One word? When seven would do…

It’s lovely having Lynda and Stuart here and Fliss and Sandy are away til tomorrow so we’ve been left in charge of breakfasts for them in return for using the house all day including for dinners which has been great. Electricity! TV for the kids! A great big kitchen to cook for six people in with ease along with the conservatory to sit in.

It has meant a lot of dashing to and from the croft though and yesterday when the weather was lovely all afternoon and I really wanted to get sorting out animals and planting in the polytunnel it meant I was slightly reluctant to go back down to the village when I took a load of washing up to hang on the line.

As ever L&S have been great company though, always so supportive of our craziness and proud of our achievements. It’s funny how people come into your lives for odd reasons and end up staying in them. Something reminded me this morning of our time at Evergreen Farm which wasn’t even a wwoof host and we ended up at by accident for those 3 weeks but played such a big part in our choices. We’ve been talking a lot about Glastonbury these last few weeks too and I had a lovely facebook message from Jill to say they miss us and are proud of what we’ve done in our first year here – another chance meeting resulting in good friends for life.

Fliss and Sandy are back tomorrow though which means breakfast on Saturday, Sunday and Monday is not down to us and we can have later starts ebfore catching up with L&S. We’ll be cooking dinner for them up at the static on Friday and Sunday but we’re all going to Fliss and Sandy’s for dinner on Saturday – our first ever evening meal ‘out’ on Rum 🙂 On Sunday there is a band playing in the hall so we’ll all go down to that and then on Monday we wave them off and have a week of ‘back to normal’ whatever that is – before Chris and Julie arrive. I’m desperate to clear up a bit on the croft, sort out the honesty box tables (they got rained on and blown about, the signs have all washed clean and the boxes need some attention), spend some time with the piglets and generally hang out at home again. I’ve been learning about the grants and subsidies and funding which we are eligible for and trying to form some sort of coherant plan for that too. Gav is coming to spend some time with me tomorrow morning here at the school to chat about grants and we can share knowledge and research on that, on the basis that two heads are better than one!

I told Stuart (at the school) yesterday that I’m intending leaving at the end of this school term. He was unsurprised and grateful for the early heads-up. Given our tenants told us yesterday they are leaving next week so we are suddenly without rent it feels slightly foolish to be jacking in a paid job but I am so desperate to not be here, to be with the kids again and to be focussing properly on the croft. This is our make or break year and I have this underlying feeling of desperation in making sure everything that needs to happen does happen both in terms of building the business into a livelihood, sorting out a house and getting a better vision of what happens next and which direction we’re headed in. I think a revised business plan / life plan would be a really good idea for Ady and I to sit down and rustle up as would give us some clarity on the things we can be doing, the things that need to happen when and help us feel like we’re in control again. It’s odd that this office environment with access to the internet and the photocopier / printer etc does not inspire me to make that happen but it doesn’t – I think I need to be looking out over my croft with Ady to bounce things off of rather than feeling cold, dark and a bit depressed about listening to the nursery in the background!

Davies and I had some interesting chats yesterday. He was asking me about how the croft actually works. He knew we had submitted business plans and has been listening to all the talk of grants and funding and wanted to know who checks on whether we are doing what we said we would do. I explained a bit more about it all to him and he was telling me what he would do. His thinking on business matters is pretty clear and I can see another change in him starting to think ahead and start planning his own life. I think 13 will be an interesting age for him and he is starting to get a feel for what he thinks he might want to direct himself towards next. Last night he was asking me about why humans have taste buds and different likes and dislikes to each other when all food is good for us. We had interesting talks about different cultures and having a taste for the local food that is available and how a diverse palate probably was essential for our ancestors and if you listen to your body closely it is still possible to work out what your body needs rather than what your taste buds think you want. We talked about processed foods, refined sugar and stuff that we have created rather than is available naturally and how we have trashed our own instincts with regards to what is actually good for us and we need versus what gives us an artificial high or tingles our tastebuds but has no actual nutritional value. I am aware that the kids’ diets are slipping back to less adventurous and less balanced lately and I think it would be a great opportunity to try and actually *taste* what we eat and learn a bit more about what our bodies need.

We used to be *so* much funnier! Just found this http://quickquickslow.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/12-twelves-are/#comments

I blame facebook! Or something 🙂

What’s been happening? Davies and Scarlett have been doing some maths workbooks I picked up from the school. Davies hated them, got the idea of what the book was asking but found them tedious, repetitive and pointless once he’d grasped the concept. Scarlett really enjoyed them, particularly one using money. She was less keen on one to do with estimating, weighing and measuring 🙂 She’s decided she might bother learning to read as she finally sees some point in the idea but is now worried it will be too hard. My plan is to spend some time with her on it as soon as I can as I think once she realises how easy it will be for her (which I am sure it will now she wants to do it) she’ll lick it in no time and that will be the end of that.

Davies sold some postcards from the craft shop and Jinty has offered to sell them from the shop and Rachel offered to sell them from the castle. I reckon he’ll be doing really well on them this season.

I’ve been looking at grants for the croft and realising there is lots we can access which unfortunately mean yet more of my time needs directing somewhere else in researching that more and then applying but at least things remain finacially viable for us which is of course key to making this life work, particularly given I am intending jacking in the only actual guaranteed income generating thing we do between us!

We have Lynda and Stuart here with us this week which means life is more disjointed than ever – they ar staying at Fliss and Sandy’s B&B but |Fliss and Sandy are away til Friday so Ady is cooking their breakfast in return for us getting to use the house and kitchen for the rest of the day including cooking our dinner. Much easier in terms of bigger kitchen, dishwasher, electricity and more space, not to mention not needing to trek Lynda and Stuart up and down to the muddy croft but meaning we’re away from the croft all day long and need to remember to take all ingredients down to Fliss’ each morning. The kids are enjoying unlimited access to Lynda and Stuart, TV and internet though 🙂

The piglets are doing well – I know I’ve not announced their birth on here but I’ve done it everywhere else so it seems a little pointless to make a formal announcement here. It is very exciting to have them here at last, makes me feel like a real crofter 🙂 Losing three was hard – we’re not sure quite how they died but two out of the three had been mauled and eaten by rats which was very unpleasant. Lessons learnt for next time and we’re focussing on the positives of having four, knowing Tom and Barbara are both fertile, she can carry and birth piglets and seems to be a great mother happily feeding and tending to them. We always intended keeping two to fatten ourselves and have sold the other two already so that’s good. We’ll let them go at 8 weeks or so and will be moving the remaining pigs to a different spot with a more permanent home and plans for a better maternity area for next time too. I’m hoping we’ll manage a second litter this year. The broody hen had two pipped eggs under her last night so fingers crossed there are chicks on the way too which will be great – hens can join the egg laying flock, cocks can be fattened for eating. Turkeys are on their way in June so it feels like the livestock side of the croft has really come to life just in time to mark our year anniversary :).

We’re off for a few nights at the end of May, mostly so we all visit the dentist but will also look forward to a little off-island respite and time to ourselves. Everything feels so much more possible now the sun is shining but I know we are all still slightly reeling from such an intense first year and a long, kept having relapses winter. This is definitely the right life for us although we still have a few tweaks to make to the details but a chance to grab some perspective and some deep breaths without feeling bad about sitting down is much needed. Gav will croft – and Bonnie-sit – so we can actually do that at the end of May I hope.

Just when we thought the winter was over it’s been back to bite us on the bum again this week. Literally as the boat pulled away on Saturday night it started raining and got windier and it’s not really stopped much since. The winds have been SSE rather than easterly or westerly which are the worst ones for us up on the croft so it’s not been scary, just wet and noisy with the straps over the roof vibrating lots. It’s pretty mild so not totally miserable but the condensation is back and so is the mud.

Poor Barbara is thigh deep in it and I am worried if she has the piglets just now they’d probably drown in it. Yesterday we collected three old mattresses from the castle which we’ll put down in her pen just as soon as the river is low enough to get across to bring them to the croft. Mattresses are such a bugger to carry, like a great big sheet of jelly! We also had a big Harbo delivery of compost, grow bags, animal feed and straw yesterday, along with some food from the Co-Op. It’s amazing how quick we’d forgotten the grind of trying to get large and heavy things up the muddy hill. The mice have gotten into the polytunnel and eaten loads of my seeds – gits!

We had Vikki and Sean the Rat up for dinner on Tuesday which was really nice. We had a great evening, chatted about introverts vs extroverts after Vikki had linked to an interesting TED talk on the subject, Sean did a myers briggs test and we talked about that and then we (mostly Sean and I actually) had a long debate about politics which I really enjoyed. Have not had a good old rant like that in years! Sort of strange to realise I do still really passionately about these things even though I’m pretty removed from that world these days. Also quite odd to be discussing such stuff with someone so much younger than me. I also ranted about birthing choices (rather topical on island just now with Laura pregnant and lots of people tutting about how she’ll not be able to have the baby here, live in a shed etc.) I was the most extreme in my views and felt a bit like I was being a nutter but comforted myself that I was the only one in the room that had actually *had* a baby so I was allowed to speak with more authority 😉

I hate the school job. I’m sat here now typing this while I charge up phones and torches and I got to print off a load of housebuild stuff this morning and use the school phone to arrange dentists appointments but those sort of perks are just not enough. I walked down the road to the school on Tuesday morning just utterly resenting with every step that I am here. I’m away from home for four hours four mornings a week. I earn about £20 per shift so it only works out as £5 an hour and one of those is walking around in the rain. In the winter it will still be dark when I leave. I either take the car and use diesel and leave Ady without it (not feasible on boat days if we are expecting something anyway) or walk and even if I do take the car I’d be wet by the time I get to it parked on the other side of the river. Plus I just hate being here. I hate Stuart talking to me about how he tells the kids they have to do the ‘boring stuff’ like maths and history so they can do the ‘fun stuff’. I hate the stickers and certificates for meaningless stuff. I hate listening to the kids being told they can’t go and explore the pine cones or do painting because they ‘have to do this now’. I hate the taped nursery rhymes that get played every morning and I hate being captured in a depressing building with other people’s kids four mornings a week while my own children are missing me and missing out on the time I used to have for them. I hate missing Popmaster and having half the day already gone by the time I’ve gotten home and had lunch. I hate that it means I struggle to arrange stuff like the dentists appointments and won’t be around for half of the time people visit when they come to stay and it’s just not what we moved here to do. I’m here for freedom, for being outside working my croft, if not beating the system then at least ignoring it! Yesterday my tasks included some photocopying, organising the sugar paper storage system and ordering playdoh and fabrics for the dressing up table. Life is too short!

Fortunately Coryla is interested in the job as she will probably lose her job in September when Stuart comes back and the school opens for Eve. The council (rightly!) cannot justify a nursery assistant, a teaching head and a clercial person along with running two buildings for two children in a school! I told the kids my decision to finish at the end of the school year yesterday and they were delighted 🙂 So I get to skip away at the end of the summer free once again. I just need to explain to my Dad now why I’m planning to give up a perfectly good job (in his opinion) – I need to find something else to bring in the money instead and justify it that way.

Poor Gav has been rained and winded out of his tent and is staying with Neil and Lesley down in the village until the wild weather passes over. He seems in good spirits still but is clearly finding this a testing time without Laura or a home. Saturday is our anniversary of a year on Rum – I have this feeling that it will either be an amazing day – sunshine, new piglets, chicks hatching and maybe a bottle of fizz and some venison. Or it will rain, there will be problems with the animals and the polytunnel will blow away. Fingers crossed it’s a day for celebrating!

and in under 48 hours!

Yesterday it mostly rained and was windy. We had a couple of breaks in the weather during which Ady went up to check the water pipe in the now very fast running burn and I chopped some wood. We all went outside and gathered some strimmed reeds, rushes and grass to put in Barbara’s pen as she was now thigh deep in mud thanks to a small space, lots of rain and plenty of pregnant pacing.

Around all this we watched War Horse, ate popcorn, had a roast dinner, watched Nims Island, made bread dough, did some crochet, did some drawing and generally had what for us is a fairly restful day. It was quite nice not to see another living soul, no one even walked by on the nature trail. In Sompting we could go a whole day without talking to anyone else but we’d only to look out of the window for 30 seconds to see someone walking or driving by or a neighbour (remember our neighbours?!? 🙂 ) out in their gardens.

I also didn’t get out of bed til gone eleven having enjoyed returning to bed with a mug of tea to finish a book I was reading. I do love my lying in bed reading mornings when I get them every so often. They are often interupted by Tarly climbing into bed with me to chat which is also lovely.

Today I spent some time before Popmaster with Davies looking at a lettering book he got for Christmas with him. He has a range of postcards for sale in the craft shop and Jinty has offered to take some sale or return aswell. she also paid him in sweets and coke on Friday to make a poster advertising the bar on Saturday nights which was classic Davies and very funny with people getting drunk, snogging in the toilets, necking wine out of the bottle and more on it along with the actual writing Jinty had asked for. It’s on display in the hall now. I love how these little touches from my family shape Rum and the village 🙂

I then went down to the village as I had arranged to call into the IRCT office to get caught up on some being a director stuff. I was there for an hour or so and then walked out with Fliss. Ady had come down to meet me and we had enough time before the boat to call in to Fliss and Sandy’s for a cup of tea so did so. We had nothing off the boat but were sending jerry cans of diesel off so needed to go. Jinty had a huge delivery so we loaded some into our car and dropped it round to the shop for her before heading home for lunch.

After lunch I got chatting to Davies who was drawing in a graph paper exercise book (I nicked a whole selection of exercise books for the kids from school; lined, plain, half and half, graph, squares, handwriting etc. Scarlett said to me ‘can you get me a swimming book if the school has them please?’ Eventually we realised she thought that all the books were named after types of exercise and wanted to know what a swimming one might look like! 😆 :lol:) and trying to create a bar chart having had the idea explained to him the other day. I drew him one with hours of sunshine per day over the course of one week. We then drew a graph and plotted the same date on that and I then showed him how to do a pie chart which involved ratios, multiplication, addition and getting out a compass and protractor and teaching him how to use that and about degrees in a circle. Highly educational 🙂 Scarlett is much more mathematically minded than Davies, always has been, she just gets numeracy concepts so muck quicker but Davies really liked the idea of graphs and charts and was trying to think of other information he could put into graphs and charts 🙂

This afternoon Scarlett watered the polytunnel plants and spotted the first sprouts of seeds in the lettuce and salad leaves :). Davies spent time with Bonnie training and teaching some new tricks. Ady did some Barbara pig pen repairs, I tried and failed to clear a couple of the ditches that are blocked at the bottom of the croft and then cut and gathered some more reeds and rushes. Then I left them all to it and went to collect the veg box and had a couple of beers at the shop with Fliss. I walked all the way back up the hill with the veg box plus four cans of beer for Ady, a pack of butter and various other bits, stopping on the way up to put the ducks away and feed the pigs who had already been fed but had decided if the birds were getting some food they had better have some too. Oh and going back down to the river to refill Barbara’s water bucket which she had knocked over.

Back to school tomorrow. Boo.

What a week (or maybe slightly longer :oops:)

We had a good visit from Mum & Dad. I got slightly fed up with them by about day five but they left on day six and I kept Jan’s perspective warning from friendfeed uppermost in my mind so kept my temper. They both looked to have visibly aged since they were here in October which I find tough. Parent’s mortality is always hard to come to terms with but when you know you will only see them once or twice a year at the end of one or other of you doing a full day plus of travel it hits slightly harder than when they lived a mile away. For the first time we had a fairly frank discussion about the fact we moved here after they messed us about with our proposal to them to do something in with them. They both conceded (in their own unique ways) that they may have been wrong not to take us up on that idea really, particularly since it ended up with us moving so very far away from them and I think we may end up with them moving closed to us at some point.

We did an otter walk, visited the bar open on Easter Saturday briefly with them and generally fed and looked after them very well. Ady and I slept on the floor in the lounge while they had our bed but Dad was keen to sit up chatting with us most nights, with a couple of 3am finished which meant although I was, as ever, sad to see them go I was also glad to get my own bed back and have an early night when they left!

They left on Wednesday, Thursday was an RCA meeting, Friday we had Ranger and Gav up for pizza night which ended up a very rowdy boozy evening with lots of youtube clip watching of literal videos and interpretative dance (Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn?), Gav trying to get home without a torch and me retiring to bed but needing to be ill out of the bedroom window. Classy…

All of which meant that despite an early start and an invigorating shower the car didn’t start quickly and then only managed about 5mph so Babs and co were already starting to walk to the village by the time we arrived at the pier 😳

Chris and Ady drove back while Babs and I walked with kids back to the croft. A fab day trip visit with them which ticked everyone’s boxes. Ady and I got to sit and chat with dear friends, drink tea, catch up on gossip and pretend we are not totally cut off from the rest of our friendship circle, have a wonder down into the village, catch up with various islanders who of course Chris and Babs have met before when they were here last summer. The kids all went off exploring and playing in the castle and managed some screen time connecting, some lego playing, some soft toy worship, some animal stroking, some hanging out on the beach and by the river and more.

A daytrip is lovely, a full 10 hours on a Saturday with no feeling that we don’t have enough space or facilities to accommodate people as they leave to go and do sleeping elsewhere. It feels sad to have them leave though…

On Sunday we could really have done with a day off. The end of a very full week, a deferred hangover for me from the day before but it was not to be as it was putting the plastic on the polytunnel day which as the polytunnel sits on our land at the bottom of our croft meant we had to be there really. So we went down and joined in with ten hours worth of plastic putting on, plastic clip manhandling and general bodging what has already been quite a bodge job of a community polytunnel. At 6pm there was just Gav, Vikki, Ady and I left so we came home, had a large glass of cider each and then Vikki stayed to finish the bottle while Ady and I co-cooked dinner. I suspect the fact that most of the other people putting it up were able to go home to a bath and not have to cook dinner for their two children was lost on everyone but us but it was one of the rare days when I feel the burden of our many responsibilities.

Dinner was lovely though and we all slept really well that night!

This week has been a super productive one. Meetings, planting, making a maternity pen for Barbara Pig, penning the ducks over night which means we get all the duck eggs each morning now, marking the 10 eggs that the broody hen is sitting on and hopefully hatching, getting loads of seeds sown in the polytunnel, the potato council seed potatoes in, digging over my first raised bed and finding four worms in it. Getting the newsletter finished, printed and distributed, doing some work for the ISCAPE project, meeting the man from the Big Lotto grants funding for lunch to talk about the bunkhouse, getting co-opted as a director of the IRCT, doing venison stuff and loads more. The only thing carried over is the ongoing saga of how to get the compost toilet from Ed in Tarbert to us on Rum…

Which about brings me to today. When Marcus, Michelle and Chloe came. The friends with whom we first came to Scotland (not including Melrose which now we live here is so Not Scotland ;)), who helped us with the business plan which won us the croft and who have definitely been a big gap in not having been here before now. So, so pleased they made it in our first year 🙂

We’ve had a lovely day with them. Done the now famous walk to the croft, talked about how the static got here, introduced them to the animals, the kids took Chloe off for their child’s eye view of Rum and introduced her to their world here and we snuck in a little private tour of Kinloch Castle too 🙂 We had the last of the venison sausages we’d been saving for a special occasion and even a tot of whisky in our afternoon cup of tea on the sporran. We did manage to point out an eagle but failed on the red deer. It will not please Mich that on the drive back from the ferry a stag ran across infront of the car at the bottom of the croft. Or maybe she will just choose to disbelieve 😉

Home for leftovers, a bit of youtubing of some shadow ballet artists from Britains’ Got Talent that was being talked about on facebook which led to me finding some of the sand artist from Ukraine’s Got Talent that did the rounds on facebook a few years ago and I was reminded of by the shadow stuff. We also watched a Horizon Special documentary about Tomorrow’s World Science stuff which was very good.

And now to bed. Tomorrow we are all having lions. Unless of course Barbara Pig has had piglets in which case we’ll all be standing around in the newly back mud (rain! First rain in eight weeks!) cooing at the new life on the croft.