Eid Mubarak! Ooops!

A week or so ago David went flying off to Brussels for meetings and then popped over to Manchester to visit Meaghan and Jamie, leaving me at home with the cats and what was going to be the last run for my thesis (yes was, but that's a whole other story).
It was Eid and the country had shut down for over a week.  Boy do I mean shut down.  Practically every one I spoke to was heading out for a little trip to Europe, Thailand, Cyprus, Zanzibar, Dubai, Qatar, Abu Dhabi.......  Pout.

 I was being a good girl and sitting at the PC editing away like a loon and listening to the sewerage truck slurp up water from our unconnected sewer outlet.  Dum de da de dum.

CRASH!!!!!!!!!!

What the hell was that??????

A quick dash to the front door showed me..........

Yes, the truck had clipped the gate and pulled down the wall and the pedestrian gate.  Excellent. 

 "You broke the wall!" I cried cleverly.

"Madam, It is broken" was his even cleverer reply.  Then he jumped into his truck and drove away.

Right.  Good.  Marvelous.  It's a little nervous making when the whole world can see straight into your house when everyone lives behind high walls, and of course the whole world did come and have a really good look.  Especially five times a day on the way to the Mosque.  Quick call to my landlord had no reply, and a call to the handy man was met with "Oh....I will come and look at it maybe after tomorrow."  SMS to landlord.  Minutes later, the landlord called and the ability of Omanis to get things going even in the middle of a religious festival swung into action.

By the end of the day two handy men had been, and the police had been. The next day cleanup began happened and the following day the footings were begun.  We were to get a little more front.  Hooray!!  Of course the hooray may be short lived as the owners are looking at renovating and moving in.  Although their youngest boy has decided that he is going to live in a tree house at the top of the biggest tree so that David can live in the new upstairs bedroom.

Footings were followed by a wall that immediately gave us more privacy.  The cats, however, were not amused.  Either were the two beautiful pots that had been sitting behind the wall.  The very flat pots.  The plants, on the other hand, are Omani plants and can survive almost anything.

The wall was followed by two pillars for the gates.  Getting in and out was a little "interesting" at this point.  Well, for those of us with knees that don't bend too well and hadn't been to yoga for a couple of weeks (the teacher was one of the friends in Cyprus....).

Bluey finishing his inspection of the new paving

From the front

New paving ensued, and you can see that we have a new garden bed. Plus enough room to easily fit David's car if we wanted to.  Actually, both cars.  

This was all done by three blokes (here are two of them) armed with a jackhammer (for taking down the old pillars), a drill (for drilling holes of course) a shovel, some bessa blocks, quite a lot of concrete and even more sweat.  The electrics were powered by a lead hanging over the roof.  I'm not sure the tools had any plugs, they just stuffed the wires into the end of the lead.................. 

There it is pretty much finished except for the painting.  Bukra insha'allah.