On the job

Song of the day: “The Flood” by Katie Melua…gawd, I hope not, seeing as I’m at the job at the moment, digging holes, and we’ve just been forced to take a break due to the rain coming down. It has been doing that for a few hours now, and we already had to take a thirty minute break earlier because there was an increase in the water flow then too. Hah. I also had the song “I thought I’d lost you” by Miley Cyrus and John Travolta. It’s on the cd in the Opel, so it got stuck for a bit. Hah.

But I’m getting ahead of myself again, aren’t I? Let’s start this properly, and get back to yesterday. I was up just a bit too late for a proper workout, so I had to do without because I had to head on down for the usual morning chores. That done, followed by breakfast, and settling tenant on my terrace, we headed on down into the yard for the usual rounds. It was at this time that mom informed me that the lady who possibly had a job for us had gotten into a bit of an accident over in Malaga, and that she would be coming over to see if big brother could fix the back door enough for her to travel with it next week.

We were about halfway into hosing everything down when she arrived and we headed up to see what could be done. While the lady visited with mom and tenant (leaving tenant with a 7 week old puppy, which psyched tenant, of course) big brother managed to fix the locking mechanism at least, while I discussed the specifics of the job of putting up her fence.

In the end we decided on starting the next day (ergo, today) despite us being without the Land Rover (market day tomorrow, remember?) and thus needing to drive the Opel up the mountain into the country. It was quite a ways, but we managed just fine.

But anyway, since there was a down payment, we headed out to the construction and get most of the supplies. Was an experience, in particular since the guy at the building company was in such good mood that he didn’t even make a problem. Loaded everything up, checked out gates, and then headed home with all sorts of calculations in our heads.

Then there were edits (not a lot, but a few) catching up with messages, and chats before it was time to go to bed early. What can I say, we had to get up at seven in order to get to the job in time. There were a few chores to do beforehand (such as they ever existent laundry, ya know) and then gathering up food for the day before heading out in the friggin’ Opel. Seriously, whoever designed that car should be shot and then hung at a castle wall somewhere. You have to break your back climbing out, and to get in, you basically have to fall inside. Grrr. And then I’m not even talking about how it scrapes over anything that sticks out three inches up from the ground. Grrrrrrrrrr!

Arrived on time, phew, and after a short talk with the “boss lady” we went to work, measured everything out (three times, hah) and then got to digging. Boy, did we dig. I had figured we’d manage ten at most, seeing as there were stones, rock surfaces and just plain hard packed clay, but in the eight hours we were there (it started to rain by the way, twice we had to take a thirty minute break during the worst of it) we managed to dig a total of 23 holes. Yay. Most of it, in fact. Now we only need to dig three more pole holes, and ten supports and then we can start on pouring the first concrete. The corner poles are first for that, by the way. Most tension will be on those, so they’ll need the longest to dry.

While we were there boss lady got home with a bunch of puppies which she’s going to find homes for in the near future. Lemme see if I can get a pic on here…

Nope. Not today. I'll get to it later. For a flash of a second I regretted that we have so many dogs, because in that second I regretted having so many dogs already. Then of course I remembered all our own little darlings and could just enjoy the puppies for a bit before they were put in the back where they could recover from the trip.

But anyway, on the overall it was a productive day, and we got home at around eight in the evening with the dogs being absolute insane. Can’t say I blame them, poor sweeties. It was a long day without us (10 hours at least, since the trip to, and irrevocably the one back, takes about an hour) but according to cousin Ed and grandpa, they behaved relatively well.

What followed was cleaning up the leftover food, filling bags with sand, getting a couple of bags of cement, and counting out the poles that we’re going to need tomorrow.

Once we had pasta and sauce Cousin Ed made for us, it was down to our computers and editing the two pages that we hadn’t managed yesterday. Then there was this blog and now I still have to go over my messages and such. *sigh* Gotta go.