Dad had asked for some help cutting up firewood this week and we’d been rained off yesterday but decided to do it this morning. My parents have had an open fire since we moved to this house 35 years ago but a couple of years ago they decided to have a wood burner installed. I’ve never been entirely sure why and it was a saga from beginning to end with at least 3 different lots of people called in to work on it, a chipped mantlepiece having to be replaced from somewhere abroad and the actual burner never working properly necessitating various call backs and fallings out with the supplier. It has now been fixed and actually works fine but of course it’s been so mild it has only been lit a couple of times in the last few weeks. So Dad had a big pile of logs ready to be chopped up small enough to fit in the burner. He does have a chainsaw but is not respectful enough of it and Ady has always done the sawing for him ever since we’ve been together. I think he is starting to realise his axe wielding days are coming to an end at 73 too.
So Dad mostly stood inside the garage peering out from behind the closed door, shielded from the occassional rain shower and flying woodchips and sawdust while Ady sawed and I fed him wood and stacked up the chopped bits. Initially Dad had just asked us to cut it to splittable pieces with the maul and hammer but we actually chopped the whole lot small enough to go straight into the burner using the chainsaw. It felt so good to be outside, doing something productive and active :). A very good couple of hours work. Meanwhile Mum was supervising Davies and Scarlett doing some tidying up. It was long overdue as they have scattered lots of stuff around their room in a sort of half unpacked state. They didn’t seem too traumatised by her supervision so either they will have learnt their lesson and keep stuff more in order in future or she was actually being okay about it. She did show me the carrier bag she’d taken up ‘for rubbish’ was empty at which I laughed at her expecting them to declare anything rubbish and want to throw it away 😆
We all had lunch and then Ady and I went to our room to go through the boxes. Mostly because we wanted to find a particular cook book but also because it feels so very claustrophobic being surrounded by towers of boxes so we shuffled stuff around a little and it feels incrementaly better. We have an ebay pile and after all these months I have uncovered my perfumes so have been wafting around smelling all lovely this afternoon!
At 330pm we walked along to The Charmendean which was the masons hall when I was a child but is now a sort of exhibition / venue place where the blood donation team visit. We’ve felt bad about not giving blood for a year (and realistically I’m not sure how reliable we’ll be again in the future, the nearest donation place to Rum appears to be Inverness!).
As has happened to me several times I failed the initial blood drop in the liquid iron test so had to have a larger sample taken for testing. That passed fine but my left arm is very hard to take blood from and sure enough I have a big lump and bruise there already 🙁 My right arm where the full pint was taken from is nowhere near as bad. Davies came in with me and asked loads of questions, unfortunately the nurse was not as receptive to him as we’ve found other medical staff to be so he didn’t get very comprehensive answers.
We sat back down with Ady and Scarlett who were a few minutes ahead of us in the queue now thanks to my delay and drank water which is supposed to lessen the chance of feeling faint. The nurse called Mr Goddard and a man who’d only just sat down got up. I was sure he must have misheard, particularly when I got called next and Ady should definitely have been before me so I detoured over to the man and said ‘did you call Mr Goddard? This isn’t Mr Goddard’ to which he indignantly replied ‘yes I am!’. I checked the paperwork (probably much to the nurse’s horror) and said ‘what Adrian Goddard?’ to which he replied ‘no!’. Cue much hilarity from the staff when they realised they had two Mr Goddards and a Mrs Goddard all donating in the same little corner of the room. The cry ‘too many Goddards!’ went up when the children joined in to which my response was of course ‘there is no such thing!’ 😆 It would have been realised as they do check your address with you again before starting to take blood but it’s always nice to meet another Goddard :).
Ady’s blood flow is very fast – I’ve been googling to see if I can find out why but can’t. Today his donation took 4 mins 42 seconds, I tried really hard with fist clenching and crossing and uncrossing legs and bum cheeks to push mine through and managed 5mins 30 seconds, so not quite a minute longer but still slower than him. (the other Mr Goddard was much slower than both of us 🙂 ). Apparently the average is between 6 and 8 minutes so we were both on the fast side :). We had our cup of tea and pack of biscuits and then walked home again.
Mum was out tonight at a work colleagues leaving party which meant we planned game pie for dinner using some pheasants and partridges Tom had given us before Christmas, as Mum can’t eat pastry. I made Hugh’s rough puff pastry which always comes out really well but was superb tonight thanks to using lard (Ady said it is the food of gods!) and cooked up the birds with some bacon, onion, garlic, carrots and red wine. It was delicious 🙂 We had it with roast potatoes and red wine gravy and the kids had a complete roasted partridge cooked in bread and butter which they carved themselves. So lovely to have full use of the kitchen 🙂 The kids and I all had baths too.
I spent ages on the bedroom floor with the kids, Scarlett had watched some TV programme about animal attacks earlier which was now haunting her, I suspect she may wake with bad dreams and end up down in our bed tonight. I told her a bedtime story at her request – about how a little girl got a pet hamster :). I came down at 11ish and thought they were on the verge of sleep but at 1230 had to go up and tell them to be quiet so clearly they were not.
Today has been a good day 🙂