Two Fat Pigs

The two little piggy wiggy's are no longer, in their place we have two fat pigs who have recently been introduced to Trout. The two girls spend a fair bit of time tickling trout. They all lie together, top and toe and bicker aimably enough together. They eat prodigious amounts, have required purposed built, reinforced housing to handle the rigorous self-scratching regime.

They have now ploughed up three areas of land and it means re-fencing the electrics on a regular basis and taking advantage of their ploughing to re-seed the areas they've been in. I've written an article on pigs for the upcoming ABC Organic Gardener Magazine.

Trev is on close terms with the pigs, though he, like me, is very careful not to fall over at feed time! They are incredibly solid animals and single-mindedly hungry.

At this stage Pinky and Browny are both due around Christmas day, can't wait for piglets!

Pot of Gold at the End

Actually the bank gets that, we get to live in a house in exchange. It's getting much closer, walls, floors, ceilings,windows and doors. Electricity - mostly complete, plumbing has started, our great steam engine of a slow combustion wood stove has arrived and challenged but not overcome Trev's ingenuity in manouevering it around the house and into place. Also removing floor boards and increasing the level of support for all its 380kg.

We're planning on having an Italian themed Christmas at our place and inviting around all the lovely people who've had us over at for dinner and we've not returned the favour. Quite a few over the past five or so years.

Looking forward to that...

Today, Tonight Tomorrow

I admit to being very slack on the update front in the last few months. Trev and I both have our heads down and bums up as we race towards the housing building finish line.

I could detail the progress but if you hook into tomorrow nights Today Tonight on Channel 7 you'll get to see us shivering on an icy Tasmanian morning, pretending not to look embarrassed about the state of our winter garden which is also suffering from neglect of the house obsessed variety. Also get to meet the pigs, the goats, the lambs and the chooks, and a quick squiz at the inside view of the house and hear us blather on a bit.

With a silly little embarrassed smile she hits publish post and shambles away.

Recycled Glass Tiles

Trev and I searched for Tasmanian tiles for the bathroom and discovered there are none. Mostly due to the prohibitive cost of sending them to the mainland and the cheapness in which one can import tiles from overseas. But we wanted something local. So true to form we found a hard way to go about it. Making our own.

We'd said no concrete, but as this involves minimal amounts of cement and it creates a thermal mass and utilises a recycled product we finally compromised and gave it the green tick of approval.

Onto the scene comes one angsty pre-teen with a, before now, unfullfilled desire to smash and break things. The desire survives parental approval. Caleb donned safety gear and happily smashed around 30 blue bottles purchased at a tip shop. He's since gone onto shades of green which are easier to come by.

Trev made up moulds from a sheet of form ply. I consulted him on percentages of cement to glass and sand and then went and did something else anyway. Yes, he does get frustrated. I discovered that filling half the tile with a mix of white cement and roughly smashed glass with no sand provided the best quality tile, the second half of the mould is topped up with a mix comprising less cement and more sand. Both in shades of boring gray. It will never be seen. Between the two different mixes is laid a sheet of fibreglass mesh that provides an added degree of strength to the tile.


Once screeded off and tapped and vibrated level the tiles are left a couple of days before the moulds sides are removed and the tiles turned over and revealed. They look boring. The white cement covers all the glass. Out comes the angle grinder with a coarse grinding attachment. Dust mask, gloves and glasses donned and off I go. The blue glass peeps through, then grows as the first layer of cement is ground back. I keep going till it's liberally sprinkled with beautiful blue chunky glass.
Next I mix up a small amount of white cement (which should have PVA glue in but I've never remembered to put it in yet) and use a plaster spatula to thinly spread the mix over the tile to fill in any air bubbles or holes. It's left to dry and then out comes the...

Variable speed polisher with a diamond polishing pad attached. I start at 50 'grit' and move slowly down to 2000 - by the time I'm finished the concrete is smooth with a sheen on it. It looks beautiful, I can even see my reflection. I look disgruntled. I have sore shoulders and a murderous headache. My carpal tunnel syndrome has flared up and I'm wondering why the hell it is we always have to do things the hard way. But the tile looks beautiful.

Repeat this process every weekend till hospitalised.

This weekend I've started a new tile. I found a design online and used it as a template for a feature tile. I've stuck down the design inside a mould and siliconed between the pieces. Trev gave me a good tip, to dip my finger in detergent and press the silicone to a similar depth the whole way around. Once this is dry I'll trim it with a knife so the lines are all the same thickness and remove the paper. Into each of the segments will go a mix of either green or blue glass and white cement mix. When the tile is complete it will have premade grout lines and hopefully look gorgeous in either the bathroom or the sun room.


I had intended to make black tiles with green glass for the sunroom but quickly discovered that you need nineteen mountains of black oxide and even then it's not a good black.

I learnt how to do this from youtube. There's a much more anal bloke who can tell you how to do it much better than I at Day Creek

Solastalgia

Completing a uni assignment and needed to find five different psychological disorders for a character in a screenplay. Found this in Wikipedia and just loved it.

Solastalgia is a neologism coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003 with the first article published on this concept in 2005.[2] It describes a form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change, such as mining or climate change.

As opposed to nostalgia - the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home - "solastalgia" is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment. A paper published by Albrecht and collaborators focused on two contexts where collaborative research teams found solastalgia to be evident: the experiences of persistent drought in rural New South Wales (NSW) and the impact of large-scale open-cut coal mining on individuals in the Upper Hunter Valley of NSW. In both cases, people exposed to environmental change experienced negative effects exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness or lack of control over the unfolding change process

Lock Up! (your daughters?)

The house is a house with walls, floors, ceilings, doors and windows. Yes. We can lock it up and you'd need a crow bar to break your way in. A $30,000 mortgage to get us to this stage. Though of course most of our one income goes into paying for the house before it gets to the mortgage stage. I must catch up with just how much, probably more than the same again.

It's lovely to walk inside the house at the moment. The light is fantastic. There's almost a sense of reverence when we do. Because soon, at least not too far away, this will be our home and we'll no longer be the poor cousins living in the shanty town shed at the bottom of the block. The rooms aren't too hard to visualise in their finished form, and it's not going to take forever to get them to that state.



We're about to go shopping for a slow combustion stove and a solar hot water system and have them installed. (happy to hear suggestions on best brands for the stove) The laundry tub, the shower stall, the kitchen bench and sink, the ceiling Solomit lining, the power, which has all been run, 'lit up' as Trev says, a few more doors a fair lick of paint, the rest of the floors beeswaxed, oh heck, might stop the list making it's starting to get a tad long. Still, things that can be done pretty much in any weather and most of it while I'm at work :-)



N.B The photos are now old news, the floors are now complete as are the internal walls (thanks again to John Fibbens for his help). I'll have to get back out there for an update.

How my parent's are 'fearing'

Thanks to Net, who asked about my parents and how they are fearing in Christchurch. It was a great Freudian Slip. I was thinking yesterday that if we could have a global image of fear and grieving there would be hotspots in Christchurch, Yemen and Libiya.

My parents are OK. My mum had an adventure she'd rather have done without.
She volunteers in an op shop that was hit fairly hard with the quake. All I know is that the window imploded right where she normally sits. They got out onto the street and stood and watched the minister's church opposite disintegrate.

I probably shouldn't repeat this, because there are a million and one better stories to tell of selflessness. But the minister was most anxious about his cat and used his mobile phone to find out if it had survived. When he finished mum asked if she could use it to call Dad to find out if he was OK.
His response. 'No, it's a credit phone.'

Mum tried to drive home but soon realised that this wasn't going to happen and she was safer walking. She struggled through the liquifaction, sometimes unable to find the bottom she'd have to haul herself back out. It's a long way home.

Dad was OK, the house a little less so. Doors no longer close, a two metre long five row stretch of bricks fell away. TV's are smashed, the typical mess we're seeing on TV. But nothing compared to many of their friends.

Mum told me today of one friend who lost her husband last year and then sustained a lot of damage to her house in the first quake. Now she has a bundle of clothes and no house. All she wants is her husband.

It's hard to watch it on TV. I see the street names from my childhood. Years ago I climbed to the top of the cathedral just when they gave the bells a work out and leant back on the swaying spire and waited for it to crumble. I've stayed at the YMCA, have a wonderful pair of ampersands I bought at Ballantynes. It seems, at such a distance so unreal. But talking to mum, no less unreal her end either.

I've heard them say on TV, 'earthquakes are a fact of life for New Zealander's' as though they are a daily occurance. Nothing like this has ever happened. Newly demolished 1860s churches testify to this.

I can only recall about five earthquakes and I lived there till I was twenty three. The most remarkable one was leaning on a sliding door eating lunch with my family. I must have been nine or ten. The door began to rattle. I turned around to tell my bloody brothers off, no one there. I turned back to see them riding the wild barbeque table over the patio. It was the kind of thing where you went 'whoa!' and laughed over.

Nothing like watching some huge fellow throwing sandstone blocks off someone trapped beneath. Nor watch the agony of those waiting.

As for the minister. I've advised mum to tell him that it's a credit line to God he's got too and he's used his up.