The blogging discipline seems to have just upped and gone. Not sure why, it’s not as though things don’t happen and I can’t even pretend I don’t have internet access when I sit at the school for 3 hours four mornings a week doing nothing but online stuff.
Chris and Julie had a good visit here, it coincided with me having a real low point. I think a combination of struggling to have people here, the loss of the three piglets that didn’t make it (we have four going strong and the three dead ones were never seen alive so many have been born dead for all I know but I mourned them nonetheless, both with guilt incase we could have done more and with regret that if we can’t breed animals then we don’t really have a livelihood) and the seven chicks that that poor tenacious broody hen hatched out and lost all of – to the mud, the rain, the rats, the crows, the Rum factor, who knows. The school job totally sucked everything out of me and after the last blog post I cried in the office for about half an hour then went home and had a blazing row with Ady who failed to spot that the correct response to my state of mind was a cuddle, some reassurance and support rather than listing my faults for me 🙁 I insisted on meeting the ferry with him despite looking like I had a severe attack of hayfever, swore at various people, totally lost it when a bag of flour came off the boat for me leaking and ended up being cuddled by people all of which kicked the Rum rumour mill into overdrive and means nearly a month I am still getting people asking ‘How *are* you?’
It’s taken lots of sunshine, a stern talking to from Fliss about making things happen and a hefty dose of my own positivity to get me back on track. As ever the cure for feeling disempowered is to get on with things and then look back and see your achievements. The polytunnel has been great for this, I love being in there and have loads of stuff growing and doing well. We’ve been eating salad since 13th May and are even selling bags of salad at the shop. We moved the pigs who are all doing really well and have cleared a large area on the croft that was just a heap of stuff looking untidy. All of the animals are looking really healthy and thriving and we have turkeys and more geese arriving next week with another sow to follow soon. We’ve constructed ten raised beds on the land that the pigs had turned over and have been selling out of eggs. I have posters up around the village advertising produce, my scarves have almost sold out in the craft shop and we are generally able to claim a success. I was interviewed for the Mail on Sunday last night which is the journalist is to be believed should be a positive, happy story appearing about us this weekend.
The compost loo is finally here. It is so big it doesn’t actually fit either through the bathroom door in the first place or in the actual bathroom which has led us to plan to install it in the horsebox – a job for the next week or so in putting up a false wall to split the horsebox in two, shelving out one half for tinned food storage etc and the other half to be a compost loo.