I really liked the Doctor. The bloke had such a cheeky sense of humour. Laying back in the dentist chair, with all manner of deeply uncomfortable things going on to my mouth, he decided just at that moment to invite Sandra in to the room so that she can take some photos and share a laugh whilst he recounted jokes. I wasn’t laughing, but everyone else was. My mouth was a world of discomfiture. A tooth had been cracked and was in the process of being replaced with a crown.
Every visit to the dentist there after would begin with the question: ‘Chris, are you feeling stressed?’ I was beginning to feel that way… He could get away with such jokes at my expense, mostly because he informed me in clear and unambiguous terms as to why one of my teeth had cracked: Stress. During sleep, my body was clenching the jaw together until it became bad enough that a tooth cracked. Nobody tells you that continual low level stress can do that trick. And you wake up with sore neck and jaw wondering if some exotic disease is going to take you out, just for good measure.
It can get worse too. Add enough stress and some people grind their teeth together at night. The top and bottom teeth abrade one set against the other. They wear down evenly until people have top and bottom teeth which are in a flat line. You can see it in people, if you know what you’re looking for. I met someone with exactly that set of teeth the other week. It would have been ungracious of me at that particular moment to mention the subject, so I let it be. A bloke has to know when to act, and more importantly, when not to act. But I knew what I was seeing.
My own tooth lesson was earned the hard way well over a decade and a half ago. I worked at the top end of town. The technical side of the work was fine, the constant emotional stimulation and confrontation was simply beyond my abilities. The result: Stress. It wasn’t stressful all of the time, but there was just enough continual low level stress over a prolonged period of time to express itself as a cracked tooth. Who knew dentists provided counselling services?
I didn’t much like the person I’d become when working there, and the tooth issue was the final straw. I changed, utterly. That’s when we sold up in the city, and headed bush to build a farm and have a life. And here we still are today. Nowhere is stress free, but life needn’t be continually stressful. If that’s the case, there’s probably something very wrong with the arrangements. This week the smoke from a fire two hours drive to the west of here has hung thick in the air. You can smell the acrid stink of bushfire. That’s a reminder of the possibilities, but I take a watch, wait and keep your eyes open approach to such matters.
We moved here because the land here had the singular benefit of being cheap. We had plenty of experience with construction techniques, and so knew how to build a house with our own labour. The rest, well, we’d learn as we went. How folks younger than either Sandra or I are coping with the realities of the ‘Australian dream’ (i.e. working in a paid job so that you earn enough to own your own home) is an issue which is very much on my mind these days.
The odds are stacked against many folks now and on multiple fronts with that dream. So when I read about young folks ‘quietly quitting’, or getting one up on the system by being ‘over employed’, I’m hardly surprised. Heck, when faced with that same work culture back in the day and diminishing opportunities, I quietly quit and went off and did something different with my time. There is no obligation to support a culture which fails to return that energy. It’s a funny old world when digging soil and moving heavy rocks for hours on end is preferable to working in a hard core corporate environment, but there you go. The thing is, so many doors are being slammed in the face of younger folks nowadays that I’m wondering at what point the machine simply stops moving forward. We’ll get to find out sooner or later.
With all the bushfire smoke in the air, the sun’s rays have this weird sort of menacing orange hue to them. I tried to capture the strange light in a photo.
Into that smoky atmospheric mix, the tall Eucalyptus Obliqua trees of the surrounding forest have been dumping their pollen. At times when the wind blows, the trees drop enough pollen that you could swear it was raining. Let’s just say that it has been a very challenging week for the sinuses…
When the smoke blows away, the air smells of honey. I’ve never known the tall trees to flower this profusely, and they’re doing more flowering here at the farm, than in the surrounding areas. It’s a credit to the health of the soils that they’re growing in.
Work continued on the low gradient path project this week. The path leading up to the formerly rat infested shed was extended by several metres (approximately three feet to the metre).
Looking back towards the house, you can see that the first layer of rocks supporting the soil on the downhill side of the ramp have almost met. Alas, Peak Rocks is very real, and we now have another day ahead of us with rock splitting before the first layer of rocks is complete. And before the path is complete, in order to produce a level surface on the path, it will eventually require several layers of large rocks to retain all of the soil.
Once completed, the path will be several feet wider than the original. That will make it easier to move machinery around the property. The intention is to convert the rat infested shed will into a materials storage area with proper racking. That should keep any materials off ground, not to mention also out of the rain (mostly).
We grow several varieties of nut trees in the orchards. The largest hazelnut bush produced a few nuts this year. I found one on the ground beneath the bush, and then plucked another off the plant to see what it was doing. The skin was easily removed from the fallen nut. It took another day of drying in order to easily remove the remainder of the skin from the plucked nut. I’ll roast them over the next few days and see what they taste like. Home grown nuts are generally far tastier than anything which you can buy. I was very distressed earlier in the growing season to observe a frost which wiped out all of the almond crop. There are still some chestnuts and horse chestnuts (buckeyes) on the trees but they need a few more weeks of ripening.
There has been a bit of very hot weather over the past few weeks with more to come this week. There is enough moisture in the soil from the heavy rains in late December and early January that most of the fruit trees are growing very strongly. Even 38’C / 100’F in the shade is not troubling the older trees. The well established citrus are loving the heat, whilst I provide a little bit of water to the the younger citrus trees prior to a hot day. What that means is that they receive about 25L / 6.5 gallons each. But that’s it, they’ll be fine and survive. I see no point in mollycoddling the trees.
Onto the flowers:
The temperature outside now at about 11am is 13’C (55’F). So far for last year there has been 210.8mm (8.3 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 207.2mm (8.2 inches)