Morning all,
Another hot a sunny day here believe it or not.
Up to 48.7 degrees as I type this, and seems overcast but is fine actually dust in the air blown off the streets and the surrounding desert.
We’ve been unable to do our big pour on Saturday as planned due to a lack of planning/listening on the part of the contractor. Once again, he doesn’t have enough cement and gravel in place so we have postponed the pour till he has.
We’ve continued with walls and other pads in the abattoir area and have done around 8m3 yesterday.
Drainage progresses well with as builts done for line 1 which is being backfilled and Line 2 is also now in and should be finished off today (Sunday) or tomorrow.
Our stockpile of laterite continues to grow, and we have now started backfilling around the coldstore pads and along the wall sections which are now complete.
Next week, we will start digging out the area under the blastfreezers and then backfilling the whole coldstore area to bring it up to underside of floor level.
By the time the chippies arrive on Sunday morning, we will hopefully be suitably advanced that they can then start on the upstands in the blast freezers and other nibs around the place.
Our client left us last night to go back to Morocco for, among other things, Physio on his hand following an operation he had a few weeks ago. He’ll be back in 10-15 days.
He is also going to look at buying some more, larger concrete mixers and I will see if we can buy the ones our contractor has been using though I don’t think he’ll like the price I’ll be offering.
We’re having a few issues now with synchronising our computers.
Dave’s is still not synching anything and mine and Johns have been unable to do a full synch for a couple for weeks.
The main problem I think is the sheer volume of changed files. Mainly photos and QA stuff from this end, and drawings/contracts plus Ralph’s various bits and pieces from that end.
Added to this is the fact that the wireless keeps dropping out on its own fairly regularly and if that’s not happening then the power is also intermittent so the laptop’s get part way through a synch and are then interrupted or stopped.
They then have to re-start from the beginning again, and of course the longer it goes without having done a complete synch, the longer it takes to do one and the more chance of dropping out mid way.
We are certainly appreciating having the car available to us now. It makes simple things so much easier. Whereas before if we wanted to go somewhere after hours we would have to call our driver.
He’d then have to walk from his house to the clients house, about 20 minutes, to collect the car and then come and pick us up.
Now, we just hop in and off we go.
On Friday night as the highlight of the week, we went to the Hotel Gawaye to the infamous bar.
And for the curious among you, no, Wag’s favourite girl wasn’t there.
In fact none of the whores were on duty at the time.
They have now installed a pool table where we always used to sit so maybe there’s no longer room for them
Whilst having a pleasant beer or two, John Dave and I popped over the corridor for haircuts with our favourite Lebanese hairdresser.
Well, I say favourite, she’s actually the only one we’ve been to and she is, truth be told, quite rough.
And in fact a bit shit at cutting hair as well.
Having said that, she’s still better than John’s efforts to cut his own hair.
Stan and Lindsay pointed out afterwards, with great amusement that we’d just paid well over $20 bucks each for a buzz cut.
Or the equivalent of 10 labourers for a day’s work on our wages or 17 labourers on the contractors wages.
Their amusement was heightened further when we pulled over next to a barber shop near the villa to be told we could have had a cut with them for about $3.50.
It’s a heady and exciting corporate life we lead over here I can tell you.
That’s it for now,
Bon weekend,
Me
