{"id":730,"date":"2012-07-02T23:59:47","date_gmt":"2012-07-02T21:59:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/digbyyoung.co.za\/boggy\/?p=730"},"modified":"2012-07-03T01:37:11","modified_gmt":"2012-07-02T23:37:11","slug":"another-scrappy-week-at-boggy-pond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digbyyoung.co.za\/boggy\/?p=730","title":{"rendered":"Another Scrappy Week at Boggy Pond"},"content":{"rendered":"

Monday 2nd<\/sup> July 2012<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

It indeed felt like a scrappy week at Boggy Pond, probably because I didn’t do as much physical work I usually do, but that doesn’t mean things didn’t get done. I should really stop beating myself up about not achieving a major visible milestone every week. Steve has been living here full-time for barely two years, and it has taken him eight years to get to that point.<\/p>\n

\"Broken<\/a>

The collapse of two more trees has left the cabin quite exposed<\/p><\/div>\n

The beginning of the week was cold, wet and blustery. At first I was sceptical about the predicted wind speeds of up to 44 KmH, but I was soon proved wrong. While Jeff hacked away at new growth below the cross \u2013 road, I snuffled away while putting up a shelf above the toulet cistern. I heard a rending sound and went outside to find that the main branch of a diseased tree between the cabin and Home Field had been ripped from the bole. The dead trunk standing next to it also appeared to be standing at a different angle to that which I remembered, so I gave it a shove \u2013 and pushed it over!<\/p>\n

Apart from getting over the flu rather slowly, I’ve also been juggling several different balls. Without going into detail, work prospects are becoming clearer, which has simplified our property search. That also meant that the search has become a lot less theoretical, so Christa and I spent some time on the web,with me flying Google-Earth-Airlines around Cape Town while conferring via Skype. The result is that on Thursday Christa is flying to the Cape, where we have a series of meetings set up with a studio, several Producers and one or two estate Agents.<\/p>\n

The other result is that the restoration of Boggy Mansion will have to go on hold for a while, while we deal with more pressing property and accommodation issues. It appears that I will need to spend quite a bit of time in the Cape, so it makes sense to make Boggy Cabin as comfortable as possible to live in when I am able to get into the Overberg. With Boggy Mansion on the back burner, getting the Land into shape becomes a priority, so I have taken Jeff off site-levelling. We went up the mountain behind the property to a barren area littered with sandstone rocks and boulders. Apparently it was used as an aggregate pit for a local road-building project some years ago. It now serves as a useful water-catchment area for me \u2013 once I’ve dug a few trenches and cleared some paths through the woods. It is also a rich source of infill for the two roads across the property. Using rocks and pebbles to fill the gulleys in the roads will allow run-off water to flow into ponds lower down and repair the erosion by trapping the sand carried down the slope. It is a huge, time-consuming job, but then that’s what it takes to rehabilitate a piece of land.<\/p>\n

I also took time out to go down to the Community Cr\u00e8che playground. Steve was involved in setting it up and fencing it off a few years ago, but he’d heard that a child had recently had a narrow escape from serious injury on the slide. The fibreglass slide was loose and the climbing net on the jungle-gym was in bad shape. Why anybody would want to saw through the bolts holding down a child’s slide I can’t begin to guess. Since the bolt-heads were welded to a steel plate embedded in the fibreglass, I had to take the slide back to the workshop to drill two holes through the embedded steel plate. The next day I took it back and bolted it on, using two round-headed carriage bolts. The climbing net will have to wait until I can get to town to buy some thick ski-rope.<\/p>\n

Once a week, usually on a Sunday, I make a detour to the refuse skip on the outskirts of the village. This week I arrived on Wednesday to find somebody actually in the skip. A tousle-headed prophet type looked up briefly then continued his rummaging. I found some useful items, such as a plastic cable-spool on which to wind the plastic tube of my water-level, some handy discarded timber, and a large thin plastic sign from the bar \u2013 ideal for making the remaining valves for the biogas digester. The prophet emerged from the skip, pouring his considerable length over the side, and acknowledged me with a polite greeting. I struck up a conversation, and discovered that he was Jackie Avontuur, a bricklayer, and one of Jeffrey’s many nephews. (I later learned from Jeffrey that Jackie is a very good and conscientious bricklayer indeed… when he can find work.) Apparently Jackie also makes regular trips to the skip to scrounge.<\/p>\n

Our conversation stalled while a white farmer arrived in a flashy SUV and tossed some rubbish in the skip without acknowledging either of us. When the chrome-and-white SUV had purred away, Jackie stroked his voluminous black beard and growled in Afrikaans: \u201cWell now, I wonder what that sort of person throws away. People are so stupid about what they throw away.\u201d I went across to have a look, and scored a big piece of flat polystyrene packaging \u2013 ideal for insulating the back of my \u201chot\u201d compost bin. The farmer had recently treated himself to a huge flat-screen television.<\/p>\n

I asked Jackie Avontuur what his recycling \u201cspeciality\u201d was.<\/p>\n

\u201cLeesstof\u201d<\/em> (Reading material) he said, but added that people seemed to read very little these days. He seldom found a \u201cHuisgenoot\u201d or an Afrikaans paperback in the skip, so it was becoming very difficult to find something decent to read… Although he understands English after years of working in the building industry in the Western Cape, he reads only Afrikaans, preferably detective stories adventure novels.<\/p>\n

You never can tell…<\/p>\n

\"Red<\/a>

The orange-red fungus on a dead tree in the top dam is the size of a twenty-cent piece<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Monday 2nd July 2012 It indeed felt like a scrappy week at Boggy Pond, probably because I didn’t do as much physical work I usually do, but that doesn’t mean things didn’t get done. I should really stop beating myself … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digbyyoung.co.za\/boggy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digbyyoung.co.za\/boggy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digbyyoung.co.za\/boggy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digbyyoung.co.za\/boggy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digbyyoung.co.za\/boggy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=730"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/digbyyoung.co.za\/boggy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":734,"href":"https:\/\/digbyyoung.co.za\/boggy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730\/revisions\/734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digbyyoung.co.za\/boggy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digbyyoung.co.za\/boggy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digbyyoung.co.za\/boggy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}