Daily Archives: 2017-06-16

SwimGym with Karola. According to our FitBit wristband tracker I had a good long sleep despite having got up for a while at 2:15am due to, I strongly suspect, having eaten some gluten last night. I didn’t make a fuss at the restaurant so they may have assumed it was a lifestyle choice rather than a real condition. My mistake.

Bangle – orchard – apple

Karola let the sheep onto the lawn again for the day, and this includes underneath the big oak which the sheep are really enjoying. However, Karola and I independently noticed that one ewe, probably #410, has blood on her lips and jaw. If it persists we’ll have to take a look and fix it up before we leave for UK in just under three weeks time.

All three of us went shopping. It being Friday we went to Cornucopia, our local organics shop, for my weekly GF bread plus some organic food – eg small leeks and Bostock chicken – that Karola likes. Then on to New World for the rest of the weekend shopping.

We also went to Spotlight for some fabric perquisites for Karola and to Mitre-10 for two replacement 50 metre measuring tapes for me and a compact 30 metre tape for Karola. Karola needs a non-metallic tape for measuring round her tree guards and 30 metres is the smallest size. She has been borrowing my old cumbersome 50 metre tapes but both the old ones have broken handles, stretched tapes, and damaged lead-ins. Also a couple of reels of yellow builders string for Karola and new bathroom scales. Karola has a preference for the Salter brand, an old established purveyor of weighing scales for hundreds of years, and for non-electronic mechanisms, and for analogue dials rather than digital read-outs. Success on all fronts, and it cost less than double the modern conventional electronic bathroom scalers. The new scales are mechanical (ie a spring), the platform is a decent size and the “speedo” read-out (no, Karola, it’s not a reference to swimwear, its like the speedo in a car).

Somewhere along the way Karola’s door was flagged as being permanently open – the door sensor had broken – meaning that we could not lock the car so on the way home we dropped by Bayswater Garage and Karola’s friend there glued it back together.

After lunch Karola & I unloaded the big trailer of the firewood Byron had split a few days ago. I then went off in the Landrover with the trailer and bought more timber for the fencing project: 100 more battens, ten half-round posts, and railings, ready for replacing a short netting fence across the corner near the Macrocarpa.

After I’d distributed the fencing materials I spent the rest of the afternoon chopping up some of the long lengths of 50mm alkathene that I’d pulled out of the planting area in preparation for reconstructing the planting area inside fence along the orchard drive, from the swamp cypresses to the road. We’ll keep the undamaged pipe but all the pipe that has been bent or cut or otherwise weakened will go to the dump. I’m cutting those bits into ½ metre lengths to make transporting them easier. I had the petrol generator out in the paddock and used a reciprocating saw to cut up the pipes. Darkness fell before I’d finished.

Salter Mechanical Bathroom Scales

Timber Laid Out For New Railings To Replace Netting Fence

Oak Avenue Weather:5℃—14℃ 0.5mm rain [?]