All finished up for you then Sir, I do hope its everything you thought it would be?!

Reality Bites

Yeah, even though its been 4 weeks & not the expected two since my last update, it was only in my dreams that all we had left to do was throw a house warming – I hope most of you caught the watermarking courtesy of 123 stock photos before you got too excited 😉

Back in the Autumn of 2015, I developed a programme of works for this build. Of course there have been some amendments since, however, I allowed 3 months to construct, with a further month of finishing. I then took a flyer on what it might possibly be like to get work done here & trebled it. My darker, inner voice, had already pre-accepted quadrupling that to a full year. What did I know, I was making it up as I went along…..

The thing is, its going well, very well in fact & I should be elated, I am elated, I just don’t feel elated. Having given this some thought during an idle hammock moment, the likely reason for my emotional dichotomy is that I was supposed to begin last June, so even allowing for a years build, we are now several months behind. Of course I know that’s nonsense, but that doesn’t change the largely underwhelmed feeling I cant shake off at the moment. Maybe its hormones – more on that later!

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Everything else in the jungle is awake & making its presence felt!

So you recall I said there were some dangerous…ok, more dangerous, creatures calling my back garden home, well I got to meet some more over the last few weeks…..

       Aint I just all cute n cuddly?!

I can grow up to a foot in length & I got more bite than a box of bulldogs

First up is this mofo – it moves pretty quickly, so whilst the shot of it next to my boot was taken by me, the other clearer shot is a library photo so you can see the detail. This then is Scolopendra Gigantea, AKA the Peruvian giant yellow-leg centipede or Amazonian giant centipede. It grows up to about a foot long & feeds on anything it damn well feels like! Its actually part of the scorpion family & as such is carnivorous, eating other insects, mice, birds, spiders, snakes & even bats – basically whatever it can overpower. Im told their bite is fatal, but whilst the death of a four year old in Venezuela was attributed to one, they are mostly considered just very poisonous. Their bite however will probably be all that’s needed to deter you from going near one a second time as they are ranked at a 4 on the Schmitt pain scale. My guys decapitated it, then cut the rest into four pieces & flung it into the undergrowth as it screamed “you’ll never take away our freeeeeedom”

The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend

Now when this winged behemoth flew past me, blocking out the sun as it went, I was expecting four horsemen to follow along after it, heralding the rise of an apocalyptic dawn. I don’t know whether this was the same as flew by me or horror of horrors there could be more than one. It is The Spider Wasp, or Tarantula Hawk. I made enquiries as to how the hell one dealt with this kind of beast & was told you avoid them where possible, but don’t discourage them from being around as they eat Tarantulas. Music to my ears & I was never much bothered by flying things anyway, so all good. Naturally a touch of further research was also called for, just to set my mind at ease. Things didn’t start off well as rather than kill Tarantulas, its namesake feeds on flowers like any ordinary wasp. They didn’t improve much when I got to the harmful section. They have one of the longest stingers at 7mm long, thats plenty long enough to pierce all the layers of skin. This means they also score a 4 on the Schmitt scale, so let me put that in context. The scale begins at 1, goes up to 4 & only lists those within the most painful bite spectrum. The fire ant, so named because of the intense burn when bitten is only a 1. The Spider Hawk shares top spot of the 4’s with the bullet ant – guess why its called that & no, its not the shape of its head ;)

The next bit comes with an advisory warning for the squeamish, so Mum, its enough you know they are our friends & skip to the next paragraph 😉

The likely origin of the myth, is that it lays eggs in Tarantulas, the lava then bore into the spiders abdomen to feed, but amazingly manage to avoid vital organs to keep the spider alive & thus feed for as long as possible. When its ready to ‘hatch’, there’s one last trip along the sweetmeat smorgasborg & then it erupts from the belly a la John Hurt, leaving the spider taking an octo-shuffle off its mortal coil.

Bow Legged Lou

Not much needed on this. Yes it’s from a chicken & all I can say is thank you to the bandy bantam, it was delicious & a meal in itself 🙂

 

….and then there were three!

So I get home a bit early a couple of Thursdays ago & need to do some work on the pc. Having had a few weeks of strange beasties on site, I am now primed for anything large & hairy within my peripherals, moving or otherwise. Back at home on the beach though, there’s been nothing, so Im pretty blasé…..which is why it took me a minute to decide on what I was supposed to do when I pulled out my chair & saw this….

Once my testicles, momentarily in my throat, had dropped back down & everything relaxed, this lil ball of fur barely raised its head whilst emitting the saddest mewl Ive ever heard. My heart melted. Now what was I supposed to do?! I have full 1^st Aid accreditation, but it doesn’t extend to cutey pie kittens & their welfare. Fortunately I always keep cream in the fridge, so two agonisingly slow tablespoons later, there were promising signs of life. Another hour & a can of tuna later, my mystery guest is bouncing around like a lottery winner, which I suppose it could be argued, she is – heart beginning to liquefy 😉

I have no idea how she got here or where she’s from – certainly no one has put any lost kitten “reward” posters, but the thing is, if Im not home, then the door is locked & even when open, because Im home, unless Im in bed, any other animal trying to snaffle our cats food has to get past me first. A clue came the next day when she ran under the stairs – turns out she’s been in an old equipment box under there for a few days at least – someone told me its not uncommon for cats to deposit recently birthed kittens in a safe place – she’s was a feline swaddling child, left on the church steps for fate to decide. Now she’s Daddy’s lil Gurl & we wub her n skweeze her n wub her all of the day & all of the night all along. I guess she must have imprinted on me because she absolutely will not be anywhere but by my side, I even have to escort her outside to do her business, she mewls until I do, which took a few mishaps to get the understanding of……

It’s a couple of weeks on now & the warm fuzzy glow has cooled – of course I still wub the lil mite, but the cycle of sleep, eat, play, repeat has become annoying as we are out of sync & she always wants to play when I want to sleep or do anything other than play with her – its taking me twice as long to write this as she leaps all over the keyboard, then scampers up on to my shoulder when I shout, but cant resist my dancing fingers, so when uiohdioI#IJ#’Innnnnnnnnnnnnn occurs, she gets put outside with the door shut. Cant see me getting away with that if it was an infant, so no, still don’t want kids….but I have laughed a lot over the last couple of weeks 😀Daddy Loves You, but you just gotta hope you will blossom later, cos right now the camera is not your friend…..

Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day

When you were last here we had just finished the footings & I was trying to buy prefabricated cages for the columns. We ended up making them ourselves & then had a welder attend site to make them the equivalent of factory made. We also got the added benefit of being able to weld them to the footings steel work, ensuring a solid connection throughout. Our next task was to concrete around these cages to form the columns themselves. As Ive said previously, we opted for the metal forms as they came in the size we needed & are easy to assemble. I met the guy on site to discuss the hire, which was confusing to say the least. I needed to allow enough time for them to be ready, wasn’t 100% on when the concrete was possible, so my thinking went like this: Deliver Thurs, assemble & level through to Fri & Mon if needed. Concrete Tues, disassemble Wed, collect Thurs, so a weeks hire. Yes the w/end was a bit of a waste, but I didn’t want to put the concrete off & just in case it all went tits up, 2 days is a nice cushion. Straight forward yeah? No Senor! My understanding is that they only hire them for 3 days, but you can have them for as long as you like. This meant I could only hire them from Mon, but get this, if I still needed them after Wed, I could hang on to them, yes, for a week if necessary! I don’t recall the exact details that made up the reason for me not being able to get concrete Tues, but I was guaranteed for Wed! So I kissed the dice & rolled a 3 day hire for Mon. 08.00 he pulls up in a home modified Toyota Hilux, over full with steel forms. I duly pay him & we unload. We have 18 columns, 4 sides to a form, why didn’t I have 72 pieces on site?! Didn’t fully understand the exchange, but my main guy assured me it was under control, so I threw a glance at the dice, let the guy leave site & waited to see what would happen. With a little more time to work on explanation, it turns out Id cleaned out his stock & he hadn’t finished making more yet. I was impressed, no, very impressed. He had the forethought to deliver enough for us to be getting on with, even if it cost him an extra journey. He was back by late afternoon, we successfully poured Wed & he collected Thurs as we were stripping them. He was a shoe in anyway, but he guaranteed his continued employ as we rise up through the building by confirming this was a 3 day hire. At $5 a day each plus $15 transport, it was money very well deployed.

With the columns complete, it was time to crack on with the base for the floor, but as has now become the norm, little happens when its supposed to. As long as you don’t execute anything based on something that hasn’t happened yet, its not a problem. What this means is that you have to work concurrently & not consecutively, which I think is what I used to get the buzz from. Motivating/cajoling to get something completed because the next thing absolutely could not be affected. Flying by the seat of someone else’s pants & knowing you can only succeed if you help them to succeed. Sure I can still plan, but I don’t execute until the precursor is complete. This means its a bit more paint by numbers, for which I am adjusting. In my moments of greater clarity, I savour the reward of unhurried, honest graft towards a home & no matter rain or sun, it feels mighty fine 🙂I want to use as many locally sourced products as I can, so we built the base from cocaineFilled, vibrated down & levelled. All ready for steel & concrete

So whilst we were waiting for stuff, we ticked off a couple of out standings, like lights & sockets to the office / W/c & an actual toilet for the W/c. I didn’t want to use one destined for the house, so I asked the guys if they knew of any 2^nd hand – I envisaged a version of a council reclamation yard, I had actually expected to see one by the side of the road for some strange reason, but no, there’s none of that. The one he found is extraordinary & for $30 it will end up “repurposed” further down the line. I have christened it – it promotes a better defecatory position in that your ear lobes rest on your knees, but it does a good enough job & fulfills its function.

Yes thats the certified electricity board installation & yes the engineer drilled the hole in the top when Id already drilled one at the bottom. Apparently water doesnt drip down here like it does in the Northern Hemisphere.

Anyway, we were on to preparing the base, which meant Bob was back on site to make mechanical light work of the soil that we needed moving around & also to bring in more fill material as due to yet more rain, there was no way we were getting a lorry where we needed it to be. With the area prepped, we lined with polythene & laid out the steel mesh reinforcement. To be fair they all looked at me like Im some kind of loony wasting $100 on polythene as they don’t use damp proof membranes here, which given the volume of rain, surprises me. Now we have poured the floor, they understand the benefits during that stage, but Im not sure I will ever sell them on preventing moisture rising from the ground.

Im as yet undecided what I will use to cover the basement floor – It would follow that I use the same ceramic/stone tile as everywhere else, but as this will probably end up being an ‘anything goes’ party area for the most part, I might explore a different covering. I had considered leaving it as polished concrete, so this pour was something of a test to see what they could achieve using their methodology. Well, bless them, Helen Keller could’ve gotten a better result with a wet puppy. In fairness, none of them have ever dealt with pumped concrete before, as usually they hand mix it. When mixed by hand, it stays wetter longer, so is easier to work with for longer. However, the big difference pumping is that you are no longer dealing with a bucket full at a time, but a continual flow. So where normally they would rough it in place & then return later to fine tune & polish, you cant do that with poured as its set too hard by the time you can get back to it. Its no biggie, it was an experiment & it will now be covered anyway. The main thing is that its pretty nice & flat, which is the critical skill, the rest is just technique. We’ve discussed it & will do it my way for the next pour so they can appreciate the difference (hopefully 😉 ).How many AirBnB’s can a big basement be before its a dorm….or tree

One aspect I felt a little horrified over, was footwear. They were all in plimsoles. Not trainers, but those canvas & Indian rubber fashion faux pas that you had to wear to junior school P.E. lessons. Think kung fu slippers with laces! So whilst they willingly stepped in the concrete where needed, understandably they did what they could to avoid doing so & with poured concrete you need to get right up, close n personal in the middle of it. Luckily they don’t use lime in their cement here, but even so, contact with skin is ill advised. Along the coast here at least, footwear options don’t extend much past flip flops, so whilst you will see trainers, as Ive said before, they are expensive, so are for Sunday best. Work footwear is whatever you’ve got & even at $10, wellies are an unnecessary luxury most of the time. So long story fractionally shorter, Im taking them all shopping Friday after work.

The “lack of” status most of the work force here have is a niggling issue. They tend to have 1 or 2 key tools for their primary skill, but don’t have much outside that, or its ‘created’ to fit a function. Some of the methods I am using require certain tools, but in general terms, everything we do requires something, which falls to me to provide as I am both client & principal contractor. The thing is, I have all these tools & equipment, just not with me right now & there simply isn’t a tool hire centre. Much like the motor bikes, the tools that are available are expensive but cheap & crappy Chinese imports, or very expensive name brand. So for now at least, we are prioritising, which means the guys are still using an axe instead of a plane to trim down timber framing, which until I splurged on a claw hammer, was also doubling as the main banger-in of nails.

Oh Glazing, Where Art Thou?!

The day before the re-re-scheduled delivery of my order I was informed there were still parts needed to complete my job & thus they would not be arriving as advertised. Of course no subsequent date was offered, so I was back to swinging in the wind. Channelling my inner Bruce Banner, everything went white hot as my eyes scanned down the brief note. Intense light flooded my ears, the sound of my blood pounding through my eyes, the scream began deep down inside but became an almighty roar as it exploded forth from my lungs as I went full ‘Hulk Smash’.Jack Kirby eat your heart out!

Of course I was still the one with my dick down a dingo’s throat & I couldn’t afford for them to cough. So I took a deep breath & maintained eye contact in the form of a very strongly worded letter. Well it made me feel better & thankfully I had my good sense guru Jeff here to guide me through the subtleties I was beyond feeling. I may tell the whole saga at some point if I decide to name & shame, but for now, all you, I, anybody needs to know is that they were finally delivered yesterday! TFFT ! Any day now I expect a date to sail…..now the so far, minor concern of getting my stuff through customs here has gone up a notch to five penny, ten penny as its about to be the last significant hurdle. The thing is though, even with a very fair wind, it will be middle of November at the earliest before I see any of my stuff on site. Given the electrics, kitchen, brick ties, render beads & yes, all the glazing are in the container, I am not going to be in a position to move in before Xmas. Damn, I’ve become a Kevin McLeod cliché 😉

The Little Boy That Fell Down the Well

So Jeff came for a quick break from the 5 – 9 & this time was a little more tranquil than previous, but no less enjoyable for it. Great conversation, at least one proper meal a day, a movie & TeaSmokeBed for a good long sleep. I went into work each morning to set the guys on for the day, returning for brunch out somewhere. No pressure, just blowin in the wind & feeling better for it. On one such afternoon we were going out for an early beer & a pizza, but there’d been a power cut earlier, so we hadn’t showered in the morning. 5pm & power back on, I head into the shower only to find it was still cold. We’ve previously had ignition issues, so as I realised it wasn’t power related, I headed down to the outside boiler room to tickle the boiler into submission as I had many times before. I may’ve mentioned that forethought isn’t a big part of Ecuadorian construction, well in the middle of the door way to the boiler room is the manhole into the underground cistern storage tank. The manhole cover has been cobbled together with bits of tin, but previously seemed solid enough & you really cant easily avoid stepping on it to enter the room. Hurriedly redressed in jogging bottoms & flip flops I headed downstairs, across the yard & into the room. Into the room with no mind nor heed for the cover that chose the precise moment the ball of my right foot transferred my weight, for the lid to give way, spin on its corners like a flip bin & shoot me down into the well, making sure to bash me on the sides as I went. I caught the top sides with my arms Tom Cruise style, hung there for a moment looking off meaningfully into the distance, then hauled my sodden, battered body out the hole & the surprisingly chilly water as a curious/concerned Jeff turned the corner to see what the shouting was about. A tri-fector of shock numbing the senses, Adrenalin trying to force action & nausea bought on by the pain now beginning to erupt all over my body, meant all I could do was go back into the room on auto pilot to complete my original task. The gas cylinder was empty, there was nothing I could do as the missing spare bottle indicated the letting agents had taken it to refill. Unable to complete my mission, reality began to trickle in, then really roar as every nerve ending began sending critical error warnings. I did a quick body scan assessment based on pain, but when I looked up & saw Jeffs worried face, I began to consider things may be worse than first thought. Right little & possibly right index toes broken, right tibia fracture, right 2^nd & 3^rd ribs cracked, left little finger dislocated, left hip broken. I was fine! The gas shouldn’t be too long now, so we can still go out. Jeff was having none of it & guided me to the sofa while he went through the pain killer drawer, which meant that a few hours later I was feeling much better ;).                                                                                Seems I was right to watch E.R. & not to apply for a job there as a second, later assessment showed that aside from some grazing to the skin of affected areas, no bones were in fact broken, I would just have a few bruises.                                                                So the thoughts going through Jeff’s head. He’s resilient, he’ll be fine, he does this shit all the time. He looks hurt, this could be bad, how do I go about doing what I should do? Who do I call, how do I call, what do I say? All very fine points, so just in case……………….. its 911 same as many. Unfortunately, the chances of you getting anyone that can speak any English is slim, so maybe just remember “emergencia” & the name of the town you are in & you should be fine… 🙂 Yes, Jeffs visit was quieter than usual, but we didn’t miss out on any excitement 🙂

After & Before, the true story of a cheaply made drive sprocket ………& I thought the chain was just loose.

Sadly I don’t think the Blazer is going to work out. The guy apparently still has another interested party, but even if they exist, they don’t seem to be giving him any money. The car hasn’t been matriculated for four years & owes $700 in back taxes/fines. I told him if he clears all that then Ill buy it. He said he doesn’t intend to pay the fines if hes only getting $1500 for the vehicle, but hasn’t answered any texts since, so it is what it is. Im off to Colombia next week to qualify for my 6 month entry/container/tax free pass, so Ill sign off for now & be back with more news in a few weeks.Marcus Arelius could have said to the Senate, “If you would be weak, disguise your tolerance as ignorance & turn your back upon me, but know this, while that ignorant back is turned, I shall eat your fish & grow strong”.

Si x