I was waiting to talk to Ross as soon as he got up - so first of all I had a good look at what he had been doing. He had just spent the last two days with his earth moving equipment tidying up piles of overburden

It looked so much better and this motivated me to tidy up some tat near the pile of slabs. I loaded pine needles, aggregate and bamboo rhizomes on to the back of the utility.

I was not feeling too well today - an incision to remove a dodgy bit of skin had become infected so I was on antibiotics, which always leave me a bit woozy.

Consequently I was feeling very unmotivated. I would have preferred to spend the day sitting in a cafe reading the paper.

Fortunately, Ross turned up, was quite keen and told me what I should be doing.

He had been thinking about how I should organise the materials on the plateau of boral quarry dust so that he could get to everything and start on his work.

We had some very productive chat about where everything should, what he would do in the next few days, and what I should do.

He even lent me an ingenious simple device called a slab lifter that takes most of the back breaking work out of laying slabs.

Right at the back door is a newly levelled section of ground. The top priority was to slab this so that materials could be moved on it.

I didn't go to a lot of trouble to set up a precise level - just plonked the slabs down.

They are a little bit up and down but this will be fine for the moment.

I had to do a temporary repair on the sewer line until the plumber gets here.

I found a break in the 100 mm pipe between the brick paving at the back door and the main ecomax tank.

At first I thought that Ross had done it with his work yesterday but as he pointed out - the broken edges were quite old and discoloured. Plus he said that merely running over a pipe would not produce that damage pattern - ie a small section punched out.

Then I realised it was most likely from the the hydraulic stabilising rams of the cherry picker when the pine tree was brought down over a year ago.

Fortunately, my plumber had set up the connection to the temporary outside toilet so that it was connected via a repair kit. This just needed to be removed and an inspection fitting glued on instead.

I was then able to move the repair kit across to the broken section. The repair kit itself has a crack in it - so this is just a temporary fix until the plumber gets here and does it properly.

My main concern was just to stop sand washing in to the ecomax tank.

When I cut out the broken section I had a close look at the sand deposit inside it - it looked like just a small accumulation immediately under the break and nothing else - so no problem.

Sunday

I told Linda about a small fig tree we had in a pot at the back door.

Ross had needed to move this out of the way and in the process had to break some small fibrous roots coming out the bottom of the pot.

By the time I saw it on Saturday all its leaves were dry and withered.

In my mind I had written it off but Linda believed that it had a good chance of surviving.

At the same time I realised that I could plant it part way up the slope towards Ian's garage and it might eventually shade our back door if it survived (very hot there at the moment after we removed the dead pine trees).

When we turned up we were pleased to see that Ross was working on the yard with his BobCat.

So apart from me having to dig a hole in to the slope, all the hard lifting was done by machine.