I'm pooped!

It's Saturday night and we've just finished an exhausting 3 day session of making CEBs (Compressed Earth Blocks). We're on a new WWOOFing gig in Chidlow WA, which is about 50km east of Perth. Our wonderful tour of the South Western coast of Australia came to an end when the rains came. It was bound to happen. We got as far east as Bremer Bay after stops in Denmark (very cute town and surrounding area) and Albany (less cute and crappy weather not to mention expensive fries and beer). We headed north through the Stirling "Mountain" range with hopes of doing some hiking but the weather just didn't cooperate and it kept raining, blowing and effing freezing (or so it felt after all of our recent beach time).

We're here with a family of 4. Bill, Denise, Jesse and Joshua (and Rocky the dog Barbara's new best friend after their walk to the post office today). They have 20 acres on which they're building an Adobe/Santa Fe style home. Bill is from the US where he met Denise (from Oz) many years ago and they lived in New Mexico for years and loved the Adobe building style. The walls are about 2/3s done. You can check out their site and a webcam of us working at http://www.adobero.ww.com/. We're 14 hours ahead of Calgary and 6 ahead of Switzerland so if you just see black, we're sawing logs. If you don't see anything happening we're either on Tea or Siesta. If you see us working, consider yourselves lucky.

We arrived here on Monday night (April 21st) and had 2 rainy days during which we sat around in our caravan (its the one on the left in the picture) and basked in the glory of our dual laptops. They're a little old so I'll have to straighten out the photo albums later and hopefully I can get a few videos uploaded. You'll be glad to know that our caravan is fairly clean so Baebs isn't sleeping in ALL of her clothes, just some.

Once the sun broke through, we got busy and started making compressed earth blocks. Baebs and I alternated between being up on the loading platform from where the clay, sand, cement and water mixture was loaded by the Bobcat to be moved into the CEB maker. The mixture is then smushed to 3000psi, quality inspected by Denise, and then rolled down rollers to one of us to be loaded onto pallets. This second person also had the task of running to open and empty cement bags into the Bobcat, receive the completed blocks at the house and stack them accordingly. It was fairly demanding work and it felt great to be moving our bodies and doing hard work and to be helping out this very nice family.

Since our hosts borrow the Bobcat from their neighbour, we didn't always have full days of brickmaking, but over the 3 days we pumped out 32 pallets of blocks (roughly 2000 blocks each weighing about 5 kilos). It was so great to fall into bed at night tired from all of the work.

We have breakfast in our caravan but share lunch, coffee breaks and dinners with the family. Baebs and I have cooked a Lasagna thus far and have designs on a few more meals before we head out.

The next step is laying all of these blocks which we hope to get to tomorrow. We'll follow up with more details then.

Oh, my Dad will be pleased to know that I was a huge help in the clay sifting process. All my hours of practice paid off. I'll bring home the blueprints for the sifting machine, but if you can assemble the following items in the meantime, we can hit the ground running:
-plywood
-old bed frame & mesh
-washing machine motor
-Bobcat

Ta for now,
Jason & Baebs