fence building in Obule

This week Colin worked to get a fence put up around some land we are buying.  The goal is to one day build a home on the land and live in the village permanently.  But first things first.  We need a fence to keep unwanted animals out, our animals in, and to keep Silas from wandering off too far.  So we have been busy fence building.  Colin's fence building experience this past week is not quite what fence building at Dry Hollow or at the Sonora experiment station is.  Here we don't use pipe for fence posts, instead you use angle iron.  Here you don't buy sakrete and cement in the posts, instead you order a dump truck load of sand, a dump truck load of gravel, and a pickup load of cement, mix it up and transport it one wheelbarrow load at a time to the holes located around the property.  Colin was able to hire some guys to help mix the cement and set the posts and he was able to concentrate mostly on welding everything together.  It has been a pretty fun experience for the guys.  The clearing of the brush around the perimeter so we could even get started was the biggest chore.  Colin loves clearing brush.  He admitted to me the other day that he often finds himself daydreaming about clearing brush.  He says that as he drives down the road (whether here or back in Texas) he looks out the windows at the fields and visualizes what they would look like with all the underbrush cut away, or what it would look like after a good hot burn.  He loves clearing brush - all of it - burning it, using a machete, cutting it with a chainsaw, using heavy machinery, etc.  So the brush clearing portion of the fence building was especially gratifying for Colin as he got to spend several days wielding a machete chopping away brush and sculpting our property.  The fence is far from being completed, but at least we now have posts in the ground, we can see boundaries (property boundaries, usually fences, are something we all have in the U.S. but here you just know without there being any definite marker) so we know where our property starts and the rest of the village begins.  The fence is not really for security, but mainly so we have something that is our own that we can begin to improve.  I realize in the grand scheme of things a fence is not all that important, but it's important to us.

our fence going up

posts getting cemented in

Colin and Rose "mowing the yard".  Mowing is done by slashing the grass with a slasher or a "wing-ding" if you grew up in the Rosser family

Dan and Rose's children after helping to slash an area of our proeprty.  Dan and Rose will be our closest neighbors.