Ugh, this blogpost won’t follow any kind of coherent theme. So brace yourself for a frankenpost stuffed with animals, broken things and repaired broken things. Last time on my little backpacking adventure we had a look around the horribly rundown premises, now let me introduce my new animal friends as the humanoid ones still make themselves scarce.
This is Harley. Harley is the oldest of the bunch, and opposed to the fact that I’m pretty sure that ‘Harley’ is a women’s name and I’m told that he’s got 2.5 boyfriends, he’s a pretty straight guy.
Well, except for his back. He’s the horse I’m currently learning to ride on, and as long as I’m bribing him with carrots, he isn’t as thickheaded as the others told me.
That’s, well, she hasn’t got a name, but she and her child are the residents of hut 5. Usually though, they both hang out under the hut instead of jumping onto the cozy, dusty matress inside. Not that anyone would care.
That’s, umm, I’m bad with making up names. But this cute little Possum is currently pregnant and always gets snacks from the others, much to the amusement of our customers. I have a feeling that we shouldn’t be feeding her. Her child will never learn to take care of it’s own…
A rare picture of me, leading the conga line. You may note the distance between the red-shirted guy (me) in front and the rest of the group. Why that? Well, at that moment we were on the way back to the yard, and at that point Harley usually remembers that he can walk faster than the human walking pace to get back to his beloved feeding through. In the beginning I had trouble realizing his change of pace, but I’m slowly getting the hang of it. Or rather, I’m getting him to walk the whole trail faster so the customers can adjust to it too.
Aaand here we have one of our Cows, didn’t even want to pose for a photo. In the background you can see one of the few rainshowers we get rolling up to us, most of it gets stuck on the mountains before it gets to the ‘scenic rim’ area.
More cows. That day we thought they had escaped because they were nowhere to be seen on the paddock, but somehow they just had a suspicious interest in the dry creek running through it. But let’s get away from animals. They’re boring anyways. Or so I would say. I’m sure some of my more regular viewers will say that what follows is boring instead…
Well, last post I mentioned that I would only stay if I got the tools to fix up my accomodation. And I got everything I needed even faster than expected.
Wouldn’t have thought that I’d put my skills acquired from the last job to use this quickly.
But duh, the fitting of those frames is truly horrible. I just hope the meshing will hold as long as I stay as the badly matched corner will quickly tear it apart.
Fancy result pic. Because of this, I convinced my coworkers not to burn a mozzie coil each evening, so I can finally enjoy a movie without getting headache!
Die, dust! Afterwards it turned out that the Fan doesn’t work anyway, but well, just another thing to poke my multimeter at when I’m getting bored again.
Job benefit: Leather oil. Mmmmmh, love that smell. They should make perfume out of it.
Another job benefit: Walking into stones. Okay, that was whilst lunch break, on the job we have to wear enclosed shoes. I wonder why…
Fridays are our shopping days and more or less only chance to see some civilization, so we all get into a car,…
Turn JPOP to maximum…
Aaaand get stuck on the way back up because people didn’t think it was necessary to drive up the hill slowly and cautiously. Ooof. What followed infuriated me even more. The sideskirt is held by simple plastic clips, in this case they were all intact, with a bit of patience it would have been a childs play to get the skirt back on for no money at all. Instead of listening to me however, madame went to the next workshop and payed 100$ for her 7 simple clips to be reattached. Not my money, but still…
Since my Deli hasn’t got enough seats for all of us, next week we took the company car.
It sure seems that someone like me with a small wallet and corresponding creativity had already laid hands on it.
Oh, yeah, and that’s what I meant with civilization. Beaudesert seems to be a ghost town whenever I go there.
But well, who needs civilization when you have a private pool. Turns out that there will be a child camp in the hostel the exact week my birthday takes place, so no relaxed birthday pool party for me :/
The week dragged on with me getting ballsy enough to take photos while riding (not that they are any interesting), but just have a view from the bottom of the hill up to my private-ish pool.
At the end of the week, 32 screaming kids were supposed to arrive with help of the white van. It hadn’t been used since the last camp, so the battery was dead. Not flat, but dead. Took us way too long to realize that.
But now for Birthday day! What else would I do on my birthday other than cooking and taking apart my poor van? I had noticed that the drainage under the windscreen and fenders had been clogged with leaves and finally decided to do something against it. So, first take of the wipers…
Get that plastic cover out of the way and get hands on precious, rotting leaves.
The water is supposed to flow off to the side into some hidey hole under the fender. While the passengers side was clear…
The drivers side seemed to be completely clogged.
And here the fun began. To get to the drainage hole, I had to take off the fender. Or at least unhook the upper side. To achieve that, I had to take off the indicator. And so, my tiny little cleanup job became messy quite quickly.
After all that, I could finally take a look at the drainage hole. ‘Quite small’, past me thought: ‘No wonder it got clogged’. I poked around for a while and got to a point where it got shut completely. Bravo. Im really good at fixing things. After getting myself a drink, I tried scraping dirt upwards and brushing it out, and suddenly…
Well, at first I thought I had stuck my stick into a rusted section, but as it turns out, the mitsubishi engineers are not morons. I sure am one for thinking that they would devise a drainage hole as small as I initially thought. I still don’t know *where* the drainage hole is actually leading. To Narnia I guess, because the dirt surely did go somewhere, but not to the underside of the car.
Oh, yeah, for 7 of those clips you apparently pay 100$ in some places. I’m quite sure that they would even be interchangeable between cars even if they are of a different make. But lets get to another topic. This really is a frankenpost.
Cooking. Still couldn’t get the stove cleaned completely, but it’s getting there. Check with my previous post…
Theoretically, I would have needed something called ‘processed cheese’, but no store seemed to have it, so I tried to improvise by smelting a whole block of cheese in milk.
While the substance of the sauce turned out quite well, I later realized that the fat had seperated from the rest of the sauce and was drenching the mince at the bottom of the casserole. Ew.
Couldn’t even find normal peas. But I think I’m more to blame for that one…
Just put the sauce on, sprinkle some extra cheese on it and shove all of it in the oven for half an hour.
Waiting for the oven means I’ve got nothing to do. I hate having nothing to do. So I got the old, bigger and better TV out of storage which was supposedly defunct… Well except for it working just fine. Well, now we’ve even got a taste of dolby surround sound. And a black TV just looks miles better than a white one, but that’s just personal taste. But what are looks in a garbage dump like this anyways?
Killer movie to give me a killer soundtrack for the day. I’ve got to say, I was pleasantly surprised.
But the best thing for today came last. My brake pads. Jokes. Silas stopped by, and he had brought my new brake pads.
Instead of taking off the caliper and having to vent the brake lines, we just took out the lower bolt and pivoted it out of the way.
Sweet new heavy duty brake pads. 80$ in total. Quite cheap when comparing it to plastic clips for 100$, huh? (It’s alright, I’ll stop poking fun at my coworker now)
Good thing we changed them.
Thing is: As the brake pads wear, the pistons are pushing in. This is how we got them pushed out again after taking off the cap of the refilling reservoir. Turns out that in the end the fluid got back up to ‘max’ exactly, that’s how I like it.
The second brake pad dragged on into the night, we didn’t encounter any problems but surely should have started earlier.
Next day, Silas abducted me to Brisbane, where he got an apartment for cheap for a few days.
Wow, proper civilization. Haven’t seen that in a while. Also, I’m quite sure I have never before gotten into a pool that wasn’t on ground level. Quite cool to be able to look down onto the traffic whilst relaxing in the pool.
Even if it’s only 8th floor, it’s quite a view already. But well, that’s all for now of me, I’ll be back if interesting stuff comes up. Looks like it’s gonna be the same for quite a while…
Hooved cat tax.