About a dozen years ago, Sandra was in the wrong place, at the wrong time. There she was just innocently going about her professional activities when an attached unrelated office was raided by the Australian Federal Police. As you do. Turns out the folks next door had dealings with a mob boss. Who knew? My laconic response to the distressed phone call was along the lines of: What the f#$k?
Anyway, nothing came of the raid, except a few months afterwards, the mobster ended up allegedly residing with the authorities. On the day, my advice to Sandra was to get the heck away from that office location, and that’s what she did. Cheap office sharing arrangements are perhaps cheap for a reason, buyer beware! The decision did inflict costs and hassles. Unfortunately for me, a few days following on from the raid I was driving the dirt mouse Suzuki Swift (which was registered in Sandra’s name) in that area, and yeah. Not good. That was when I was pulled over by a very heavily armed collection of constabulary and questioned before being sent on my way. The flak jackets sent a strong message, but it sure was an alarming incident for one with a sensitive disposition.
It was so super weird to be just going about your day to day business and end up being caught up in such craziness. One of the Kafkaesque side effects of the drama is that somewhere within the postal system our packages and personal mail gets searched. You know it’s an impersonal service, because the business mail has never been touched. I do know with certainty that it is nobody local, because over the dozen years since it began, there has been a complete change in local people, and yet the mischief still goes on. I suspect that there is some petty bureaucrat in a distribution centre noting that our name is on some sort of list, inspects the contents of our packages and hand addressed mail. For giggles, we’ve kept photographs of the holes and pried open corners of packages. Ironically, it’s a criminal offence to do that act.
One of the things which disturbed me about the Terminator films, was that the killer robot never stopped. Unrelenting. Indefatigable. Tireless. The thing just kept going and going, it was an unstoppable monster. Sadly after so many years I’ve become accustomed to the horror of finding my packages inspected. The opened Christmas cards were probably a step too far. It’s really weird though that nobody has ever thought to ask the question, what was Sandra doing there that day? The bureaucrats have perhaps declared us guilty, and I guess that’s enough in these enlightened days.
However, sometimes the incident has proven to be useful. There are costs and benefits to all situations, if you can work an angle. Not long after the brief craziness, some trespassers just popped up out of the forest and walked through the sunny orchard, as you do. The old times used to say: Bold as brass, and that was their attitude for sure. Given I have the right to hunt deer at any time of the year on this property, trespassing is an extraordinarily unwise activity.
In a normal world, which none of us live in, you’d imagine that the people caught trespassing would be humble and apologetic, but no. They took a very high handed approach with me, and even complained about the rough passage they’d navigated. Fortunately despite being mouthy and expectational, they didn’t seem all that bright, and so I followed them back to their cars and recorded their license plates and gave them another stern lecture.
Being part of a local group, they were not hard to track down, and their mobile number was handily on the groups interweb page. So I phoned them up and gave the leader yet another ear full and advised that it was probably the wiser path to ask for permission beforehand. But there was another option available to me, I called the cops. The nice detective went and had a chat to the leader of the group and probably reiterated my earlier advice to the bloke. A few days later the detective had a chat about the outcome and he told me to leave them alone, because ‘the guy is a nobody’. Wow.
You know what, word gets out in a rural area. This person knows that person, and people sure do love to gossip. The most anyone has ever said to me about the trespassing incident was that ‘I was a little bit full-on’. Yeah, sure it wasn’t their land being blithely crossed. But so far, the fix appears to have worked and the people have they come back. Plus there have been one or two incidents where upon coming into my awareness, they decided to keep away from the area – and had some rather ungentlemanly things to say about me. A friend was with me at the time, and the incident convinced him that living in a rural area was not for him. Anyway, reputation is a thing up in the bush, and who knows what people think, although I can take a wild guess. Nowadays I simply shrug my shoulders whilst nonchalantly saying ‘whatever’, and that’s an option. It’s beneath my dignity to even notice.
And with the mail, I’m no longer bothered by it. It amuses me to consider that our government is wasting money on the task of being unnecessarily obtrusive in our life, for no good reason or outcome. A two minute phone call from them could sort the entire matter out once and for all, but no that didn’t happen. I guess it’s provided stimulating employment for someone, for over a decade, and the phone call may have forced the bureaucrat to have to do something more useful with their hours. With such Kafkaesque activities going on ad nauseam, it’s no surprise to me that we live in a society in decline.
It’s been another hot and dry week, but this morning in a sign that the seasons are slowly changing, fog wafted through the tall trees.
I’m getting a bit over the hot weather and am looking forward to feeling cold. On one particularly warm day, we assembled the chainsaw mill which had been purchased months ago. Timber is astoundingly expensive, and we have plenty of trees, some of which are conveniently laying in a horizontal position. The nice folks who supply me with chainsaw gear have an amusing logo which I often remark looks like Sandra and I, but in cartoon form. Presumably that’s how the locals perceive us!
It took a few hours to assemble the mill and rail kit. It was just too hot that day to test out the device. It wasn’t until Sunday when the weather cooled that usage was possible, and that was the misty day.
The cooler weather really was the perfect time to test out the device.
Long term readers will recall that for the past couple of years, a leaning tree has been threatening to fall over. Well, as is often the case, gravity usually wins such fights and the tree eventually fell to the ground sometime in early spring. And there it has lain for months just waiting to be milled up.
An 11.5ft / 3.5m section was cut out of the dead straight downed tree. The guide rails for the mill were placed on top of the log and levelled.
The chainsaw was fired up and then run along the rails. A lot of people prefer leaning over whilst using a saw, but I prefer to avoid back troubles and simply kneel instead. An old timey forestry worker drilled me many years ago for a couple days in the forest on chainsaw usage, and that was one of the tricks he pounded into my head.
A lot of people using these mills in the US are actually cutting softwood tree species, and those are a no-brainer easy mill job. Eucalyptus Obliqua is an entirely different experience, and one pass of the chainsaw uses an the tank of two stroke fuel plus oil and requires a super sharp skip tooth ripping chain. Softwoods, pah!
The mill works by cutting the log into slabs and I chose a two inch (50mm) thickness. As previously mentioned, the tree species is Eucalyptus Obliqua which is a hardwood with a density of 750kg/m3. It’s a very strong and durable timber which is used in construction and also furniture. It’s also just happens to be hard work cutting through such wood.
The two inch slabs produced were themselves very heavy, and hopefully they’ll get lighter as the moisture content (which I didn’t think to test) reduces.
As you’d expect, nothing here goes to waste. The bark was cut into small sections and will make excellent kindling. Any other chunks of timber not used were turned into firewood. For a couple of hours work, we produced five long boards which will most likely be used as roof beams in the firewood shed project. There’s no hurry to mill up all the timber at once, so we’ll do the work as time and the weather permit.
Incidentally, the ends of the boards were sealed with a 50/50 mix of mineral turpentine and linseed oil. You have to seal the ends of sawn boards so that the timber does not dry unevenly and split.
A tiny smattering of rain fell whilst milling timber, but it wasn’t enough to make any difference to anything. I leave water out for the birds and insects. Even the bees have their own water bowl which has to be kept clean.
The sunny orchard no longer has any green ground cover plants (other than the worm farm sewerage trenches), but at least the trees themselves show no signs of water stress. The cooler weather has begun the process of the trees going deciduous, and I’m guessing leaf change will be short and sharp this year.
The shady orchard has some kind of green looking ground cover plants. Maybe the grass has died and nobody got around to telling the plants that this was the case?
The view from the house looking into the shady orchard shows a lush picture, but at ground level, it’s dry.
So far all the trees have survived this year on rainfall alone. I do hope that the rains return soon. Dry as it is here, the conditions are better than the surrounding area, and the forest critters regularly turn up for a feed.
Oh! The dog barrier which was modified and fixed up last week, scored a nice coat of glossy black metal paint.
The heat has been good for the tomatoes, and I’ve cut back on watering those vines so as to force the plants to ripen the remaining crop. I have a hunch that tomato vines grown in greenhouses are over watered towards the end of the growing season, and this leads to fungal disease issues. The vines will die anyway, so why not try and match a more natural cycle with the plants?
Other than fresh eating, the tomato harvest is being dehydrated, and then stored in olive oil. Every day the dehydrator chugs away outside under cover at it’s work. The results are good.
This week’s video talks about the chainsaw mill and tomatoes:
In breaking produce news:
The yummy addition to breakfast this week are the first of the seasons clusters of grapes.
The hop vines have continued to amaze. Those plants receive no watering or attention other than a regular soil feed. The pods are aromatic and it is a useful plant.
Onto the flowers:
The temperature outside now at about 11am is 13’C (56’F). So far for last year there has been 96.0mm (3.8 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 95.8mm (3.8 inches)