Underwater

What’s this? Tuesday was busy doing paid work. It’s generally understood that work pays the bills. But then what was this all about? The nice telco had sent me a text message saying that they were soon going to switch off the 3G phone network, and my phone needed to be upgraded. I guess the implication was: Sort this out soon, or else.

As a canny and resourceful individual not wishing to spend heaps of mad cash replacing a device which already worked with the remaining 4G phone network, I thought to myself: Well, how hard can this be? Turns out, both mine, and Sandra’s phone (which are the same devices) despite having worked faultlessly for four years, aren’t good enough to do voice calls over the 4G network. That’s what was meant by the replace your phone now, or become a non-person, you have thirty seconds to comply (said in best ED-209 voice), meant. A bit of a bummer really.

The next day I headed down to the nearest town, which surprisingly has a nice telco shop where you can speak to real people and get telecommunication problems sorted out. Winning. Except, and I should have expected this, there were heaps of people waiting to be served. Other folks from the area had likewise received the memo. They even had a couch that you could lounge upon, listening to music which could have been aired on the national youth music broadcaster, and simply wait. It amused me to wonder what the other, mostly older customers waiting to be served made of the tunes.

The helpful bloke who runs the store interrupted serving a customer to inform me that my best option was to make an appointment for later in the day. Who knew you needed to make an appointment to get served at a shop? However, it seemed like a good idea to avoid the couch of older folks baffled by the most excellent youth music. As a side note, the music of RÜFÜS DU SOL, tends to improve any wait time. So despite the good tunes, an appointment was made, and I went about my business.

When you live in a remote mountain hamlet, everywhere is far away, even the nearest town. So on the trip I picked up a metal case at the electrical supply business. Some fertiliser was also chucked into the back of the car. There may even have been a coffee. With the awful possibility that simply visiting a store requires an appointment, it’s best to run multiple errands, and not waste the journey.

Once home again, I was able to begin replacing an existing plastic wiring box in the solar power system, with the recently purchased metal case. Here’s me up a ladder doing that work.

The solar panel array fuse boxes are being upgraded

It’s hard to be upset with the nice telco for upgrading their mobile phone requirements, when I’m doing exactly the same upgrade thing with the solar panel wiring here. Perched up a ladder in the strong autumn sunshine was kind of pleasant, and the wiring upgrades were going well. In the background what wasn’t going well, was that my appointment with the nice telco was cancelled. There was a text message. I’ve heard of relationship breakdowns being communicated by the very impersonal mode of a text message: Sorry, it’s not you, it’s me. Yeah, sure…

The wonderful thing about not having options, is that there are no other options. Another appointment was made with the nice telco store. But this time I made sure that it was the first appointment of the day. Some problems, like later in the day appointments when the business is getting smashed, are best avoided.

So, there I was on another morning, sitting on a park bench outside the closed store, having arrived five minutes early, as requested by the appointment software. Computers are notably very free with my time. The minutes ticked by. Try to look casual. Inside the store looked like a replay of the Simon Pegg electronics shop motivational speech scene in the film: Sean of the Dead. Sure, I also had plans that day too.

The door opened and a young bloke brought out an A frame board onto the curb. You could hear the music, which for the record, I was enjoying. The other customers and I poured into the store as if we were coffee starved zombies seeking brains. The appointment was acknowledged, and the bloke guessed my name correctly.

He directed me to a cubicle where a lovely young lady sold me the rugged replacement phone of my choice, which was pretty much the same as the one I had. Instead of a model 41, it was a 42. The magic number had been achieved! My joke fell on deaf ears. Being early morning, looking through the shop glass I could see that someone had parked an expensive looking Mercedes sedan in the street outside. Ordinarily I don’t notice such things, except that the morning sunlight was glinting off the windscreen and landing right in my eyes. When the young lady asked for my drivers licence card number, which I’d never previously noticed because it was printed in one point text on the back of the card, all I could reply was: There’s so much sun glare from that car, that you’re surrounded by a halo, and I can’t read this one point text. See what you can make of it. Turns out that younger eyesight is better than an old fella’s, and of course she was protecting that useful faculty, by wisely having her back to the sun glare.

Fortunately, the nice telco shop had one of the very robust phones (model 42!) in stock. There was a bit of a discussion among the team about the low demand for the device. The general consensus seemed to be: Indestructible, but nobody knew anything about the device. With that detail sorted out, the business was concluded smoothly and rapidly. Some people are excited about replacing their phone, that’s not me.

All I have to do now is set up both mine and Sandra’s new phones. The government requires us to have a smart phone for the two factor authentication application for their software systems. The authentication cannot be done on a computer. If we don’t have such a phone, our income will come to a rapid halt. That’s not much of a choice, but a lot of things are like that these days. They all want to float off our productive efforts. I’d like a bit of space from their constant demands.

The purchase of the phones will consume the income from a couple of days of paid work, for no added benefit. It’ll take another day to swap from the old to the new phones. You know what? It makes me wonder if there’ll come a point in the future where the costs for running a business, will exceed the income earned, and then what?

Putting 25 Litres of petrol into the Suzuki Dirt Rat Jimny the other day was an interesting experience. Somehow petrol was $2.299 a litre, or that’s $8.74 a gallon. An impressive achievement.

Unleaded petrol $2.299 a litre – a new plateau?

Earlier I mentioned replacing a plastic box in the house solar power system, with a metal case. There are eight solar panels feeding into that fuse box, and in order to upgrade the existing wiring for those panels, I had to be able to get access to them. The roof was steep and high enough that a fall would have hurt. We had some spare short sections of solar panel railing, and so I installed those on the roof.

Spare short sections of solar panel racking frames provided solid roof support

Once the racking was installed on the rear of the steep roof, I was able to access all of the wiring, and upgrade it all. That work took many hours perched high up on the roof, but at least the autumn day was sunny and pleasant. Prior to the sun setting, the job was completed, and the fuse box was in place and tested. This work is all about installing the industrial quality fuses, and also giving the wiring which has worked every day for the past fourteen years – in all weather – a bit of a freshen up. There are still a couple more of these jobs to do.

The new solar panel fuse box is now in place

Interestingly, the two large olive trees in the courtyard are now slightly over shadowing these eight solar panels. The trees have to be trimmed back. That was when we discovered the limits of the machines we have to do such work. The olive trees have grown a lot this summer. Have to do something about that.

The pruned olive trees look pretty funny now

All of the pruned olive material was fed into the scary old petrol wood chipper, where it was collected and used as mulch in new garden beds.

The mulch makes a great soil starter on these two new garden beds

A days work was spent excavating more soil from the future firewood shed site. The site where the large green water tank only recently sat, is getting much more level.

Behind Dame Plum, a large Pac-man shaped raised mound was excavated

Spare soil is a valuable resource, and in this case the excavated soil was relocated and used as fill on the low gradient ramp project.

This section of the low gradient path project is nearing completion

Despite the warm dry days of late, the cooler evenings are killing off the summer vegetables. We’re reasonably ruthless with pulling out plants that aren’t going to survive, and so this week we’ve cleared a lot of the raised garden beds.

Raised beds have been cleared this week and readied for the coming winter

Regular readers will recall that the soil in the greenhouse had been turned over during the past week or so. It was fertilised, then sown with winter vegetable seeds consisting of: Radish; Beetroot; Kale; and Green Mustard. The germination rate of the seed has been excellent.

Observant readers can see many young seedlings

We need another greenhouse!

Outdoors, the most reliable tomato for this location yet again proves to be: Barry’s Crazy Yellow Cherry Tomato. The plant is awesome and the fruit tastes great.

Barry’s Crazy Yellow Cherry Tomato never lets us down

With the exclusion of the yet to ripen Sultana Grapes, we’ve picked the rest of the vines.

Sultana grapes continue to ripen

There has been the occasional European wasp observed in that area, so if we have to, all of those remaining sultana grapes will be picked, ripe or otherwise.

We picked a lot of grapes.

A big bucket full of fresh sun ripened grapes

There are more grapes than we can possibly eat, so we decided to make a batch of wine. Given they’re both red and white grapes, the wine will be a Rosé wine, although candidly it looks more like a yellow country wine.

A bucket of grapes produces a lot of lovely smelling juice

The seed cake could have been dried and fed to the chickens during winter, but I didn’t think of doing that at the time. The chickens enjoyed it fresh.

A seed cake is good animal feed

Spotted a herd of very large deer on the road the other day. They’d been down to have a drink at a nearby large farm dam before then heading back into the forest.

The tail end of a herd of deer crossing the road

Onto the flowers:

We managed to inadvertently track down a second Canary Island Foxglove plant
Leucodendrons are always a delight in the garden
Roses don’t mind a bit of hot and dry weather
This two tone Rose is really quite lovely

The temperature outside now at about 9am is 9’C (48’F). So far for last year there has been 218.0mm (8.6 inches) which is up from last weeks total of 217.8mm (8.6 inches)