it’s school holidays in tassie and we spent the first week in hobart. and when i say school holidays i mean natalie has two weeks off, i on the other hand don’t – i was attending (zoom) lectures learning about statistics using the ‘r’ package; pretty cool stuff but full on, especially since i haven’t really used statistics for the last few … decades.

we still had time to scout out the north-south track, which is supposedly a shared walking / biking trail, but i think walkers would very quickly become discouraged by all the riders bombing down the trail at a thousand miles an hour – you can only hurl yourself into the bushes so many times before you give up and go hike somewhere else.

the trail is actually fun to ride: from half way up kunanyi (mt wellington) it leads through temperate rain forest across slippery rocks and roots before dropping down into open eucaypt forest, where the trails are faster but also rougher & rockier. not bad, i think we’ll do it again some time.

back home my key objective was to finalise the water installation: before we went we buried the pipes that hook up the tanks and run back to the taps – now i had to connect it all, and install the pump, the valves and the taps.

the connections at the pump were a little complicated: i needed valves on the incoming and outgoing lines to be able to isolate the pump if required (eg to service / replace it) but i also needed to insert a t-junction where the line that will eventually lead to the house and possibly the veggie garden branches off (and that one needed a valve, too, so i can make sure water doesn’t go that way unless there is something on the other end).

that complicated structure turned out better than i had hoped, it all fell into place nicely. i had to tighten up a few joins after the pressure test but i think it’s mostly leak-proof now.

there is one more thing left (you can see it in the photo): the electric connection to the pump isn’t quite up to safety (and beauty) standards. i’ll run a lead to the power point on the shed wall and install a waterproof sub-point in the pump house. next time.