To be a leader is to inspire others to follow. When working in the big end of town that mythical person never materialised in my awareness. Doing four years of debt collection during the ‘recession we had to have’, just to keep a roof over my head and food upon the table, meant unwisely jumping ship at the first available job in the profession. The boss at that job was an angry person, and the year and a half spent there was a miserable experience which sadly had to be endured so as to be able to venture into greener pastures. He understood the inherent power imbalance.
Alas few people nowadays recall the ignominy which 10% unemployment brings. It’s not nice to be grateful to be kicked around, but those sure were the days. Revenge they tell me is a dish best served cold, so I used to regularly turn the stereo right up to full volume on the bosses car, and he never said a word about it. He was too busy whingeing that a few days were taken as leave after Sandra’s mother unexpectedly passed away. Hearing that diatribe resulted in resignation, there’s only so much a bloke can take. People wearing suits and ties have said things to me over the years that they’d never dare on a Tatami mat.
Sandra has been taking the Kelpie, Ruby, to dog obedience school for over a year now. They’re both learning a lot in the process, and the worst aspects of the dog have now been rounded off. Dogs hold a mirror up to their humans. Dogs need their humans to be pack leaders, and the training is as much for Sandra as it is for the dog. Everyone who goes to dog training gets to learn that lesson. Dame Plum the Kelpie is now also going to training, and blitzing it.
Not everyone gets the memo: If you want to be a leader, you have to actually be the leader. In the big end of town years, a dude gets to see some strange things. Not all bosses were bad, however, another notable negative experience was the guy who was up to some serious mischief, on an awful scale! He had an air of the duplicitous about him, and used to claim that certain complicated processes were impossible to make sense of. It was probably a source of discomfit to the guy that despite the thousands of transactions, my suggestion was that meaning could indeed be derived.
A lot of mature systems, like accounting, well, they’re pretty tight. Smarter brains than ours developed the basic principles, and time has put the whole thing to the test and smoothed off the rough edges. By the way, the boss’s claim was false, the systems there just weren’t in great order and information was withheld so the analysis could never take place. Walking away at that point is an option, so resignation was the choice du jour!
It only took a few days before the wealthy bloke who owned the businesses actually phoned me up to ask what was going on. That intuitive leap impressed me, so going out on a limb some choice suggestions were made for the external accountants to investigate. Anyway, nobody was really prepared for the scale of mischief the boss had been up to, and it was nice to be asked to come back to work and set things to right.
After a couple of years of that work I finally had enough of the big end of town. The constant emotional stimulation was unsustainable, it didn’t seem to be for any good reason. But then, it was probably a weird desire of mine to work towards keeping the system merrily chugging along. Most troubles appeared to be people looking for an advantage. Nowadays small business suits me better, and the people are more focused on the job at hand and less game playing.
That’s really a larger problem in a society in decline. People are actually looking for an angle even when that advantage comes at someone else’s expense. It’s what I’ve named, the five banana economic theory, and it works something like this: Say you’ve become accustomed to consuming seven bananas per week, yet suddenly you can now only have five. How do you react to that loss?
Five bananas is not so bad an outcome, and certainly it is better than none. Our leaders have other ideas though and continue to promise the seven bananas, even when the things can’t be paid for other than by massive amounts of debt. It’s possible that they just don’t know history. Heck, they might not even comprehend the systems being played around with to achieve that seven banana massive debt result. I tell you what though, if I had them all at dog training, they’d hear the command: No! Leave it! Like a poorly behaved dog that thinks it knows better, they probably won’t listen to the command, but I suspect that the future events when the bills come due, will be the harsher master.
As I type away at this blog entry it’s still 20’C / 68’F outside even though we’re officially into autumn. It’s been a hot and dry week, and will continue that way. Still the signs of autumn are there and one early morning fog filled the valley below the mountain range.
Due to the dry conditions, the air is full of dust. The particles produce the most amazing sunsets.
The land here was cheap because there are no services such as town water. If we use up all of our stored water, there is no more water to be had and we simply run out. Due to the ongoing hot weather, the house water system had been getting low and the weather was showing no sign of decent rain any time soon.
We have three different water systems collecting and storing rainfall. They are all independent of each other and at various times of the year we need to move water from the one system to another.
The last of the large water reserves is stored in the long line of water tanks attached to the machinery shed. There is about 25,000L / 6,500 gallons of water available for use. During the week, we installed a powerful water pump to lift some of that water back up the hill so that it can be used in the house water tanks.
Before digging a long trench to bury all the water pipes, it’s not a bad idea to see whether the pump can lift the water back up the hill. The pump was installed, the pipes were laid on the ground and the system tested. It works brilliantly.
The 1″ water pipe ends at a garden tap where an 18mm / 0.7 inch flexible hose takes the water to the inlet filter for the house water tanks.
Earlier today I began the task of burying the water pipes. The trench is 60m / 200ft long and in a few hours I dug about a third of the trench. An electric jackhammer is used to break up the soil.
A mattock is then used to dig the soil from the trenches. Both jobs are hard work and the temperature was 34’C / 93’F in the shade. In the direct sun it is apparently 15’C hotter again.
Two thirds of that trench job is yet to be done.
There’ll be a couple of side branches of water pipes with this project, one of which will supply water to the sapling fenced enclosure. Another branch will connect up the large house overflow reserve tank in a way so that only a single water pipe will run up hill. It also means that if there is excess water anywhere within the entire system, it can be relocated to best advantage.
And because clearly we don’t have enough water storage, another two 5,500L / 1,500 gallon water tanks were ordered.
This week’s video is of the work on the water systems:
In breaking produce news:
The pumpkins are growing fast. Those plants require fertile soil, hot weather and daily watering for about ten minutes. The sapling fenced enclosure has enough pumpkin production to get us through winter and spring easily.
The Pomegranate has received no watering this growing season, yet still looks lush and has produced many fruit.
It must be dry this year, the beans have dried on the vine. We should harvest them over the next few days.
Every day for the past two weeks, a small cluster of grapes have been added to breakfast. They’re very tasty. And I’m a bit surprised that they are ready to pick and eat this early.
One of the plants which receives regular watering (only a few minutes each day) is the tall tree fern in the drainage basin near to the shady orchard. Some of the fronds have died back and will fall around the sides of the trunk. This is entirely normal for these plants. The dead fronds can be removed, but I believe they provide additional weather protection in very cold conditions.
The regular watering has produced an interesting outcome in the drainage basin. Looking closely a few days ago I spotted several self seeded ferns. At this stage, the plants are small so I’m uncertain of the variety, but regardless, it is an interesting development.
A Chinese pistachio tree has clearly enjoyed the conditions this year and despite no attention, the tree has grown a lot.
Leaf change will be short and brief this year (hopefully). Most of the fruit and other trees are doing fine, but the continuing hot and dry weather means the process to turn deciduous will be rapid.
The bees and other insects are continuing their hard work about the property. The warm nights encourage the cicadas and crickets to sing their night songs.
Onto the flowers:
The temperature outside now at about 9am is 20’C (68’F). So far for last year there has been 96.6mm (3.8 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 96.0mm (3.8 inches)