Brett Writes!

The garden progressed nicely. I demolished the hill of dirt, and started eating into another. Sue marked out circles for garden beds according to a permaculture design, with the middle one becoming a frog-pond.

Photographed this lovely kangaroo paw beside the sand-track on our place the other day. First time I’ve seen the splayed “paws”.

Click ye to make it larger.

This is an intermediate photograph, showing the reduction in the hill, and the spread of the topsoil 13 days later.

While I was doing this, we constructed a compost bin out of shed leftovers (a very smart Manor Red sides with Wilderness Green posts), and Sue made compost with cut grass/weeds and horse manure. You can see our scythe resting in front of them.

I’ve been using the scythe lately to mow between the trees in windbreak — hard work but fun.

Having built the shed, and waiting while we developed the house plans, we decided to put in a vegetable garden. Behind the watertank was a gentle north-facing slope of empty land, perfect position for a garden. The photo below was taken from a very large pile of stockpiled topsoil scraped off the house site and driveway.

And here’s me standing on top of it, with a post-hole shovel and a mattock (the latter proved unnecessary).

The object of the next few weeks was to redistribute that pile over the garden area. This was actually a lot of fun! It’s not mentally challenging to dig and wheelbarrow, so my iPod helped immeasurably, and I listened to a lot of Sapphire & Steel and Doctor Who audio dramas, as well as a few informative podcasts (mostly from the ABC). Also, it’s very good exercise!

The inside of the shed after the roof went on (left) and what it looks like today …

Part of the reason it’s so crowded (aside from the airing horse-rugs) is that we have our 2nd-hand kitchen stored there …

It’s been quite a while since I posted anything here. I’ll be putting up some photos and updates over the next few days and weeks, and see if I can keep it a bit more consistent in future. Anyway, here’s a photo of the finished shed and water-tank:

This is view is from the West, looking roughly East. We’ve put woodchips around the shed and tank, which (a) help prevent erosion and (b) look nicer than sand.

We’ve been building our first permanent structure on the site, a shed, which is about 3.something meters high at the apex, and the walls are 2.something meters. A couple of photos of us working on it, and various stages of construction …

The shed structure on Saturday Evening

Me fixing the roof batten to the end frame, quite high up!

Me, fixing the roof batten to the end frame, with one of those ratcheting socket spanner doohicky things.

Partially clad shed. We managed to do the entire face, and half of the opposite face.

Some fun for Hallowe’en this year … to start with, we were invited to a costume party on the Saturday night, so I went as a Nazgul! We hired a robe, cloak and sword (samurai, but a decent replica with a nice feel to it). The leather gloves were mine (used for a 19 Nocturne Boulevard cover last year), and I covered my face with a balaclava. Sue then convinced me to get on her horse on our block and she took pictures….

(I photoshopped that picture as it was a sunny day with very little of the medieval gloom of Middle Earth during the War of the Ring; I also removed the fences and added a tower ). Didn’t actually ride the horse anywhere (other than in a very small circle), and the reason it actually looks alert rather than bored is that behind me are some emu’s … and he hasn’t quite gotten used to emu’s yet.

And we carved a pumpkin …

Which Sue turned into a delicious pumpkin soup. Sue dressed up as a witch, in an elegant black velvet celtic/medieval gown, a pointy hat and red shoes. Very witchy!

Both of us were suffering from hayfever, which took a little edge off the fun.

The cover for the 19 Nocturne Boulevard episode SNAFU. SNAFU is a claustrophobic military story in the tradition of ALIENS. It’s nice to get a good solid science fiction story to illustrate occasionally. The spaceship corridor was constructed and rendered in Blender 2.5. I was a little tight for time on this one, so I didn’t get much of a chance to give the soldier some more futuristic gear, but it visually sells the story.

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The cover for the 19 Nocturne Boulevard episode B&B Investigations: The Naked Truth. This is another in the series of Fairy-Tale/Detective/Noir tales, following on from the earlier entry Cry Wolf. Time constraints meant that this had to be a simple cover, so Julie found a lovely image of some film reels since the episode centers on the movie business. With the title of the show, and the name on the cans, you should be able to work out what it’s referencing . I treated the photograph with the same lighting as the artwork for the earlier entry

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