My back is killing me. Everything we do at the moment is lift and bend over, bend over and lift.
We’re making an archery track – I already see it all ready, but unfortunately you can’t photoshop reality. So: bend over and lift, lift and bend over.
Imagine, it would be so great: just click on the stamp, and after a minute all those little stones are nicely spread out on the track
Pity. The worst thing is: no tractor or machine can go there, there’s no entrance wide enough. We therefore have to do a large part manually. Eh … that is … more back-ally.
The petanque track is located before the shooting range. Half in length, but also a lot of those d… little stones. Sorry … that’s my back talking.
The first cargo came with a truck of 10 cubic meters
Any idea how much that is? I didn’t know either, but now I do! The truck just couldn’t get through the gate. We had measured the front, but it went wrong because of the mirrors. They were just too much sticking out. Too bad.
If such a heavy truck is at the bottom of the bathhouse path, it can’t go back just like that. It only can go back empty. It had to be deposited on the spot, but driver Sérgio would come with his miracle machine that afternoon to transport it to the archery track.
Thank God, but there still remained a wheelbarrow or 20. “Não consigo levar isso, tem que fazer manualmente – I can’t pick up the rest, you’ll have to do that with the wheelbarrow”, Sérgio said casually, and left with roaring motor.
We did it this afternoon, moaning and groaning
It was not the first and only bendover-and-lift job of the past two weeks. There was also a whole lot of reed cutting going on. Cutting is fun, but then you have to put those bunches of reeds, which are like a huge mikado game, to get to the fire. Making a fire is also fun, but these are very disorganized ones. You start at the head (because it burns best) and then you have to move it to the tail.
Always hated mikado
The reed is called canas in portuguese, and every inhabitant of the outer areas knows what that is about. If you don’t keep an eye on them, they take over the whole world, together with the blackberries – silvas. We had neglected this piece of terrain a bit, and that was stupid.
In a year they are 4 meters high, and they start right away with the annexation of the surrounding terrain.
The machine could turn the earth, but unfortunately there’s no pull-roots-from-the-ground machine. (Isn’t that a nice challenge for Elon Musk? More useful than moving people to Mars!)
I regularly stand with my back to the newly acquired view
Not because I’ve got eyes in my back, or because this heavily infested part of the body can see how gorgeous it looks, but because it’s the side of the sun. I bend over once, stay like that and chop all the clay clumps, grab a bunch of roots, chop and shake the earth out, and throw the rest on a big pile. To burn later. Ha! Sweet revenge!
You just become barbaric
But we’re already almost done. And it will be beautiful! Anyway the view is great. The archery track has a protected spectator’s place. So you can see that your child or your partner is a future Legolas, or a Robin Hood, or a Wilhelm Tell.
Now, for starters, we will be shooting at the target. Apples on heads is more for the advanced.
Of course you can’t just start shooting around. You can only do this by appointment, under supervision, and if you’re at least 20 centimeters higher than the arch.
We will continue with the petanque track. Next goal: the minigolf course.