troubled times

BUILDING NEWS

We woke this morning feeling optimistic. The day was cold but clear and John had got all the iron laid out on the roof ready for Thursday. From that point on everything started to unravel. Doug, our engineer, came first thing to check everything but for once he was not totally happy and explained that we needed to make a few changes. This required buying more steel and John discovered that it would not be delivered until late afternoon.

All in all it was concluded that it was better to get things exactly right rather than rush and make mistakes so we all agreed to postpone the pour until Monday. There are some problems with this because the weather could turn against us by then and first thing Monday is a difficult time to cancel pumps and concrete. We will just have to keep fingers crossed.

The builders have also come to a stopping place. They really need the roof poured to go on. Once again everything grinds to a halt. We are actually so lucky that we have this donga here to live in. It is far from luxury but at least we are not under crippling financial stress to get the job done. Edd and I have all sorts of loose ends to tie up so we have lots to get on with.

OTHER NEWS

We are a very tribal family. We do things together, we talk a lot and we really care about each other. This is wonderful, but it means that we are all sad when one member is in difficulties and bad times come round. All my sons, and two of my grandsons are having problems this week and any difficulties or delays in our building plans seem relatively unimportant.

On a worldwide scale even these problems are miniscule. A macabre fascination lures me to trawl the Internet and keep informed about the disaster going on in Japan’s nuclear industry. Just right now we seem incredibly lucky to be living on food producing land in the preferable hemisphere. Also we are happily not living on a flood plain or the join between two of the earths plates!

My plan is to become even more self-sufficient. The lack of garden fences is making progression in this direction harder than it needs to be. Now the cold weather is here we are moving to winter activities. I am drying off the pregnant goats so that they can use their energy to stay healthy for the latter half of their pregnancies. The six non-pregnant goats will continue to provide everyone with milk but we I think I have made the last goats cheese for a while.

My next concern is the sheep. I am negotiating with Simon to try and get barley from the brewery to give them supplementary feed, as they get closer to lambing. The horses really need to move to the hill but last year they got out through the fencing and this year there has been so much growth that replacing the faulty fence has become a major task.