16th March 2013
A hole not only in my Blog, because I’ve hardly been out here, but also in my bank balance – because of a water leak last year! During one of my hurried trips in December last year, I arrived late in the day to find that I had no water in the cabin. Thinking that Jeff had been over-zealous, I opened the main valve at the bottom end of the property. It was only when taking a walk to the ruin the next day that I heard the sound of rushing water coming from the joint taking water to the cabin. The inspection hole was flooded – one of the compression rings had cut through the plastic pipe…
I repaired the joint of course, but apart from the fourteen hours of wasted water since I had opened the main, I had no idea how much water had been wasted in total.
The answer came with the January water account… R2,000 worth of water! The local Municipality has some provision for dealing with water leaks, but since the leak was clearly on my property beyond the Municipal shut-off valve, I didn’t feel I had much of a case. Ouch!
Although I came out for the weekend of March 1st to 3rd, I didn’t manage to get much done, beyond clearing some new alien saplings off the upper dam wall. The heavy rains last season have given the Bluegum and Port Jackson invaders a worrying boost. With Jeffrey effectively “retired”, there is a danger of the infestation getting out of control.
Amongst other factors, this has meant a serious re-think of the entire Boggy Pond project, I’m afraid.
Inevitably, I suppose, moving to the Cape has resulted in me being kept busy in the Studio – for which both Christa and I are very grateful – but it does mean that I will not be able to spend long periods of time here. Realistically, we have to harvest as much work as we can for the next few years to make some investment to rely on when we can no longer work. We hope that time is still a long way away, but at least it would be good to have a choice. In practice that means we need to invest in our own Studio. Building a house here is going to be expensive and time consuming – so we find ourselves faced with a choice, because we can’t do both.
Another factor is the slow realisation that Tesselaarsdal is probably not the ideal place anyway – I fear that it may be just too far off the beaten track and offer too little to potential tourists to be viable as a destination. It would also be unfair to dump Christa in the middle of an entirely Afrikaans speaking community. In desperation, I suppose one could make almost any place work, but we are not yet desperate enough, the time scale available to us is limited, and I doubt whether I have the strength to do it on my own as a “hobby”.
We are being driven ever closer to considering selling…
Sad, but reality bites…