Carnage

Wade the earth moving guy was back today.  My goodness, the things that can happen in three hours!  Flattened trees everywhere, thankfully we have hundreds more.  But we now have a good sized treeless area where the house is going to be built.

 

Here is Steve surveying the carnage.  We are doing the cleanup ourselves, Steve will be manning the chainsaw and I will be manning the mulching machine for the smaller upper branches and leaves.  No worries about firewood for the next 10 years eh!

Wade also started preparing the ground for our house water tank.  There is no mains water out here so we will be relying on rainwater.  Our shed tank is 25000 litres but we are planning on putting in a 130000 litre tank for the house.  The sand pad for that is about 11 metres square!  He is cutting into the hillside a bit and levelling the ground and later this week he will be back with some clean sand and a compacter.

Psst, come closer....I had an embarrassing moment today, let me share it with you.  I was trying to break a big branch off a felled tree limb, pulling it with my hands whilst steadying the limb with my foot, when it suddenly snapped.  I shot backwards, lost my footing and landed straight onto my arse.  But the momentum gathered plus the roundness of said arse meant that I kept on going and rolled right onto my back with my polkadotted wellie boots waving in the air.  How ungainly.  I furtively peeped to see if anyone saw - no, good.  So I got up, dusted myself off and continued on as if nothing had happened but secretly nursing my pride and my bum.  I know my secret is safe with you.

 

On a final note, I have to tell you that we feel so blessed to share our land with many of these beautiful butterflies.  They are Monarch butterflies and in summer there are lots of them, dancing around like fairies.  Darn tricky to photograph though!