mentioned mess (she didn't even notice the rather unappetising dead rat that was part of the pile!), she tossed the lot in the bin.

Luckily I saw it in time and retrieved the lot, keeping it aside until I got a chance to spread
it all out on some plastic feed bags and separated the nylon from the die-lon, to coin a phrase.

The yield, two buckets full, was taken up to the yard and immersed in solar-heated water (our hoses have this knack in spring/summer) and detergent.

For a diversion, and while the mess soaked, I checked out some rust pockmarks on the tractor bucket and found that the 4 mm steel plate had in places already been punctured by rust in a few years of resting on wet clay. So I went at the rust with a ball pein hammer and then brushed some 'Rust-Eater' chemical on to it.

For another diversion from tedious tasks, I removed an AOpen DVD-ROM drive from my old computer Jacques, having noticed how the two hard disks seemed a bit starved for power when booting with the DVD-ROM as well as the LG CD-ReWriter in the case.

After a quick sandwich - using my self-made whole-grain sourdough bread spread with cottage cheese, pickled gherkins and hot chili sauce - I went outside again and spent most of the afternoon brushing the intricate little nylon construction set pieces with a variety of brushes and more soapy water.

All the while I was thinking whether it would be o.k. to hand the salvaged construction set in a new multi-tiered fishing gear box to grandson Raphael Mamott - who at two-and-a-half has already shown great mechanical inclination - when he turns 10 or 11, or whether I was duty-bound to present the stuff to Marco's son Rocco, In the end, I decided against it: knowing Marco, he would give Rocco too much of a chance to play with the set but rather usurp it himself...

At about 16:00 h I called it a day and went inside. I shared the last bit of a bottle of Pewsey Vale 2001 Eden Valley riesling with Bianca, and it was nearly as good as when we opened it three days ago. Then I rang the wine merchant whose motto is 'We deliver' and meekly asked "When?", seeing it was a fortnight ago that he debited my Visa card for three dozen fresh supplies for my cellar...

Cheers!

NB: There was one other diversion: I spent a few moments in a silent colloquy with a little turtle crossing my path at the creek ford. The turtle at first was about to pull back its head, but after listening to my friendly welcome, decided to stick out its neck for all of its 10-12 cm length and look at me quizzically. It then shuffled to the water's edge, first slowly, then quicker, and plunged back into its chosen habitat. I went on, strangely comforted...