This morning was bottling mead. Oh how very Nic-proproiate 🙂
We started by gathering some empty wine bottles – Lisa and John have friend who have a campsite and gather wine bottles from their recycling to give to them to use. We soaked them in the bath (which I had to clean first! :shock:) to get all the labels off and give them a good clean.
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Then we made up sterilising solution and left them to soak in that while we went off to pick some raspberries.
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apparently I look like this when I pick raspberries – who knew?!
Then back to rinse the bottles. The level of water used and drained away in this exercise rather offended me. But I was in an easily offended mood anyway by having to wash the bath round in the first place…
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Next was bottling mead from 2009. As I claimed previous home brew experience and Lisa had a horror story of previous WWOOFers flooding her kitchen floor with wine I was nominated as bottom end of the hose while Ady was in charge of top end, so he got to ensure it stayed in the bucket and didn’t suck up sediment while I got to fill the bottles. Which meant by 1030am I had had several big mouthfuls of mead in order to start it moving from the bucket to the bottles – oh the hardship 😉
We bottled 14 bottles and had a half bottle left over which was put to one side to have with dinner tonight 🙂 Then we set up a production line of corking, labelling and sealing the labels
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That took us to midday-ish at which point Lisa declared we were having lunch early as Carina was going back to school this afternoon so we all ate together and Ady and I cleared up.
We have sort of set a precedent for always doing the washing up after lunch and dinner, which I don’t mind when we have been catered for but was slightly annoying yesterday when we actually did the cooking. It is also petty but irritating that we come in to find other washing up such as the kids breakfast and mid afternoon snack washing up piled there too now. I guess as they boil kettles to wash up it simply waits for a twice daily mammoth session and Lisa did thank Ady earlier today for all the washing up but it slightly grates on me. I was fairly pissed off about being asked to wash round their bath before we washed the wine bottles out this morning and there have been small but noticable incidents while we’re here of being ‘just WWOOFer’s which have put my back up. My issue I am sure rather than any deliberate slight and it is always a funny dynamic to have strangers living with you who are working for you but Davies observed today that here we are ‘WWOOFers rather than part of the family like we have been in other places’ so there is a definite feeling of divide.
Lisa was off out this afternoon though so she gave us some jobs to do -trimming round some beds that hadn’t been done with the strimmer or mower due to having water pipes and pots so needed doing with shears and picking strawberries / removing runners. All of which were minor jobs that we whizzed through and then lazed around.
We wandered down to Tescos for some milk and bread before dinner and then enjoyed an hour or so chatting to Lisa and John after dinner. Then Yannick their son came and asked Davies and Scarlett if they would play with him, which was nice as they have not really interacted with each other at all. He got Lisa to help him ask and she played with them too – some variation on hide and seek. We retired to the static for showers, some discussion about how our lives have changed which I recorded for the other blog but needs some more added to it and then some story before bed for Davies and Scarlett.
We have once again managed to not get to bed at any sort of sensible time due to playing with Ady’s phone and spending too long online. The lure of sofa and electricity proves strong…