It’s been a wee while since I updated my blog, so here goes 😉 We covered the drilling of the well in the last entry. Since the we’ve had the pump installed. It has a temporary electrical connection and we just run out the garden hose when we want to fill up our cistern. We don’t see any point in doing anything more permanent at the moment, not until we are ready to do the water connection to the house. We’ve also had the electrical inspection on the barn passed. There was a lot of hard work there, as because the ground was so rocky we couldn’t get the required 18″ below grade that was required and we had to dig a lot of it out to cover it with concrete. Still, thats done now and “signed off”. We had the annual meeting of the property owners association. A little bit of a hoopla there, as about a week before the meeting we received a letter from the Board illegally suspending our voting privileges. They do have the right to suspend our voting privileges, but there is a procedure set out in the by-laws to do so, which they did not follow, never mind the fact that the reason they stated for doing so was baseless. So our attorney sent them a letter (again) and we went to the meeting anyway and had our say on a number of point (much good will it do us, I’m sure) There was no visible reaction from the Board at our appearance, it was as if there was nothing going on. We are still waiting to hear from the Architectural Control Committee (the Board, by any other name) on our request to erect fencing to enclose a pasture. We did see one of the board members out having a look at our land from the road, so we know that they got the request. They have 30 days to respond to a request, after that you can assume that it’s okay (at least in theory) If we haven’t heard one way or another by the 8th of September we can go ahead with it. My own feeling is that, if they reply at all, especially if the answer is ‘no’, it will be at the last minute. I’ve been working on a new website to highlight the problems that we’ve had with the board which, once its completed, will be made public. One of the directors of the board sent out an email to all the property owners without hiding the recipient list, so I now have a list of all the property owners email addresses! After all that excitement, it was back to work for me. I had to return to Europe first, for two days of meetings and briefings in Amsterdam. Then we were off to Nigeria. The journey out was largely uneventful. The charter flight landed (as scheduled) somewhere in Algeria for refueling and that took longer than expected but was our only delay. On arrival in Nigeria immigration was handled quite quickly (I’ve had longer waits in the USA!) and once through immigration the local agents had the transportation well organised. What with the relatively large number of crew (84 on this change out) we had a convoy of six buses and four escort trucks to take us to the ferry port. From there we had two large ferry-boats to take us to the mobilisation base which is on an island for enhanced security. All in all it seemed like the anticipation was far worse than the event! On the ship, things were slow with the mobilisation, but hopefully now that we are finally out to the field we’ll make up a bit of time as we’re back into ‘what we do’. In someways it’s hard to believe that I’ve been gone from Colorado for 12 days already as we’ve hardly ‘done’ anything yet! And of course, in other ways it feels like I’ve been gone forever already. Crew change is penciled in for somewhere between the 19th and 22nd, but is going to be totally dependent on how things go and port calls.
