Okey toodle, the heading warned you, so it's your choice to be here – give me no grief about being off topic.I spent the greater part of my working life milking other people's cows, and my family got to live in some - um - interesting houses. Every time one of us posts a photo of a place which still has power lines, a clothesline or TV antenna (ie, it might still be occupied) I feel a huge stab of sympathy for the occupiers. Our two "greatest hits" were not exactly in the middle of the wops. Each of them was within 10 Kms of Papakura, so you could just about reach out a hand and touch civilisation............And the runner up is:The house where the wind huffed, and it puffed, and it didn't have to do it very hard. When the wind blew from the South or West, the house leant away from it, and jammed the front door: you could only come and go through the back. Versy vicer if the wind came from North or East. It wasn't a big cottage, so you never had to walk many steps to get to the far end to get in, but if it was raining, your gumboots had to be upside down, because they were always on the weather side of the house. Of course, if it pissed down during the night AND the wind shifted, you had to socky-foot around the house to get ya gummies before you went to get the cows.The winner (by a long country mile):Is the house where our whole family got gut crook most unbelievably badly as soon as we moved in. We were used to different bores having different minerals, and having to acclimatise to the water, but this was off the scale. My sister was working in a bacto lab, so between hasty visits to the smallest room, I got some water samples to her. Back came the verdict: faecal coliform plus maximus don't even try to purify it, don't even wash ya car in it.So I set out to find the "pure natural spring" that the farm owner had described to us as the source of our house water. A spring that never failed in the driest summers, he assured us. 'Course it bloody didn't! It was fed by the irrigation that ran from his six-person household's septic tank!You couldn't even accuse the man of not caring, because clearly he did give a shit!!!!We got over that early blip, and spent another ten years in that cottage, but that's a different story.
