Missing Michelle

said in a rather whiny voice because I haven’t seen my friend for faaaar toooo long and have no end date in sight for that 🙁 was going to text you today but thought it might make me cry so I didn’t. So I’ll blog for you instead. Fliss is doing a good job of stand in friend that is tall and wears glasses (sometimes) but it’s not the same.

Today has been a Productive Day. I feel a bit crap that’s it’s my Dad’s birthday and I didn’t manage to get myself together to send a card until after it was too late for it to arrive today 🙁 and I am missing him lots. I spoke to my parents on the phone last night for ages and they are really missing us lots. I tried to tell Mum that she should take comfort in knowing how happy we are and that this is the right place for us but she said although she is delighted we are happy it just means we’re never coming back which doesn’t help. I know Julie went away feeling much the same. Family and friends and the distance between us all now is definitely the cloud around the silver lining. We are friend rich for the next week or so though so that will see us through… anyone wanting to book their space please feel free to do so.

Back to being productive though… Ady and Scarlett moved the broody hen which proved to be a mistake and she is now back in the coop again on her eggs. We had hoped to move her to a brooder pen ready to hatch but she had different ideas so we’ve returned her to the coop again. I spent some time outside with a draw knife stripping bark off poles ready to put the tipi up but it was pretty midgey and my favourite not related to me crofter (Neil on Eigg) told me to NEVER try and work when it is midgey so I worked til I couldn’t see my arms for midges and then came back indoors again. I collected all the dry washing from the line, sorted it and make all the beds (we’d slept in sleeping bags last night as I was too slack to bother yesterday). I made various phone calls including checking Bonnie in at the vets, booking her in to their kennels, returning the call to Calmac who wanted to speak to the marketing person for Rum (which seems to be me!), dealt with the rent from the tenants (now paid), did lots of online stuff including a food shop, booked diesel and petrol on the ferry, replied to emails and some blog comments and generally got on top of stuff.

Ady did strimming. Lots and lots of strimming 🙂

Davies and Scarlett did lots of drawing and Davies did some more writing of his latest story – about a dragon called Long Tail. He’s been doing lots of character developement including creating models of the dragon in plasticine and Steve here has promised to help him do some online stuff with it including making a game with the character (he designs computer games).

Then we went down for the Midgefest post mortem and next stage in Events Committee which is Blasda – yet more probably too ambitious ideas for us to get cracking on in the next month. I love the fact there are other crazy dreamers here with ideas too big for them to take on but happy to have a crack at nonetheless. I feel in good company ;).

We stopped for a couple of drinks and could probably have stayed longer as it was a nice evening (if a bit midgey) down there but we had food to cook and kids to get home after lots of late nights and more on the cards this week so headed for home around 8pm.

We watched a bit of River cottage hedgerow but it was really disappointing so we gave up on that. I cooked dinner and everyone else has gradually gone off to bed. I’ve been doing some more online stuff including signing up with Vonage for a local landline type phone arrangement. Not having reliable emergency phoneline coverage has been a bit scary to me with Ady doing chainsaw and strimming and having kids too. For not very much money it means we have a bit more connection to the outside world and can be contacted easier by people too. Eventually when our contracts run out on our mobile phones we will go across to PAYG sims as we rarely use them at all now anyway. I’ve also bought the domain name croft3.co.uk as after much debate we have decided to just stick with croft 3 as the name of our croft. We may later name a house when we build one but for online purposes I quite like having that to cover us for various things we may sell / produce / offer.