I had a Visitor Management Group meeting this morning and on the walk down there I made up my mind that if I were to start knocking on the head some of the things which I don’t find useful, enjoyable or fulfilling this would be a good thing to not do any more. So I told everyone that I didn’t want to do it any more, have potentially roped in Vikki to do it instead of me, emailed off my last few contributions and feel very happy about it. I didn’t hate it, didn’t even particularly resent being there, it is a fairly small drain on my time really with meetings perhaps only once every two months but I got nothing out of it, don’t feel it is a particularly constructive or purposeful group and as such don’t need to give my time for nothing to it any more. 🙂
I had a cup of tea with Vikki as the meeting was very brisk and efficient and we were out within the hour, then walked home, marvelling that I managed both ways without getting rained on. I did slip over on the way down the croft so had a wet muddy knee for the duration of the meeting but that is preferable to being rained on.
Ady and the kids had a productive morning – Scarlett cleaned out Humphrey and her and Ady worked out how old he is in hamster years – 106 apparently! Davies spent the morning recreating a cover of a book to recover an old book and turn it into something from Adventure Times to be a prop for one of his home made films. I am not at all familiar with Adventure Times and probably don’t care enough to google it but it seems to be all the thing with the young ‘uns. I may be officially old and Someone’s Mum now ;).
Home for lunch and I made some bread dough to prove. Ady volunteered to cook dinner – steak pie as he wanted to experiment with cooking the meat on the log burner top. The others all carried on with their various indoory things while I went back down the hill to do some more to the honesty cupboard / larder / upcycled freezer. It’s looking good, I’m pleased with it :). I was down there for a good hour or so and then Casey came along, we chatted for a while and she headed up to see the kids while I finished the bit I was on before getting thoroughly rained on and heading up the hill myself. Casey was playing lego with the kids 🙂
We talked and drank tea and Casey and I looked at some aerial shots of the croft and talked about permaculture design and long term croft plans. Ady and I had been saying earlier that it would be great to get some third party input on some of our ideas and Casey is a landscape design architect so although not precisely her thing she is very interested in what we want to do, particularly as her special interest is in design for tourism.
Casey left, I baked bread and made some pastry for the pies, had leftover so made an apple tart too and then Ady made suet crust for the pie tops and finished off dinner. Claire gave Davies and Scarlett the Little Book of Calm the other day having talked to them about it from Black Books much to their delight and hilarity so we watched the first couple of episodes of Black Books to see that featured again.
I had a big list of emails to send and things to do online and for once I think I have achieved all of them. And so to bed.