A Not So Good Day

Tuesday 10th
A day that started well was kind of messed up by a torrential downpour just before lunchtime. The block became a river of mud as tools and materials started floating away. Fortunately, I was assigned the task of 'shopping' for today and was in town at the time. I returned after lunch to find a washed out team recovering back at the house. The sun came out and we were able to go back onto the site and do a couple of hours work, although once again it was much harder to get into it after the rain. The shopping expedition was an experience in itself. You have to be constantly on the lookout for people trying to rip you off with inflated prices. Robert is an expert at spotting this and lets people know if he thinks they are charging too much. We finished out trip with a visit to Robert's favourite restaurant for lunch African style. It was very tasty and very cheap! Goat meat in broth, with a side plate of rice, green banana mash, beans, cabbage and silver beet.

To add a bit more to Ronny's blurb above, what a write off day it was....Started with a power failure, so no welding, no grinders or power saws, then when it did come on our resident electrician Cam checked the voltage...165 volts and the steel cutting saw was almost as good as your teeth and the welder did not want to weld. Just an electrical 'brown out' so our electrician commented. The concrete mixer decided to spit a belt so... no mixer. The boys continued on to sift a couple of piles of dirt to mix with the mud to use once the ring beamers finished their job. Well when the rain came, 5" in 30 minutes then continual for the next 2 hours guess where their sifted dirt ended up, some neighbour down the track ended up with a pile of slurry. The new tarp cover for the brick making drying area couldn't keep up with the rain so the new bitumen emulsion bricks got a testing before they were completely dry, the ladies making bricks were busy digging drains to divert the water while others were trying to stop the huge puddles of water forming on the roof from collapsing onto their bricks. The mud mixing boxes had a couple of big rocks thrown inside them for a bit of weight as they started to float away. With a river flowing down our driveway, all the water from the roadside table drains flowing down our driveway, a couple of trenches were dug trying to divert the torrent down the road which resulted in drowned team members. After the rain departed and we were a slight bit dry we got back into it and everyone at the site grew a couple of inches, gained a couple of kilos and moved a bit slower...(sticky muddy shoes). Then the morning's shopping arrived, interior doors and all the timber for the roof of house two, the delivery truck made it 10 metres onto the block and disappeared into a huge hole. All hands on deck to extract the truck only to have a brake failure, the front wheels locking on and having to unload the truck and carry the timber to the house site all 150 plus lengths. We eventually got off the site at 6.00 pm for dinner of rice, potatoes and cabbage, followed by a soda. Then the troups relaxed playing cards.