Increase the size of your deck! Easter 2004.

Gonna post a few up since blog access will be sporadic at best over the next few weeks...

Anyway... before Xmas 2003 we had a couple of local lads - Bert & Ernie build us a new deck between the house & the sleepout. They didn't quite finish it in time for Xmas, but it WAS finished enough for us to use with great success... but now it is really finished. And here it is. before & after shots...

Before:

After:

Note the bamboo around the corner of the fence in the "before"... more on that later...

The fence around the house in the before shot above, was previously relocated to another part of the boundary to stop Wilma wandering through the neighbours'... And painted green by the ever enterprising T.

To go with the new deck, I had to buy a new barbecue... just had to...

It's to augment the big red kettle job I already have up there.

I likes my barbecues. I have lots of them. In fact, just a little while ago I had to (had to) buy a new one for home too. Actually, I was only at the barbecue factory looking for a lid for the gas barbie at home. The old lid blew away in a storm... but they had these little cast iron jobs there half price... what's a man to do? T's got her cupboards full of shoes, I have my sheds full of barbecues.

The gas one is a aberration. I think it is cheating. But it was T's. And our last house was a fairly sectionless affair, so the gas seemed a better bet than setting fire to the (little) deck there.

I like to build a big fire, and stand around it for hours until it's just starting to get dark, then I put the charcoal on. When it is pitch black, except for the red glow of the coals, I go get one of my many flashlights (I like my flashlights too, in fact I recently got two new ones from the Kathmandu sale), so I can see what the hell I'm doing. Pays to ignore all the complaints you get from family members about how late it's getting. Guests are always more polite.

SO anyway... Easter 2003 we invited a truckload of people to come to dinner at Sunny O on Sunday. Truckloads arrived & we had all forgotten that booze outlets were closed that day. So we went to Byron's Bar & Grill, ordered a bowl of fries for M & 6 bottles of wine.

this year, we were better organised. We invited truckloads of people for SATURDAY night, when bottle stores were open. Nobody came. Still... we did our best all by ourselves. And still had wine left over for Sunday.

The main purpose of the trip was to relocate two youngish (about 10-15 feet tall) pohutukawas that were planted about a metre from the house. Before they got too big & heavy to move. SO all in all I dug 4 colossal holes in the garden & filled them back in. Two to dig up the trees, and then two more out in the paddocks to replant them (where they will provide much needed shade for grazing beasts. And also look quite nice). Back breaking work, but satisfying.

I also replanted a load of little peach trees that self seeded from the next door neighbour's yummy peach tree. I have many more to replant too. Assuming they survive. may well have a free peach orchard at the end of it! They're screened from the sheep by a paddock wide string of sheep mesh. I even ran irrigation out to them so I only have to stand about half a mile away & turn on the tap... we have the technology...

Had the sheep sheared again, in a fairly uneventful visit from the shearer.

But the real gut buster was the digging out of bamboo that was started... man, never mind planting trees right next to the house that will one day be 100 ft tall... who the f*** would plant bamboo anywhere? We did this for 3 days straight, and left that particular patch of turf in a hell of a state. We've piled the grass clods up & once we've finished digging as much of the bamboo out as we can, we'll use some of the excess topsoil we have stored in a drum in the shed to refill the hole where the bamboo was & plug the turf back in on top. I expect this to be completed around 2007.

Any bamboo that makes an appearance after the returfing will be dealt to with a very environmentally suspect chemical.

BTW: dunno if you can remember me mentioning the pergola that was cemented into the garden like the sword in the stone, digging around the concrete reveled it to be at least a metre thick, so in the end I hacksawed it off as close to the ground as possible. Bert & Ernie asked if they could have it "for a friend" Yeah right.. SO it's gracing some other place now. Nice. Hope they're not too tall though if they're planning to walk through it.

Wasn't all hard yakka though, we did watch a mediocre version of Dr Zhivago over two nights. Thought we were getting Julie Christie & Omar Shariff... to find it was Sam Neill & an absurdly young Keira Knightley. Still...

On the home front, we spent last weekend in town. We were going to paint the kitchen, but a bad case of something to do with sinuses persuaded T that we should do something other than sand a load of dust into the air. So while she gardened, I removed all the nails & crap from the back porch & outside dunny, filled all the holes, bashed out some shoddy shelves that I kept whacking my knee on, and washed the whole lot down (accumulated dirt & grime from the last 90 years or so).

Best bit of the weekend was taking Wilma for a walk through the Bot Gardens. A week or so ago, a park bench appeared there - In Loving Memory of Timothy Cranfield, 1975-1993, and his dog Jazz. Sam & Valerie Cranfield (of the Cranfield's store fame) have a little staffordshire bull terrier called Havoc (who is well named), who is one of Wilma's best pals on Magpie Lawn. So anyway, there were about 30 people crowded around the bench at 4.30pm yesterday afternoon, drinking wine & beer & officially "opening" the park bench commemorating the death of their son 11 years ago (leukaemia).

So Wilma & I crashed the party, she rolled around on the lawn with Havoc munching on a pile of bones that Sam brought along, and I wobbled away about an hour later after having several beers plied upon me.

Dog walking should always be like this.