One word? When seven would do…

Filled with good intentions (the sort the road to hell is paved with….) I have a partially composed post in draft about where D&S are now which has distracted me from the daily / sort of daily blogging and meant nearly 2 weeks have passed.

Two weeks in which we have:

• Spent a day mincing, mixing and sausage stuffing to fill the freezer with 45kg of Blackie sausages. They are delicious, by far the nicest sausages we have ever made. There is much to be said about slow grown meat.
• Invested in a self-basting pot roaster and done lots of research on pressure cookers. The Blackie joints are full of flavour but tough on texture so required a slow roast. The couple I have tried have been delicious tasting but a little on the dry side so we bought a roaster to help with slow cooking them. Our electric slow cooker is one of the kitchen aids I am most looking forward to getting back out and using once we have mainland power again. So far though the roaster is a win.
• Ady has done a few days work with Internet Ian, the Hebnet guy getting cables, towers and other IT related stuff up hills. Some with Bad Neil, some with Sean, all with Ian. He’s come back very cold and very wet but £15 an hour better off and enjoying the challenge.
• Bob Pig is now in with Barbara, BenFogle & Waddles pig. This is going tentatively well with some pig political wrangling still to be ironed out.
• Davies and I have started watching Hannibal together. It’s pretty dark, no actually it’s very dark but it’s also pretty good. We’re enjoying it. Can totally see why it’s an 18.
• Prosecco Mairi came! She arrived on the Saturday morning boat and stayed til Monday afternoon. We had a lovely few days, lots and lots of prosecco drunk, a visit down to the shop to catch up with Rum friends, some late night heart to hearts. All good.
• I’ve done a lot of logistic. The whole of April with spill over into late March and early May is full with people coming to visit, us going off and all the organisation that entails. Car booked on and off Rum, ferries planned, accommodation arranged and contacting various family and friends to confirm, arrange and work out who will be where when. Looking forward to it lots. Also know come the second week in May we will be very ready to breath deeply, sleep in our own beds and not have anyone kipping anywhere else in the caravan!
• Played much ukulele. My new one arrived, a £40 concert uke to replace the tenner soprano one I started on. I actually have callouses on the ends of three of my fingers and they are perpetually numb. I am reliably informed this means progress has been made. I’m getting there with chord changes, strumming patterns, finger picking and even singing while I play. A very steep learning curve but I am really enjoying it.

Which I think brings me up to date and reminds me once again to get back to that draft post….

Not literally, obviously.

Monday – Was mad windy. Boat cancelling, turbine tied up windy. At least some of us went to the village to the freezer but I am not at all sure of which combination of us it was. I must have been outside at some point though because I do remember it being very windy indeed.

Tuesday – We all went down to the village in the morning. Scarlett and I posted her very overdue parcel to her friend in Ireland – a combined Christmas and birthday parcel, then we all went into the hall as Marine Harvest fish farm were over to chat to the community about various fish farm off Rum updates. Interesting, a shame so few people turned up. I like Chris the high up manager bloke, met him quite a few times. He looks a lot like David Cameron and has the same politicians way about him that makes him slightly untrustworthy in that ‘you can trust me’ type way in a business way but I think he’s a generally nice bloke and very good at remembering details about people that have come up in conversation.

Back at home I got venison pie filling cooking and then went out to feed the animals with Ady.

Wednesday – in the morning I spent some time in the walled garden. I planted out garlic, onion sets and some seed potatoes. The soil under the raised beds I have mulched is amazing, really rich and dark, well drained and crumbly. So pleased that I have managed to improve soil, be excellent if I can actually grow something in it this year.

Lots more ukulele-ing and then Crafternoon for me. Had a really good chat with Ali while Fliss was out collecting the girls from school. Nice to reconnect a bit with her. Home for steak and chips for dinner.

Thursday – In the morning Ady and I went down to get some bits from the shop and theoretically collect the post except we managed to collect instead the pre-post delivery of a prescription inhaler for me and a parcel which Derek the postman had already left in the car which we use as our post box, failing to realise until we were practically home again that maybe he had not actually sorted the post at that point. So Davies and Scarlett went back to collect it later.

Ady and I cut down some dead branches from a tree at the bottom of the croft, bought them back up and split them for firewood. More ukulele-ing including finally cracking La Vie En Rose which was one of the two songs I most wanted to learn. Hurrah.

Friday – today – We had made sure we didn’t need to visit the village today. It was a mostly grey day despite the forecast being for sunshine. This morning I made pizza dough, practised ukulele-ing and did the Rum Rumble monthly newsletter. After lunch I spent a couple of hours cutting chicken wire into strips and stapling it onto the wooden path that Ady had built up to the caravan so it doesn’t get slippy when it’s wet or muddy. It turned into a lovely evening so we had our last cup of tea outside, watched the stars appear and the moon rise. I rang my parents and we had pizza for dinner.

This blog is very blah blah blah these days with not much actual talk of Davies & Scarlett and what they are up to. Given it’s fairly select readership I might start writing a bit more about them here so that I have a record for them to read at some future point.

Wednesday – I have no inkling of what I did in the morning. I know Ady finished the path. It now reaches all the way up to the caravan!

In the afternoon I went down to Fliss’ for Crafternoon. I arrived at hers as she was heading off to collect the girls from school so I walked along with her, marching at Fliss pace is tough, particularly while talking too. I was a bit ranty having felt pissed off at the AGM the day before. It’s a funny old balance just now of wanting to remain present until we actually know what we’re doing next while not feeling as invested in Rum as we were before.

Debs and Ali came along too when we got back and it was a nice afternoon if a bit generally ranty about Rum folk.

When I got home we decided that we would do Blackie the following day as looking at the forecast for the week ahead it was the best day for a while. We emailed David who was to be our back up gun man just incase anything went wrong and arranged for him to come up at 930 the next morning.

Thursday – I had not slept at all well. A combination of various things including Blackie on my mind. We went over and our planned getting Blackie out of the pen she shared with Bob went way smoother than expected. Ady then ran out of the bucket of food he had lured her over with and after a bit of hurried chatting we decided to go ahead and try. So he did. Bolt gun didn’t quite take her down and had her staggering but very much in the style of a headless chicken in as much as she was not conscious as such. She then dropped and rolled into the muddiest ditch on the croft. Ady did a second bolt which killed her and then slit her throat. It was fast, respectful and calm. Just as we always insist on it being.

We decided that with David’s help (and we could hear him coming) we would be able to get her out of the ditch so Ady went to get some rope. She was actually far, far heavier than we had assumed and we could not get her out of the ditch at all. We were resigned to making the best of a muddy butchering job but David suggested the winch on the argocat which he had come up to the croft in so he went to get it and it worked. Amazing bit of kit!

We stopped for a cup of tea and fully expected David to head away but he offered to stay and help so while he and Ady skinned and began quartering I whizzed off to the pier to meet the ferry as we were expecting animal feed and diesel to come off, which it did. Back to the croft and three hours later we finally had a butchered pig in various labelled bags. David very kindly ran me and the meat down to the village to put it all in  the freezer while Ady cleared up. Later I did a bit more processing indoors, chopping up steaks and diced meat and packing and labelling that up to take down the following day. So, so much meat! Having tried both a loin and a roasting joint it is very flavourful meat but clearly from a much older animal than we have previously been used to (all of our previous pigs have been well under a year old when we’ve killed them). It is much tougher and is going to need longer cooking times but has a nice flavour. It won’t be suitable for pork chops or stir fries though I don’t think. Lots of slow roasting joints and loads and loads of sausages though! I’ve ordered metres and metres of skins and rusk mix so when that arrives next week we will have a day of mincing and sausage making.

I was utterly knackered by the evening. A day of standing outside in the cold bent over the table cutting had taken its toll along with the bad nights sleep from the night before. I slept very well that night!

Friday – We wheelbarrowed the animal feed up from the day before, pumped the tyre up on the Jeep and I made bread and pizza dough. Then Ady and I went down with the rest of the meat and the laundry to the village. We put the washing on and spent some time sorting out the freezers. We are borrowing a second freezer for the extra pork just now so swapped stuff between the two and organised them a bit better. We put the washing into the dryer and then headed around to the shop as we’d arranged to meet a few folk for Friday night beers. A nice couple of hours chatting to friends and then home for pizza.

Saturday – Ady went to meet the boat as we had petrol coming off and he collected the laundry. Then we went back down in the afternoon to watch the rugby. We had originally planned to meet in the hall but the heating is broken and Jed had said we could use the bunkhouse instead as long as we took pictures as he is wanting to compile an album of all of the bunkhouse in action shots. It was Lesley, Neil, David, volunteer Ben and us although a few others had hijacked the invite the night before none of them ended up coming after all. Davies and Scarlett had thought about coming down too but in the end there was wind turbine power and it was raining so they stayed home instead. I confess to not remotely understanding rugby but was happy to eat pizza, drink cider and hang out with friends anyway!

Home for curry.

Sunday – this morning it was sunny and so I finally got outside and finished planting the last 30 odd trees. There is other stuff I could start to do outside – some weeding, some planting and some sowing but it is so, so muddy and the ground is so cold that it is not a rush to get anything done just yet. Good to be out in the sunshine for an hour or so though. This afternoon Davies and I looked at youtube tutorials for guitar and ukelele and he got out the guitar Mike lent / gave him and learned a few chords. Scarlett has managed to get herself into a nocturnal sleep pattern from staying up all night listening to an audio book then falling asleep on the sofa all afternoon, repeating it the following day and then struggling to sleep last night. So she got up early-ish this morning and spent a couple of hours outside walking briskly around the croft to get fresh air and exercise in an effort to wear herself out and sleep tonight. So far I don’t think she’s managed to fall asleep but I admire her efforts!

Roast pork for dinner and downloaded Let It Shine on iplayer. Which brings me more or less up to date.

Friday and Saturday I had decided to stay in the caravan and continue resting the ankle of doom. I did lots of crochet, tea drinking, online bits and pieces and ukelele-ing. I was having a bit of a crisis of confidence with the ukekele but chatting to various folk online persuaded me to keep at it and five days later with probably an hour most days of practise I actually feel like I have made some proper progress. I still think the bloke on youtube who said the best thing about ukelele is that it’s piss easy was lying but it’s not quite impossible either…

Saturday was a lovely Graham Norton sandwich too with radio in the morning and Let It Shine in the evening. I do love him lots. Watched the downloaded Friday night chat show on Sunday too so a GN filled weekend 🙂

I made a start on a crochet midge to send to Lynda who had asked for a green one to go with the blue one I sent her last year. It just needs wings now. Need to knock out a few more of them actually as there is only 2 in the shed just now.

In the afternoon we did our hour of RSPB birdwatching. Considering we live on a National Nature Reserve we don’t get a lot of birds actually landing here on the croft although obviously things like eagles, herons and ravens are regular spots overhead. We tallied up three hooded crows, a robin, a wagtail and a dunnock in our hour or staring from three windows.

I started learning Creep on the uke. Ady made a very lovely Chinese style curry in honour of Chinese New Year.

Sunday – I decided outsideyness was back on the agenda so headed out with the drill to finally dismantle those cloches. All now done, ripped plastic disposed off, wood stacked up with screws removed for building other things or burning and hoops now secured with bamboo cane stakes. The plastic is down there ready to go on the hoops but I need to weed the strawberry beds first and cover the bare soil with some sort of mulch to inhibit more weed growth. It was so muddy and slippy that I fell over twice in there and decided that weeding in those conditions was ill advised. I did plants a few trees (we have about 30 leftover from the big tree planting) but my dibber snapped off in the ground and then I slipped over again so decided it was lunchtime!

During the welly removal ceremony I managed to slip again and fell on the sporran hurting the backs of both legs, one knee, one hand and in still finding new bruises three days later I appear to have also hurt my lower arm… Arses! So that put an end to my intention to go back outside after lunch and instead I learnt Amazing Grace on the ukelele in an ironic fashion.

Monday – I was very stiff and so Ady did the run to the village for various things but I did chop up a massive load of firewood so felt productive even if I was pretty immobile. More uke-ing and a nice dinner.

Today – was the AGM for the IRCT so after we went to the ferry we headed along to the bunkhouse for that. It was a good turnout and a fairly good meeting although was quite un-dynamic which helps cement the idea that moving on is right. Nothing much is going to change here any time soon and while I passionately believe in being the change you want to see in the world I also don’t believe in imposing your will on others. If so many people (hard to define ‘so many’ when there are barely 20 adults I know) are so obstructive and resistant to change then it is probably best to find somewhere and someone who is more on the same page. That sounds negative and defeatist and was not really the tone of the afternoon, I just know from a bigger picture point of view that our needs not being met current feeling is unlikely to change any time soon.

This afternoon when we got home I did more ukelele-ing. I have very sore fingers but am starting to feel a sense of achievement to to go with them.