Five steps forward…

Tags

chainsaw, Humor, plumbing, rural, Tree Change

G’day,

Grab a cuppa or a tinnie – whatever floats your boat – and settle back, this is gunna be a long one.

I’ve mentioned, from time to time, that doing a tree change and renovating a crumbling cottage is a bit of a five steps forward and four steps back affair. Nothing is ever quite straightforward. Nothing ever goes quite as you planned.

The first thing about doing a tree change is that you deliberately go and live near trees. As trees are a real estate developers natural enemy, you have to leave urban areas. Cities have lots and lots of real estate developers. Living far away from everything complicates pretty much everything. Those of you who live rurally may be thinking; “Aw diddums. Toughen up princess.” But you see, people who have been living rurally for a couple of years have everything sorted out. They have their routines. They know how to manage everything and have their contingency plans already tried and tested.

Let me give you an example; when the power goes out around here, dozens of homes and farm houses go dark – briefly. Then somebody wanders over to the shed with the generator and starts it up. Most will be muttering colorfully, I admit, but they will have power after a relatively small amount of hassle.

But. If you’re new to living in the bush, it’s just possible that you won’t know that you need a generator. As a newbie, you won’t realize that power companies don’t really ‘prioritize’ rural supply. We’re far away from the power company offices, there aren’t a lot of us living here, and the really big factor is that we’re spread out and our power lines are hundreds of kilometers long. Consequently, blackouts here can last a couple of weeks.

Tradesmen and government services are the same. When something goes ‘ppffffttt’, the rural resident generally has to find a temporary solution themselves. If you’re new to all of this, the solution will involve a trip to town. It will also involve spending money that you weren’t expecting to spend.

I started my renovation and tree change knowing that my property wasn’t connected to the power grid. So I had the generator from the get go. Shame I didn’t know how to service the blasted thing. There are four dead generators in one of my sheds. None of them work. Why? Because I didn’t know what I was doing. One of them accidentally got a teeny tiny amount of water in the fuel. One of them wasn’t serviced regularly enough or properly – it might be recoverable, but the jury is still out on that. One of them was simply misused. The fourth one? I still don’t know why it died. I might be able to fix it, don’t know yet. One day I will take them all apart and see what I can jury rig.

I am not an astoundingly stupid person. I have skills. I have abilities. If you need a 60,000 word thesis proof read, I’m your guy. If you need some powerpoint slides whipped up that are chocker block with snazzy maps and graphics; look no further. If you need an insanely complex spreadsheet thrown together for an analysis of whatever; I can have that for you in under a couple of hours. Unfortunately, no volume of powerpoint presentations festooned with pretty pictures will coax a water flooded generator to do anything other than rust. Which it was going to do anyway. Because it was flooded (Some people might observe that only an astoundingly stupid person would allow water to have gotten into a fuel can and then into a generator… well… once I come up with a snappy riposte, I will post it!).

Moving on from the generator, my chainsaw won’t work. There is a safety lock, a kind of reverse clutch on chainsaws that make them merely hellaciously dangerous. If the clutch safety lock thingy doesn’t engage, then as soon as you start it, it starts wanting to rip huge chunks out of things. I am fond of my spleen and my knees and my elbows. They do various wondrous and nifty things. I’d notice if I suddenly didn’t have them anymore. Being around a chainsaw that doesn’t have a safety lock clutch doodad is, I suspect, somewhat like lathering yourself up with barbecue sauce and then jumping in to swim with the sharks. After stenciling the word ‘CHUM’ on your forehead. With bacon.

I don’t know how to fix it. I want to cut up some old logs, but my chainsaw will try to kill me. I don’t know how to fix it. I could google it, but lately i have come to the conclusion that its just easier and faster and much more reliable to ask one of my neighbours. I am convinced that my neighbours know more than the internet. The world wide web has only been humming along since about 1980, my neighbours have been around way longer than that.

There is another frequent fly in the ointment. Another kind of calamity. Nothing is ever as easy as it looks. Running lots of pipe and hoses and whatnot from water tanks to faucets sounds fairly straightforward, but the blasted things leak. You don’t lay out the pipes and hoses, hook them up, put water through, identify the leaks, fix the leaks, move on to the next job.

No. You start to lay the pipes and hoses out, discover a couple of awkward obstacles that you have to either go around, under, over, or through, then (after much hacking and hewing with axe, spade, or dynamite – your choice), you lay out the hoses and pipes and start to hook them up.

That’s when you discover that you have the wrong gauge connector for at least one pipe to a hose or some such, so you spend ages sifting through what odds and ends you do have to see if there is any combination that can be daisy chained to solve the problem. Eventually you discover that there is not, so you drive to the nearest hardware store to get what’s missing (unfortunately, that takes almost three hours – what with the rather long bit of driving),

When you get back, you hook everything up and run water through the system. After you have frantically sprinted to the tank to shut the water off so that it will stop cascading forth from about 40% of the connectors, you wander around with some tools and little rolls of white plumbers tape and try and ‘fix those leaks’. Then you try the water again. Then you sprint again. Then you go back to the old leaks and tweak them some more and then you go to the new leaks and swear at them for not having leaked before. Once you have tightened and taped and tweaked everything (Including a cat who got too close while you were really focused), you try the water. Again.

Okay. This is when you decide to get serious. Every connection, and I mean every connection is taken apart, cleaned, beautifully taped, and then carefully (but firmly) tightened to within an inch of its life. Every hose and pipe is checked. Everything is thoroughly scrutinized and made as good as is theoretically possible. No step has been ignored. No sloppy bodge job tolerated. This is meticulous craftsmanship and care of the finest calibre. This time, it’s right. You put water through the system. Then you sprint to shut it off. You console yourself that as it’s winter, the weekly rains will probably refill the tank faster than the leaks can empty it. Probably.

Oh… how I wish that I was exaggerating.

But, here’s the thing. My neighbours don’t have any where near this kind of hassle. They are well equipped and provisioned for unpredictable eventualities. When something goes pear shaped, they have the tools, the plan, and the experience to resolve it – at least temporarily. They still have a long way to travel when they go to town, but they make a day of it. They sort out 12 – 15 issues with each trip. When I go to town, I sort out about 3.

That’s the trick. Learning. Getting a handle on how to deal with things when they go awry, building up the tool chest and spare materials to deal with come what may. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. But you’re only racing against yourself. No Olympic Medals are on offer. Just a lifestyle.

My neighbours are unfailingly friendly. Always helpful. I am sure that they are highly amused by my bumbling incompetence… but I think that they have noticed that I’m still here. I think that they’ve noticed that I’m still trudging along getting the crumbling cottage on the hill sorted out. Five steps forward, four steps back. You still get there in the end.

Badger

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My Not-Un-Lucky Day

Tags

Humor, luck, Tree Change

Hail and well met, one and all.

I have had a somewhat interesting day. To start things off, Pigeon decided that I really needed feeding up. At least, that’s what I assume his intention was as I can’t fathom any other reason why he would leave a young rabbit’s ENTIRE digestive tract and associated organs on my pillow.

I know that its rabbity in origin as a neighbour of mine happened to visit this afternoon and took one look at them and authoritatively assured me that the various oozy blobs were from inside of a young rabbit. So. 4:00am I roll over in bed and smell… a smell. I turned on a light… oozy blobs heralding that it was time to get up.

There are many things that I would quite like to find on my pillow early one wintry morning (Okay, I admit it. Missy Higgins is high on the list. I am old and decrepit, not dead). Oozy blobs that belong in a rabbit are not on the list. So. Getting up at 4:00am with a running internal monologue that I should move laundry day forward to, well, immediately was how the day started. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the entrails boded.

Tragically, as a youth, I did not pay much attention during entrail prognostication class, otherwise I would have been aware that today was my not-un-lucky day.

You will undoubtedly have had an unlucky day or two of your own. Mine usually involve some stupidly expensive mistake, an entirely avoidable remarkably painful accident, and inevitably a unintended display of massive idiocy in front of witnesses. Unlucky days usually come in threes. Why unluck adheres to the Rule of Threes is a mystery to me, but then, I didn’t pay attention during entrail prognostication, did I?

But this was different. This was a NOT-un-lucky day. Horrible things narrowly avoided happening all over me. My first not-un-lucky event was at about 10:00am. I hopped into my truck and drove to the corner store for some diesel. I had plans to use the tractor, and it was getting a bit low. The store is 2kms away. As a kookaburra flies it would be perhaps 800 metres. It’s very close. I live in a tiny, EXTREMELY rural community. I forgot to put on my seatbelt.

What an unmarked police car was doing on my road beggars belief. I mean, really. There are maybe 8 – 12 properties on it in total… and the road is about 10km long. There are not a lot of us on that road.

The little lights went on, I pulled over. Two police officers approached. Sigh. It has been a source of some smugness for me that I have never had a ticket. Not a one. Never run a light, never done the speeding thing. Oh, sure. I may have occasionally broken a traffic regulation, but it is not something I have ever done casually. I obey the traffic rules. It makes me safer, and it allows me to be all holier than thou with my mates who are forever getting pulled over.

The police walked up. One was the fairly typical shaved head, wire rim glasses hard arse who probably secretly collects gun magazines and wishes he was in the Tasmanian equivalent of SWAT. The other officer, however, was a gorgeous red haired lass. Just as they were taking my details, one of my neighbours drove past… without his seatbelt on. He got the shaved head hard arse, I got the red headed goddess of adorableness.

She asked if I had any pending warrants or recent violations, I explained that I’d never had a ticket before. She went to their police car. When she came back, she gave me the ticket with a loss of 3 demerits off my license and a $300 fine… with big lines crossing everything out and the words “Cautioned” written over everything. She explained that she was electing to give me a caution. She explained that it COULD have been $300 etc. etc. So. I get the stunning nifty red head and the caution… my neighbour got the shaved head hard arse and a ticket.

But then the second not-un-lucky thing happened. I have a number of trees and shrubs that have grown ferally for the last decade or so. Some of these shrubs have inch long thorns. They are an unholy pest. I have been hacking them, slashing them, pulling them out by tractor, and burning them under bonfires. It has been a war. A grueling one. I have less than half a dozen left in my front yard. Today I decided that a partially dead woody thing that blocks access to my yard would have to go. I tried pulling it out with the tractor… no luck. There wasn’t enough grunt. So I decided to chainsaw it. I climbed half way up the 3 meter embankment and very carefully cut through the 50 or 60 trunks. Then, just as I was cleaning the area up, a stump that was thicker than my leg suddenly snapped. I was honestly oblivious to the fact that I was leaning against it. I was not oblivious to the fact that my chainsaw was running.

I went arse over while holding a running chainsaw. I rolled about 4 meters. I wasn’t impaled by any branches, didn’t dash my brains out on a rock, didn’t hack off a mildly important limb with the running chainsaw. Didn’t receive so much as a scratch. Very not un lucky.

As I started this post, I wondered about the third thing. What was the expensive, painful, or embarrassing thing that I had avoided? Well, a toot of a car horn and a knock at the door revealed what it was. I had asked a friend to fetch some cat food for me. Because Sophie has… lets call it an ‘issue’ with most cat foods, I have to get this absurdly expensive stuff. When I buy cat food, I have to be cashed up, because one large bag costs $50.00. Yup. Between Sophie and Pigeon, one bag lasts a month. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to grab the cat food last week when I went down to the city. So I was expecting to have a 100km round trip to spend $50.00 on what is essentially, imported kibble. Instead, my friend picked it up for me. I was elated. I grabbed my wallet and handed him the money… but then he handed me back $10.00 and said; “It was on special”.

So. If I had only paid attention in entrail prognostication, I would have known what a not-un-lucky day I was going to have. Three horrible things narrowly avoided. Would the day have been as good if i had known that it was a not-un-lucky day? I doubt it, so it’s probably for the best that I never learned to read entrails. With that in mind, It’s probably for the best that I continue not looking too terribly closely at what Pigeon brings me…

Be well,

Badger