Day 81 - 25/2/14 – Grass Patch WA

We were up nice and early as our brains were still running on SA time, and we were ‘working’ on a farm today and I doubted that they would be working on our timelines! It wasn’t long before we had our jobs list!

Aneka, typical of people who live in small country towns, is involved in a plethora of community groups that is not limited to the treasurer of the CWA, president of the tennis club, some role in the P & F as well as being heavily involved in the upcoming “Yabby Classic” Grass Patch’s major community event for the year. I am guessing it is like a school fete crossed with a B & S Ball with events like yabby shelling contest, yabby races along with showbags, waterslides and a licensed bar until the wee hours. As part of the upcoming classic Aneka was creating a new stall ‘dunking’ and I was now in charge of creating it!

My first job was constructing the seat that the dunkee would be sitting on. After building the new ‘deck chair’ I shaped new set of massive arm rests for it in the shape of yabby claws as well as tail underneath it for authenticity. Jacko was a great help rounding the edges with a sander.

Having finished that before lunch my brain, which had been in hibernation for the last 80 days, now had a major challenge to create the ‘dunking element’ of the stand. I thought google would be my saviour but they only had concepts for ones where you fall into a bucket and my brief was for one that tipped a bucket on their head. I managed to come up with a concept based on the big water buckets that tip over in kids water splash parks using gravity as my friend with only a small nudge from a ball hitting a target which pulls on a rope tipping the bucket slightly past its level and gravity does the rest. I managed to find just the right ‘bits’ to help me construct  the device from the aptly named ‘materials area’ (read junk pile) and went to work. After another 5 hours, a lot of measuring, wincing, and a couple of swear words I had created my contraption and soon after we had Sam standing underneath it as our first guinea pig! The rest of us missed the target by a mile but Aneka soon hit it and the (unsecured) bucket came tumbling down. Amazing it worked!!!!


While I was out wielding power tools De was in the kitchen in the morning and helping out in the vege patch in the afternoon. A super yummy ice cream desert was made in the thermomix as well as a couple of truckers pies, using veges that she had picked from the garden, that were devoured for lunch. Then De, Dede (a dutch helpxer) and Aneka proceeded to dig out two of the vege gardens – and I mean dig out, meaning there is nothing left! I was pretty impressed by their efforts and knew De would be sore the next morning!
 


The boys had had a great afternoon, going on the school bus run, putting yabby pots out, riding on the 4  in wheeler and then going back down to the dam to check the pots in the back of the truck!



It was soon beer O’clock again and we had a number of cleansing ales and had a couple of home grown chooks that De also had a hand in cooking. There things were bloooody massive. Looking at them you would bet they were oversized turkeys, certainly not coles chooks!




A few more ales and yarns later we were both pretty tired from our hard days labour and we collapsed into bed and were asleep before our head hit the pillows.

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