The initial concrete construction, piling hollow-blocks on top of each other and slapping on the finish was incredibly fast and very pleasing. But after that they built the more detailed wooden rafters and that’s when the bad weather hit us. December and january was quite painful to watch; quite slow progress and lots of very wet wood everywhere. Now that the roof is on (ok, almost) it’s full speed again and the big lump in my stomach is starting to digest.

We now have windows and doors, installed in just a few days, both bathrooms fully tiled, the kitchen and breakfast bar is rising up and many more quite big jobs have been taken care of just this one week! And now the sun is making a longed after appearance and I’m positively skipping with joy.

It looks like we’ll go over our (very) estimated budget with about 15% which is still within the pain threshold, ie. we will still be able to buy some furniture now but perhaps not all the toys I’ve planned just yet!

I’ve started telling people that we will move into the house at the end of this month, which was our very first original plan, the foreman was very sure it would be at the end of the previous month but due to bad weather it was changed. So all in all the project have run pretty much like I imagined it would from the very beginning. Not bad for an estimate picked out of the air by someone who really doesn’t know anything about building houses!

The only small worry we still have is if the garden will look ‘good enough’ for the wedding… the grass is on and the plants are there, but we’re not sure if the grass will look just right. Again, that is all because of the heavy rain we had, at least it was force majeure and not bad planning.

Now we just need a final mad rush, hopefully a couple weeks of decent weather and we should be all good!

During low season this event has turned into a family thing; Christy and me and a different variable of kids closely related to the family doing the same thing as above less the beer.

And now some kind of crazy mix is trying to happen and all parts are not quite yet happy with the results. We have several family members trying to keep the family thing going while way more long-time locals are quaffing beers in the sea…

Either way, beach life is here and it’s here to stay; there will be family members larging it around together with long-time scum every Sunday from here on, at least until early spring when said scum slink back to their regular dwellings…

Departing with pizza for girlfriend he left me with this comment: “I brought something with me here without knowing why; I think it might be for you.”

I’m not sure what it is but I already like it.

We’re now getting to the end of the first week of building our house. I’m amazed at each days progress and we’ve come to realise that some god or other must be smiling down on us since we have a plain fantastic view, specially from our bedroom. The foreman have told us that it will probably take even less time to finish it all than we actually hoped.

All in all a pretty cool first week.

A few days ago the foreman cautiously approached my fiancee to ask if she thought I would mind terribly if we could follow the old culture and make an offering to… I’m actually not sure, again some god or other. The offering required blood and it was suggested that we get a few goats and have big lunch all together, families and workers and whatnot.

I’m being very careful to never disturb any of my new family’s culture, be it Catholicism or belief in black magic; I just tag along and keep my opinions mostly to myself, if I would mind terribly I would say that I would not partake and let them to it. But as it happens I’m particularly fond of goat meat so of course I’m all in.

Deal sealed we sent out the word that we were in the goat buying business and soon had three cabritos tied to a tree happily eating grass and enjoying the great view.

Very early this morning some of the multiskilled workers sharpened their knives and soon the pots and pans were bubbling away, and several other lads were rounded up for sous chef duty.

Now we’re getting to the human part of this post; the seller of the goats was stabbed late last night by his own father who was upset that the goats were sold without the fathers permission! Daddy-o is now spending the weekend in jail…

Let’s finish off with those promised bald nuts:

After looking around for more than a month and just not finding quite that right one we finally hit paydirt; a cool thousand square meters that lies a few hundred meters from the sea in Talisay, a region just next to Panagsama for those who have been in the area before. It’s not final yet and I guess something could still turn up to throw the whole thing into the trash but at this moment it’s looking pretty good.

Tomorrow the surveyor will be around to mark out ‘our’ piece (we are buying only a part of the sellers land) and to make his life easier (and for us to be able to actually see the ground) we have spent today by pointing the local lads in the right direction to clear all the shrubbery away. The whole lot is pretty much solid limestone in different elevations but probably not more than a meter and a half from the bottom to the top.

This will be the view from our lounge, minus the crazy green growth:

In case you didn’t quite spot that smudge in the back, here is a better view:

Yes, we can see Pescador Island from any point on our lot! And to make things even better, this little fellow marks one corner of our small slice of paradise:

By wandering those few hundred meters mentioned above you will find yourself at this little fisherman-beach, perhaps not a dream sandy beach but still better than a kick in the nuts:

To celebrate our first day on ‘our’ lot (err, and to get some lunch into the hungry lads) we rustled up some proper filipino cuisine; rice and fish!

And through all this I was very happy to have my dear mother around to experience all this first-hand.

We are very much looking forward to seeing you all around in some six months when the house might be finished, more updates to follow!

We have a pretty solid routine where the kids stay at their grandmothers house on Friday and Saturday nights; they get to play with all the cousins, the grandparents get their share of sweetness and we get to go out and come home late. It’s a pretty win-win-win situation. And on top of that we should, theoretically, be allowed to sleep in on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

Today is Saturday and we had the other grandmother around at SIX THIRTY asking whatever the hell it was she was asking. And just after that we had our renegade chicken REALLY wanting to lay some eggs in the bbq in our back yard (it’s kind of blocked up with stuff and it’s her favourite egg-laying spot). She gets very noisy when she’s pacing around the yard trying to get into the bbq. Well, the eggs tasted great for breakfast and there is a very very high possibility that chicken will end up in the bbq for a completely different reason.

On weekday mornings it’s a competition between kids-getting-ready-for-school-not-wanting-something-or-other noise and the renegade chicken trying to wake us up. Or the chap selling bread with his really annoying horn on his motorbike. Or our maid furiously sweeping and mopping the floor. Or our neighbourhood karaoke place with the owner waking up around six in the morning and blasting the speakers clean from any debris that might have fallen during the night. Or our next-door neighbours playing Queen really early on weekends.

I think it’s time to buy a big pack of earplugs again…

We’ve made a deal that if I get to pull out his lose teeth then I’ll give him 100 peso, per tooth. If I just get to wiggle it around a bit and not actually pull it out he gets squat. He’s happy with the deal, and so am I! A few weeks ago we pulled out the first one and I’d say we are hours away from the second one…

Great weekend entertainment!

So I consider myself to be an at least half-decent handyman. If my brother is reading this I believe he just had a small attack of uncontrollable laughter since he’s been in the way of my skills in the past. He’s certainly a much much better handyman than myself, but still, I’m not bad.

The problems I have with DIY over here is my complete lack of tools and the complete lack of intelligent staff in the local hardware shop. If an item is called widget and I ask for a wodget with included explanations and excited waving of arms I have zero chance of getting them to understand that I am, after all, trying to purchase a widget. They seem to have an almost aggressive lack of imagination when it comes to understanding what I mean. I’ve left that place in a huff more than just a few times…

I am so looking forward to the day in the not-too-distant-future when I will start building a house, I’m sure that me and the staff in the shop will have many memorable moments together, let the insanity ensue!

We arrived in Coron a few days ago and straight away went up to the Rock Steady dive centre and had a few beers with the owners Karin and Gerd. My buddy tried to convince the guide that we should go for the more advanced wreck straight away, but my lack of wreck experience decided that we would start with the slightly less hairy ones, which was ok with me!

Our first dive was on the Kogyo Maru, a Japanese auxiliary supply ship, we entered through the rearmost cargo hold and straight away found some bullets and even a 50 caliber artillery shell! Slowly navigating through the wreck, trying as hard as possible to not kick up silt in the face of my buddy behind me but apparently failing quite miserably on that account… One highpoint of the dive is advancing on the bulldozer that is still strapped into it’s final transportation spot.

After a nice long surface interval we slipped into the water again, this time our target was the Morazan Maru, an auxiliary cargo ship, one of the most popular wrecks in Coron due to it’s rich marine life and relatively easy level. We did some pretty impressive acrobatics to enter the shower rooms, still perfectly tiled up, and our guide told us after the dive that he used this wreck as a test to see if we were ready to go out on the one we were really looking forward to; the Irako, a refrigeration ship to transport food.

The Irako is probably the most interesting wreck in the area, dubbed by a very experienced Divemaster to Triple-D; deep, dark and dangerous. And we are just about to enter through one of the more advanced entrances. After following my buddy through the propeller shaft we end up in the transmission room and then weaving our way between the massive gear cogs still left in place. We then move into the Bottle Room while our guide waits outside due to very heavy silt and an easily confused exit route.

Throughout all the dives we keep disturbing great big shoals of trevally that create big silvery walls that move and reflect our torchlight, for every breath we exhale there is a very unnerving creaking noise from the bubbles escaping over the rusty metal and our guide having a loudly humming exhalation sound just adds to the great ominous feelings you get from these deep and dark wrecks.

The second dive on the Irako we go through an extremely confusing labyrinth of corridors and storage rooms and my admiration for our guide grows by every silted out meter we travel through. At least now I know that I have no issues with wreckdiving; I can take the narrow compartments quite well and my finning technique is getting better for each dive (the finning will need some serious improvement still though!), the only real issue is to improve my breathing consumption to make the dives last a bit longer…

Four very very cool dives on the wrecks of Coron complete!

Ok, clicking around the bank website, trying to figure out if there’s anything at all I can do before calling them and finding out that there is a new way to log into my banking that doesn’t require the security device! Except that I need to log in using my security device to activate it first.

So I call them and talk to a few nice people in India; first one couldn’t do anything at all, second one locked my online banking altogether and threatened me with some pretty hairy security questions to turn it back on, third one I can’t remember, fourth one was pretty good and figured out a solution, fifth one was actually an English person and was trying to authorise the solution from number four, sixth one told me to call back tomorrow after the fifth one failed the authorisation.

All I want is a new card, but the address that my bank has for me is a forwarding address and of course there’s no-one there to sign for the card delivery, so the cards that the bank has been trying to delivery (without notifying me, very nice of them) has all been sent back. Ok, so change the address to my Philippino one then! Hmm, no sir, you need to be registered for telephone banking for that. Ok, how do I get telephone banking? They will send me a passcode as a regular letter to my UK address, that will be forwarded to my Philippino address, I will use that passcode to change my registered address and then they will send my new card to me! Except I couldn’t get a telephone banking passcode because there was a link to a business account!?

I used to have a business account, it was closed down about ten years ago. The private banking section couldn’t send me the passcode because my private account is still linked to my business account. And they couldn’t remove the link since it’s to a business account. And the business banking section couldn’t remove the link since the business account was already closed! But the nice lady said that she could force a link-removal for me! Except it takes 24 hours so could I please call back tomorrow again?

So what I basically set out to do; pay my council service charges, looks like it’s minimum a month away after two letters have to be sent out here in the outback.

Hello arrears payment remarks.