I had a couple of things I needed to take care of at the house and so with the weather being fine I got to. Trouble is, the clutch has given out in the Land Rover and I needed to transport some long sheets of polycarbonate roofing.

You see, we had a bit of wind last week and it wrecked the skylight in the patio out the back, meaning there's 6 metres of plastic sheet that needs replacing. I drove round to the house and dropped off the tools in the Koleos and then drove round to Bunnings. I waited ages to get seen to at the counter because a lady was getting keys cut and then had to bum around waiting for the paperwork, because I was hiring their ute to get the job done. Once I had the keys I fairly quickly bought the roofing sheets and tied them onto the ute. All was going well so far.

As I was heading back to the house I had barely got to 60 and heard a thump in the back. I checked in the mirror but everything aeemed fine except that the plastic seemed pushed down. I thought initially that that was because of the wind, but it really looked distorted so I pulled over. The sheets had folded over at the front because of the wind and the distortion caused by being tied down. I slapped them back into shape but they are badly bruised. Hopefully I can use that section as the overlap, because the sheets are 3.6m and I need to cover 6.1m.

So I kept driving, after shifting the sheets back as far as I could, but I was unhappy with what I could see in the mirror and pulled over again. The tie down had come loose at the front and the sheets were pretty loose. I tightened that up again and finally managed to get to the house without further disaster.

I hitched up the trailer, because I wanted to take the green waste to the dump. That all went well right up until I realised that I'd forgotten the broom and shovel. I pulled in to Bunnings and spent another $50 on tools and eventually got to the dump. The man came over and geve me a hand. which was nice of him. The only real difficulty was falling over into the rubbish pile as I dragged out the bulk of my rubbish and twisting my little finger. It's still sore. You may laugh but a little finger can give you quite the twinge.

I had to pay this time, with money, because I'd run out of green waste passes. The hilarious thing is, we just got the flyer about the annual green waste pickup. If I hadn't chopped the trees up with the mulcher I could have saved myself a lot of effort and possibly a trip to the dump.

I'd hired the ute for 2 hours and by this time I had only 30 minutes left. I headed back to Bunnings, stopping off at the fuel station to refuel and took the keys back.

So I achieved what I'd set out to do but it left me feeling unsatisfied. I think if I'd givem myself some more time I wouldn't have had to rush at the end to get the ute back on time. Having the sheets bend in half really put a dampener on my day - I was really kind of cross about that. I guess just the stress of having to get all these things done in the right order made it an unnerving experience all round. Now I have the job of getting up on the roof and actually installing the plastic, which I was planning to do on Saturday but just couldn't. Sunday, for sure.