It's a long way to Tipperary

It quickly became apparent at the beginning of the week that the team I want to lay the final pour of concrete in the garage etc were not going to clear their backlog of work this week. So it looks like it will now be sometime next week. In view of this I have taken it easy this week and even skived off one afternoon to go to the movies to watch Prometheus. I haven't felt quite so naughty since skiving off Latin prep in the fourth form at Prep School, but feelings of guilt (that never seemed to bother me when skiving prep) took the edge off the movie, which otherwise wasn't bad.

The delay is frustrating but it is not really holding everything up. The latest forecast for the SIPs for the roof is now three weeks, down one week from a month ago. I know that sounds barmy but we are talking building contractors here. If only we could take advantage of the time by doing some staining and parging (cover for the above ground basement polystyrene) but for that we need a few days of good weather and at the moment we are not getting two consecutive days of sunshine. I've got all the stain and parging material, cans and brushes all ready to go and next week it is hoped that we will start this work, weather permitting.

So this week we continued the process of preparations for the concrete laying. On Monday we had a truck load of pea gravel delivered for final levelling and smoothing inside and outside the garage.

We only used a few barrows full and the rest will be used around the cabin to smarten up some of the areas not covered by the deck. New stuff will be brought in for the drive. 

It has made the base for the concrete much easier to sculpture around the corner to the stairs for the Annex deck, where the concrete has to turn, drop and shed water away from the garage.

The apron outside the garage, before the re-bars were added. Actually, we are still awaiting some re-bars to finish the job and they should arrive on Monday, as should the replacement valley for the one we mis-cut a few weeks ago.

Inside the garage we are almost ready. All that remains is to drill holes into the foundation walls to tie the re-bars in and about 50 feet of bars for this end.

I also dug the final foundation for the Annex deck, which somehow got missed first time around. Amongst other things it will support the stairs.

 Apart from that I tidied up the wood off cuts that were cluttering up the area between the front entrance and the garage, in preparation for starting the parging. In this particularly area I am going to put stone, because the foundations will be visible but I have cleared it so I can judge more easily where the boundary between the parging and the stonework will be.

On Thursday, I went up to Calgary to visit a specialist carpentry tool shop. I went with Owen who also wanted to visit an Oil Industry Exhibition, he is doing some work in support of the business in the USA. I bought some tools which I will need for furniture making but they will also be useful for making spindles for the decking. The Exhibition was interesting and there was some impressive equipment on display. Conspicuous in the crowds where the similarly dressed squads of Chinese, equipped with enormous cameras with gigantic telephoto lenses, snapping away at all the displays from every angle so they could go away and make the stuff themselves. It was all a bit obvious.

I took lots of photos myself, mostly of the heavy equipment on display but, the only things that I thought may be of real interest to readers of this blog, was this stand that specialised in small all terrain vehicles.

Does anyone remember Mike Somerton-Rayner's Esarco company back in the 80s that used to produce these sort of things in 6x6 and 8x8. There were lots of trials on Salisbury Plain but I am not sure if the MOD actually bought any in the end, maybe a few for the Paras.

 Andrew Ridgway was involved, as the test pilot, if my memory serves me right. Well, these things are quite popular here.

I don't know if Mike SR actually invented these things but I'm guessing that he would be pretty interested to see them now.

I thought the ornithologists amongst you, and I know there are a few of you out there, may like to see the empty nest of my robins. I have removed it now that the birds have flown, so as to prevent any mould or mildew forming on the beam.

Many of you will have been following Matt Sample's blog and, like me, will be very sad that his around the world trip has come to end. His final days in Germany and mention of the smell of Bratwurst made me suddenly nostalgic for the days I spent in the old Fatherland and so I rushed out and bought some Thurlingian bratties from the local super-market and cooked them up on Tex's bbq. They looked a bit smaller than the one's we used to get up in North Rhine Westphalia and Lower Saxony after a night out on the town, and so I put two on the barbie. As I munched them with the closest thing I could find to senf and swilled them down with cold lager, a whole load of fond memories came flooding back. Autumn manoeuvres in tanks across the North German Plain, low-level flying sorties over the Fulda Gap, flaxen haired frauleins, old comrades, pig roasts ……. The Wall, which was what it was all about. Don't know what I am going to do with the other ten bratties still in the packet. Guess I'd better find a few friends, a few beers and dig out a few sheets of "Its a long way to Tipperary, Bless 'Em All, Widecombe Fair" and all those other old songs we used to sing around the camp fires - those were the days, though we didn't know it at the time. 

❡ It's a long way to Tipperary, its a long way to go …………❡