Its been 3 weeks since I last did a post which was a week after the photo left was taken.
Calum is on the digger and Craig whose house I start to build in September is standing in what will be the bottom of Calum’s new fish pond.
Around the pond will be a new deck covered with hardwood decking.
The pond is 500mm into the ground and as you can see from the next photo it will be 500 above the ground too making it a meter deep.
The three of us have been working two day’s a week on the project.
After the hole was dug out we prepared the base with steel mesh and starter rod’s for the walls in 100mm of concrete for the floor and then in the photo above we started to shutter the sides on top of the floor.
First we concreted up to 50mm above the ground with a 200mm thick wall and then when that had gone off we built the outside shutters to the finish wall height.
The photo left I took today after we had stripped the shutters yesterday and cleared the area ready to lay the joists for the decking, the above wall is 150mm thick which leaves a 50mm thick plinth 50mm above ground level for the decking joist’s to sit on.
Laying the joist’s will be the job for the two days work this week coming.
Calum mixed all the concrete and Craig barrowed it into place for me to finish off, we also did all the 200 wide x150mm deep footings around the area to take the joist’s at required spacing’s.
While we were doing all the work, in two of the tree’s, one at the far end of the pond in the photo right Andrea Calum’s wife had put sugar water feeders for the birds during the winter and as I said in a earlier post the Tui’s have been coming in numbers for the first time this winter, occasionally we had one or two but not very often, this winter we have seen as many as 11 here at one time and mostly there are 9 and they don’t seem to mid us being around, they love the sugar water, photo right.
The Bell birds and silver eye’s also feed with the Tui’s and they take it in turns to feed without any aggression which is interesting.
That’s the work section and the play time has not been that GR8 the last two weeks, I did ski 9 times over the last 4 weeks which is just under the required 3 day ski week.
Only 3 powder days and one touring day. Its very different from ski-in BC, in Canada.
The last two weeks we’ve had a lot of bad vis day’s too (miss the tree’s).
Photo above is of course on one of the epic day’s we do have, it was on the way home after ski-in some of the mountains in the photo across the beautiful calm lake Wanaka at Glendu Bay.
The second mountain from the right (above photo) in the shade is Treble Cone where we ski and the lower sunny ridge to the left of that is where I’m walking in the photo above to the top of the shady section at the end of that sunny area and Derek and I skied down the other side to the valley floor and hiked up to the Saddle lift which takes 45 min’s.
The saddle is on the left of the ridge in the photo where I’m hiking and the Home Basin is to the right.
We are on our way to our 2nd run of the day ski-in the back country around Treble Cone.
Photo left is me coming down the top section of the run, the snow was very nice here about 10cm deep on top of a firm wind packed base.
It was like that till we got to the steeper section about a quarter of the way down and the lower section which you can see in the photo below with me standing on the valley floor was a bit wind affected and on the edge of the shallow gullies was about the best parts to ski, there was also small balls of debris snow under the fresh snow, they were like small obsticals to ski around.
The last week we had a good top up each day of fresh snow given us about 30cm of new snow over the week, but the viz has been very bad, I did ski on Tuesday and only had 4 runs where the viz was good and it was wet snow so I got quite wet and spent two hours of the day in the base lodge drying out 🙂
