Monday 10th August

I’m trying to stay enthused, today I gave up about 1pm and went shopping instead. Didn’t buy anything, just wandered around Honiara for a couple of hours wondering what I’m doing here. Until all the political stuff gets sorted with Forestry/Council and SEB and our finances improve there’s not a lot happening. 6 months of promises and will do, and still no further ahead.

I had another look at the site in Ranandi, it’s small, there will be all sorts of problems with it, from water supply to access, and there is no room to expand. As Chie said last week, Japan has poured a lot of money into SEB and the Botanic Gardens already, if we have to move, the funding will stop. They are quite happy to continue expanding the exisiting Nursey, it is what they see as a benefit to everyone, training, improvements to the Gardens, if we leave, all the money they have given so far is just lost.

It is rather frustrating.

Rose sent me a large food parcel, chocolate, biscuits, pringles, yoghurt maker, and 2 packets of cigarettes. Nice thought, I appreciate it. The only trouble was Customs appreciated it more, and wanted $80 duty for the 2 packets of cigarettes, I can buy 4 packs for that so they kept them, probably gave them out to everyone working in Parcel Post at the Post Office as soon as I had gone. Thanks anyway Roses.

I haven’t had any new photos for a while, put it down to the loss of enthusiasm and general despondency. I’ve got another touch of Malaria by the feel of it, slight fever, chills and sweating, along with a general rundown feeling. If I’m still feeling as grotty by Wednesday I’ll go back to the clinic, although all they do is give me a higher dose of Doxycycline for a few days to kill the infection, then it is back to normal. I’ll try to weather this one out.

I downloaded a trial programme from Nikon for the D60, Capture 2, it enables the camera to run from a computer. So far I can’t see that it is worth paying for, there isn’t anything spectacular about it, other than being able to run a longer time delay or sequence through the computer. I don’t know what price Nikon want for it, I’ll keep looking and playing with the trial for another couple of weeks, but the initial feeling is it isn’t worth paying for.

Young Andrew has moved to his Aunts place near Ranandi, I wondered why he was so late to work this morning. All the buses have cut their routes, and now stop at Central Market, so if like Andrew you live on the east side of town and want to go to White River, Rove, you have to change buses and pay again. He was waiting for an hour for a Rove bus to come past, before someone told him they stopped doing direct routes. I’m picking him up in the mornings from now on, 7am at Ranandi so he can get to work on time and stop worrying.

Dorise turned up again today. She didn’t take the job at GGPOL on the oil palm farm after the office got burned down in the land dispute a week ago, and shes applied to the NZ High Comission for the gardeners position. In the meantime she wants to come back with SEB again. I’d like to take her back, but with the slack workload we’re having trouble finding enough work for everyone for 3 days, let alone adding Dorise back. Add that to the list of frustrations.

One bright spot is that we are getting a good market for our growing mix, the wood chip and chicken manure compost. The bad bit is finding enough chicken manure now to keep the compost turning over quickly. A couple of weeks ago it looked as though we’d have a good supply, now it isn’t near enough already. We sell it at $20 for a halffull rubbish bag, and we have repeat orders continuously, so it must be working. I know it works in the nursery, getting a market for it outside is a bonus. We have close to 5 cu.m of wood chip waiting for manure to mix with it now, hopefully we can get a load tomorrow, and get another heap going. I’m always amazed at how quickly it rots down here, the constant 30C temp and humidity help, 2 weeks and it’s ready for the mulcher.