Friday 10th July

You’ll have to trust me on this one. Please don’t use sharp pointed knives to prise out coconut meat from the shells, you will injure yourself. I’ve just put 3 stitches into my thumb with the aid of a few ice cubes to numb it, and the suture kit from the Travel Medic Kit. Luckily it was my left thumb, I don’t think I’d have done such a neat job working left handed for stitching.

I was going to mop the floor off, but as the water supply has died for the night, I’ll have to wait till the morning. I did quite a nice job of it, the bleeding has stopped, well, it did once the last stitch went in, it took a while to get to the stitched stage though.

And no, I didn’t go to the hospital, despite all the overseas Doctors doing the surgery there. If it is that serious it needs hospital, I’ll fly out to Brisbane.

On my shopping list for tomorrow, a coconut scraper and a thin steel round edged flexible knife, or similar.

We’ve got the timber for the truck, beautiful timber, $1073 worth, about NZ$200. We’ll strip the rusted tray off Monday and start building the timber deck. With 3 of us working on it it should be finished Monday night. Although this is the Solomons, and something is bound to go wrong, or be missing.

I’m still playing with spreadsheet for dummies, I know what I want it to do, it’s just trying to get it to do what I want is the frustrating part. I may have to load excel from the work disc and try that, it’s got a lot more command capabilities. Especially when it comes to *if,then* commands.

I’m trying to write up a spreadsheet that will calculate the wages, then deduct from the monthly and yearly balance so we know exactly where we are at any point. Which means having job numbers, etc. I’ve got the bank accounts working so the totals adjust automatically for each variable, setting up the wages side is ok as well, trying to marry the two together is proving a bit harder. I have it written out on a piece of A3 and it looks terrific on paper. I’m regretting starting it already. Getting the job numbers and *if this then do* this commands are proving to be a slight problem as above.

David is having 3 weeks off, and going bush for a week to cut the timber to finish his house off. He has wantok with some land with suitable trees on to use, so he’s stocked up with a 25kg bag of flour, 25kg bag of rice, 2 cartons of noodles, 1 carton of tinned tuna and 10kg of sugar. Which he thinks should be enough to feed his wantok while he cuts the trees.

His Grandmother arrived from Rennel today, the first time she has been off Rennel in her life. I think she is towards the end of her journey, even David thinks so, which is why she’s making the trip to see all her family. David took her to Frangipani Ice, the Ice cream shop in Honiara, and she had her first milk shake and ice cream. David had to carry her in, she can barely walk, and he said her eyes were popping out of her head as she got involved with ice cream and milkshakes for the first time in her long life.

If anyone opens google earth and looks at Honiara, I’ve loaded some pictures into there. And Savo Island as well. I’ll load more over the weekend if I get into work Sunday.

If anyone has read “Salmon fishing in Yemen” that is so similar to the position I am in here. I may edit this lot down when I’m finished and call it “2000 trees for the Islands” Or something, Well, edit and expand, this is more a series of disconnected notes rather than a script.

There have been a few articles in the Solomon Star this week about attracting businesses to Honiara. I’m a bit sceptical, as you may have noticed, about the idea. If my experience with trying to connect online with my bank in New Zealand is anything to go by, there are a few problems still to be sorted out.

The connection here is so slow, I kept timing out while logging in, after 3 attempts, Kiwibank froze the account, and the message said to phone their help desk and set up a new password etc. This is in the same week that Telekom here moved to charge per second for all calls. They touted it as a huge cost reduction, till you read the fine print, and they start charging as soon as the connection is made, not when the other end picks up, so going by the normal help desk time lag in answering, I’d be up for a few hundred dollars at $10 per minute by the time it was sorted. Sister to the rescue again hopefully.

I’d hate to be trying to run a business here, and relying on electricity, water, tele-communications etc.

It’s been a scrappy day here, (Saturday). My thumb is throbbing and letting me know it is still there, I’ve changed the dressings and it looks ok, terrific bruising though. I took all the books back to Nautilis this morning, and got the last 2 Neville Shute books I hadn’t read yet. His first two books written in the 1930’s, What happened to the Corbbets, and Lonely Road. Both set in England, good stories, but not as good as his later ones when he began writing more Australian based books. Beyond the Black Stump and A Town called Alice, and The Far Country. I read them all years ago in school, and occasionally since.

I have to bake another fruit loaf tomorrow for Tiffany, well, for her daughters anyway. They demolished a whole loaf last Sunday when I sent one around, and the same with the coconut loaf. Gorgeous girls, I call them Trouble and Mischief, Trouble is Renee, about 9 going on 14, Mischief is Tessie, she’s only just 4.

Our first real rain this afternoon in 3 weeks, about 4 hours of it pounding on the roof, which is good. We can’t count on it anymore now.