Tomatoes and other plantish things

Well, eight days have come gone since Tammex with their promised 3 day delivery got my money. I guess that's a lesson to me. I hope anyone else buying software or anything else to do with computers reading this picks another company to save you from learning the same lesson. Posting my daily bit has been a lot more awkward as a result, which as it hasn't been the wild week of excitement is not the end of my world. I have cooked up 5kg of tomato pulp - call it 8kg to start with, as I got rid of the skins and the juice. Life's little lessons: grow bigger tomatoes. The Stupice have done very well and are a lovely tomato, but there are a lot of them in 1kg, to slit skin and seed. The roma shape ones I have are actually more rewarding because they've got a good pulp to seed ratio. They also dry beautifully, with a sweetness and tartness balance. Oddly the little rubbish-for-salad pear shaped yellow coctail tomatoes are next best. Their texture isn't great fresh, but they dry well. We're supposed to get rain today, and if it happens, I will have to get some winter planting done. The island's downside (which is also an upside) is that sitting in a great big radiator - the sea all around us, our temperatures are skewed - we warm up later, and cool off later. Unfortunately no-one told the day length or the solar input. So you have very confused plants and now in autumn when they ought be being hoiked out to make way for the winter planting summer crops limp on, producing - my zucchini - just enough that it worth keeping them on, despite the straggly plant taking too much space.

Am bitterly regretting the day I did business with Tammex. They're now saying Friday. So much for their three day delivery promise. If you do decide to buy any software, choose another company, any other company.

I thus had another frustrating day today. Anyway, more little bits got done. Hopefully tomorrow will be better. I have lots of tomatoes to process.

Short cuts

Make long delays... I was hoping to get a tow-bar and hitch, finally on the Blue Slug today. It's been a process that's been onging for about 6 months. I had found one on a wreck and with a lot of bad language and a hydraulic jack and a scissor jack and crowbar and a pipe extender, and a hacksaw blade in a gap too narrow for a hacksaw ripped it off its frozen bolts. Only it was too wide. No worries we will cut a section out of it, and Jamie will weld it together for me (my welding skills are of the porcupine variety, and his quite good. And I don't own a welder. One day... - a long way down the list.) Only... um somewhere down the line we lost 12 mm. I am innocent -although it could have normally been me, but I just cut on the marks. And now we need to put in 6mm each side, around the pipe that we're putting down the middle. And that needed a 'something else' welder to do well, and Jamie was out of gas. So the project is a bit further, but not there. Anyway, hopefully soon I will have a tow bar, get the electrics sorted, and the trailer I scavenged can go toward getting done. I found suitable 'mud-guards' - blue drum sections, I have LED lights, I have reflectors, I have to drill two holes in the tow hitch so I can put bolts and a safety chain onto it, then get the trailer registered and then all I need is a decent motor for the Zoo, and we're done with that project. It's been about 14 months, of scavenging and finding bits, and getting stuff done in spare moments. You can have cheap, or you can have fast, or you can have good... pick any two, but not three. The same is holding for the computer at the moment, where I have cheap and hopefully Okay if not good, but not fast. I'm not going to get my MS operating system bit from Tammex on Tuesday because they can't read. I did explain that Flinders Island has no to the door courier delivery, and asked them please to send Australia Post. Reading customer instructions is obviously too hard, so they sent me an e-mail - saying payment received as a header, same as the payment received one saying they need a street address. I didn't realize it wasn't the same e-mail and it took me a while to notice... and thus while I sent them the street address and a blistering rocket, I am sure they won't dispatch until Tuesday (Monday was a public holiday). Probably - because they don't seem too bright, by courier. Which means it will take longer.

We got three drops of rain today. I mean 3 drops. Shared equally across the island... the drought here is getting serious.