Yawn. Moop. Well, we are finally more or less absolutely moved in. Pretty much. Kinda. A woman off Freecycle is coming to collect the empty likker boxes for her house-move tonight, which will make the kitchen look considerably more respectable. And I have been seasonably afflicted, as usual, with veggie gardening fervor, so the back entrance to the house is littered with wee pots and dribbles of potting mix exhumed from them by the snortlepig, who is apparently anti-veggies.
More impressively, we have a raised bed. Slightly raised, anyway. More of a token raise than a legitimately rheumatism-saving waist-high raise; but a raise nevertheless. It was a bit of a mission , nevertheless. The raised beds on TradeMe go for ridiculously inflated prices, and after seeing a few dead simple four-plank affairs go for over $100 my Scottish blood revolted and I said to myself, How hard can it be? Which is a thing one should not say. So I called upon my mother to take me to Bunnings, which sold cutesy little prepackaged veggie-bed-building kits with planks and nails and the like for $129. Puh-leeze, thunk I, and trotted off to the loose lumber. Four planks of that turned out to be going for a good $50, which by that stage I was meekly prepared to accept; but my mother is made of sterner stuff. “Dreamin’”, quoth she and drove me to a place I had previously only known as a legend: Demolition Traders.
What I knew is that it used to be Mum’s favourite shop and you could buy old French doors there. What I didn’t know is that it’s essentially a decayed urban Disneyland - a tumbleweed-blown, dusty Main Street USA and the perfect setting, if anyone’s interested, for a student horror film. It isn’t a shop at all, it’s an enormous lot filled with old houses transported onto the site - some of which were cannibalised from other old houses - and filled wit bits of yet more houses. One is filled, as Mother predicted, with French doors; another with bathtubs standing up against the walls like a hotel for hygienic vampires; another with amputated taps. One warehouse was full of whole kitchens, extracted neatly from houses and standing around just chillin’. And just to add a ghoulish Western B movie effect to the place, the legitimate goods for sale are intermixed with ancient carriage parts and wagon wheels, as well as seats made out of bathtubs a la Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s totally uber, and if I were left there alone after dark I’d very quickly end up gibbering in a warehouse, probably under the rowing boat named Titanic.
Anyway, an old chap eventually emerged from the gloom to help us sort through the piles of old weatherboards and such, while the pig courted tetanus playing amongst the gravel and rusty nails. To our request for H3 treated timber he snorted derisively and pointed us to H4 - apparently H3 rots like tissue paper when placed in contact with soil, and whose advice had we been taking? (Dad’s. Never trust an infralapsarian in the matter of treated timber.) A slightly younger and less picturesque individual cut the timber for us and manned the EFTPOS machine, clearly resenting us as lightweights who weren’t planning on hauling away any kitchens in our teeth. Nevertheless: wood obtained. $30. My ancestors would be proud, in a “Couldst thee not have cut it thyself from yon kindly greenwood, feeble wench?” kind of way.
Making the bed was likewise a heavier task than expected. I gave it my best effort with a hammer and galvanised steel nails, moving from one plank to the next to avoid the fingers of the snortlepig, who kept trying to hold the nails as I pounded ‘em. (She also had the disconcerting habit of waiting until I had nailed them in to - I thought - a considerable depth, and then casually reaching across and plucking them from the wood. That dude has fingers like biceps.) I got a few in straight, but the vast majority buckled and wilted and had to be extracted by Helpdesk Man. Fortunately he was so repulsed by my incompetence that he finished the bed himself, thus demonstrating that he is surprisingly manly. I want him to build a pergola next.
Anyway, the raised bed is now wobbling danergously on the back lawn waiting for a trailerful of dirt to stabilise and strengthen it. At least, that is what I’m hoping it will do. As it happens, however, we are now too broke to afford dirt (poetic, no?); so I’m making do in the meantime with $6 worth of supermarket potting mix and some seeds scrounged off a friend. Life remains snortly.
In other news, I am abandoning the Points system. My Suite101 earnings have better things to do for the foreseeable future, such as buying chests of drawers and bookshelves and stuff; and my tally marks got lost in the move. Instead this week’s Challenge will be as follows:
- Henna hair
- Write one article a day
- Query one article a day
- Do one thing every day to make the new house look more homelike
- Do one organisational thing a day
- Do Bible study homework
- Do singing group practice