“It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound. ” Thomas Hardy.

Since the rains came I haven't seen much of our tall neighbors,

but Sunday morning on the back way into Nairobi I saw about a dozen of them headed to church.

Monday we started working on the pathways that will connect most of the buildings on the property.

We plot them out, set out strings 40" apart, make the curves we want, and then round them out in chalk the lines for the guys to follow.

This is quarry dust. More about that in a minute.

Fitting the mazerra stones together is the easy pat. Making the stones completely stable is the hard part.

We've decided not to use mortar between the stones on the paths. We used it for the three patio spaces and there are already some cracks in it.

This will require a little maintenance, but it's a much better method.

The guys stay ahead of the masons, digging the trenches and filling in the murram.

 

We put river sand between the stones and compact it with flat sticks. We'll have to add sand a couple of times a year, but that's no real problem.

Soon enough we had the beginnings of some gently curving pathways.

 

Ben jamming quarry dust under the side of one of the stones.

 

The main electrical panel box in the generator house. George installed it and will hook up all the armored cable strands we buried to it,and eventually the grid power cable too.

Th other wall of the house. Lovely in a family mausoleum kind of way.

Japolo our foreman for this job, playing drafts (checkers) with Juma, the mason.

I can't see who's at Joyce's now when I drive home. The maize is too tall. For the first time in three years. But I did find Agnes and the girls coming down the path to say howdy.

Nduko, Josephine and Ani. They are eating a divided up roasted ear of maize. Looks like our corn on the cob, but is about ten times chewier. Takes some dedication.

 

They decided goofy faces would be a nice touch.

This man and his donkey cart deliver water around the area. We have become waving friends in our frequent passings.

Day Two in the Trenches:

The first junction of our boulevard and an arterial.

You can see here the excavated black soil trench, although this will be cleaned up and the edges sharpened before we fill it with murram (the brown dirt here). The quarry dust is on top.

We had our system figured out today, and the masons were on a pretty good roll.

 

Benson has become the stone trimmer. He scores it where he wants it to break,

and then fairly gently whacks it with a triangular shaped hammer along the line until it breaks off.

On the boulevard, we use the biggest stones set sideways. It's broad shouldered.

We use smaller stones set together for some of the others.

And, in case you were wondering where Eskimo cyber geeks get their tech needs met in Nairobi, you can rest easy now.

We hope these pathways will serve contemplative as well as collegial moods.

Less talk. More rock(s).

David

Posted on May 11th, 2010 by david
Filed under: Recent News | 17 Comments »

Hello,

.

I hope your Cinco de Mayo was all you hoped it would be. Ours was, guacamole and all. Lots has happened in your hemisphere. The Chief and Karen got married, Tom turned sixty, and some other very important stuff that is still classified. Here we have marked our progress in dug and filled trenches, workshop walls and armored cable.

.

Here’s part one, looking over its shoulder at part two.

.

Morning in Nairobi. Mr S making sure the perimeter is secure.

We're burying armored electrical cables in the trenches we dug. They are very expensive. In order to secure them people put concrete pavers over them in the ditch, or, there are hard plastic protectors you can buy at 255 shillings per meter. We have 450 meters of buried cable. So I came up with the idea to buy relatively inexpensive PVC pipe, cut it in half and and lay it six inches or so above the cable as a protector/warning system to anyone who might be digging where the cable is in the future. Costs about 40 shillings a meter. So I went to Eslon Plastics in the industrial area and got 40 pieces of six meter 2" class B pipe. I'll let you know how it works out.

Down the road, a guy pulling a cart full of cases of soda got whacked by a car. These are human powered metal frame carts that haul all sorts of goods around Nairobi, usually in heavy traffic areas. They are in the metal frame pulling and so get badly injured when when they get hit.

 

This guy was on the ground surrounded by the people you see in the right of this photo.

I went to Ian and Jane's lumber and furniture making shop in Kitengela and had the pipes cut in half lengthwise on their band saw. These two delicate smoke stacks caught my eye behind their place.

This is mahogany saw dust. My, my.

These luminous particles in the air made me think of wood sprites. Like the British kids who faked everybody out with their fairy photos in more innocent times

Sometimes they were everywhere.

George improvised a fence and began the long bifurcation.

Lots of people had a hand in it.

it took about a minute and forty five second for each pipe.

The lumber library, complete with at least one adult title, evidently.

Patterns.

A very short man from Mombasa who carves by hand.

Doors and bed posts and other things.

We bundled up the eighty pieces and tied them on the roof of the truck.

They kept slipping and nearly falling all the way back home.

I was cheered by these familiar faces near our place. Ani, Josephine, Nduko.

And, of course, Joyce,

who had gathered a certain kind of eucalyptus leaves to treat a skin eruption on Ani's scalp.

.

So long for now,

.

David

Posted on May 5th, 2010 by david
Filed under: Prayer Request | 2 Comments »