A Proliferation Of Projects

Our friend Paul comes out a couple of times a week to have dinner with us and talk about Man Things with Gary. I stand at the kitchen bench making our tea, calling out things like "Did you tell Paul about the inverter kit?" and "Tell him about the idea with the boat" - Paul likes to hear about our latest list of mad projects. At least I think he does. We get all excited and go on like jabbering fools until Paul starts laughing and saying "You guys'll be 105 before you get all that done!"

This gets Gaz all worked up and enthusiastic - after Paul leaves, Gaz goes into overdrive, even if it's the middle of the night. "Do you want me to put these drawers together now? Hey, let's set up this two way kit on your desk as a base station. Where do you want me to put the inverter?" As he's working he starts rattling off ideas to me which has me in fits, but then I get all inspired and we end up with all these hilarious plans for things like putting an old rowboat up on the old tree stump as our tree house, making our own cement from local earth materials, and welding together parts from old quad bikes and trucks to make a lunatic Mad Max bush vehicle for no reason.

Then Gary says, "Make me a list!", which is great. I write down every single thing I want him to do around the place plus all the things he wants to make, and he works his way through them. I just love it. "What's next? What do you want me to do now?" he calls out. "Fix the Holden up ready to sell!" I yell back. "Then do the bike!"  "Okay!" We've become a great team and we're really happy - we inspire each other all the time with ideas and creativity. I just adore him. One thing I really like is that our bed is actually two separate king single mine camp beds that we've put side by side, which means we can cuddle up if we want but if one of us is fidgeting or snoring or making weird schlopping toothless gum noises in the night we can sleep on the separate mattresses without jostling each other. We usually sleep holding hands - it's too hot most nights to snuggle up!

So we've worked out that we can source the right types of earth and limestone to make our own mud brick / wattle & daub walls - we're going to line the inside of the sheds with a thick layer of it, then render it off so we have a nice adobe look indoors instead of the horrid tin, and it will make the place a lot cooler without the expense of insulation etc. Then we're going to rebuild an old truck, a storm shelter, some castle towers out of giant loader tyres, a wind turbine, furniture, and lots of other stuff, if we can drag ourselves away from watching 17 episodes of Lost every night...