"You've got your work cut out!" said the auctioneer cheerfully.

That sounded ominous. Dan is a local stock agent and rural auctioneer. I've bought and sold livestock through his agency, and been entertained by the patter at different clearing sales. Usually goods are stacked in piles and the auction moves along at a fairly rapid clip, with agency staff holding up one or two items each time so the crowd can see what's in it.

It can be quite funny...one pile had a small anvil in it. Dan hefted it to waist-height, but struggled with the weight of it. "No one can see it Dan. Hold it higher!" said the auctioneer.
Dan held up a shovel in each hand. "You can see there are left and right-handed shovels in this lot" said the auctioneer.

But since Covid, clearing sales now are often online. The goods are still on the farm for collection, but the sales process is all via a website. Not as entertaining, and sometimes you misunderstand what the item is.....

Anyway, I bid on two pallets of cinder blocks. We've been slowly building raised vegetable garden beds. A couple of years back I bought 10 metres of sand and 10 metres of bluestone chip, and we been mining that to make up batches of concrete which get poured into frames to make the raised beds. Its slow going. We both need to have time to collect and transport the stones and sand to the vegie garden, and then mix and pour the concrete. I figured the cinder blocks would let me do a couple of beds, but quicker. Anyway, it was a bargain that no one else wanted, and I got the two pallets.

Except they were four pallets, stacked quite high. And they were not cinder blocks, they were concrete blocks. Much heavier.

And they were stacked behind other pallets of bricks. The only way to get them out was to carry them, one at a time, and stack them in my ute and then trailer.

My ute takes 1000kg, and the trailer 500kg. It took me 4 trips. At the other end I had to lift them out, carry them 20-30 metres and re-stack them.

Dan and his agency are decent people, who provide an amazing service. I once bought two calves at an auction. Dan's team inoculated them transported them to my place, and unloaded them for a pittance.

A couple of years ago a calf showed up at our place. It didn't belong to any of my neighbors. I rang Dan and asked him if he might know who it belonged to. He did. He came and collected it and took it back to its owner. No charge, to me or the animal's owner.

So when I came to collect my blocks, I gave him a present, a bottle of our olive oil. He was quite pleased.

And then, while I was taking the first load home and unloading, he came up with a better process. He put an empty pallet on a forklift and held it above the stack of bricks that was blocking my way. It was easy to push my blocks onto the pallet, and when it was "full" he swapped it for another pallet. Loading up was then as simple as forking each pallet into my ute and trailer. As it was it took me two days to move them all. If I had had to manually load each brick, it would have been longer.

No forklift at this end. Its all manual. But its done: I've stacked them inside the vegie garden. I have started renovating one bed. Its a lot of work, but it will be great when its done.

Still work in progress, but you get the idea....!.