Yesterday we did a couple of loads of laundry and hung it out, had some lunch and then headed off to collect the car from the pier. It was a gorgeous sunny day so it was a slow meander with plenty of pausing to look at the view and talk about the last two years along the way.
At the pier Ady took the batteries off charge and fixed them back in the car (it had broken down too far away for the chargers to reach so he had to disconnect them and carry them to the boat shed to put on charge – the Pajero has two batteries). Meanwhile I took photos of the view, the kids played on the beach and Bonnie mostly watched one of the Bunkhouse builders filling up his digger with building stuff to take along to the site.
The car started ok but only went a very short way before it conked out. It carried on starting ok but failed to actually drive anywhere and then died. Ady and the builder pushed it out of the way to a sensible place and we left it there. There is noone on the island with the skills to sort it out so the search is on for another vehicle as we simply can’t be without one for any length of time given our animal feed, own groceries, petrol etc deliveries we need to transport from the pier up to the croft – not to mention firewood. Just what we didn’t need 🙁
We walked back to the village to buy a beer each from the shop to take round to sit on the bench and toast our two years since being offered the croft. We bumped into Claire along the way and she invited herself along which felt quite symbolic somehow – a sort of illustration that you are not alone here, even when at times you’d like to be, and that you are also somehow responsible for others, as she was in clear need of a friendly chat. It was actually a nice hour or so sat with her there and she took our photo meaning it is not our usual precariously balanced self timer shot.
It started to get cold and we had animals to feed so we parted ways and headed back to the croft. I got dinner on while Ady fed the animals. We watched Pirates and Scientists (or whatever it’s called) and had a really nice roast lamb dinner followed by rhubarb crumble.
I got an email from Lesley asking if my offer to help with recruitment for the development officer post was still open and if so could I look at the applicants CVS – all 14 of them!
Today – it’s rained and rained and rained. This morning after Popmaster Ady and I donned oranges and walked down to the village to put our veg order in, get a few bits from the shop and some stuff for the freezer to ensure the next 3 days dinners are all sorted and mean we don’t need to go down for anything til Thursday. Forgetting that we had agreed to help Mike load his removal van tomorrow between boats but never mind, it’s good to be organised!
Back home for lunch – soup and fresh rolls for me and Tarly, rolls for Davies and some leftover roast dinner for Ady. I did some jigsaw and some knitting and some chatting to the kids. Davies did loads of drawings – he’s experimenting with black, white and grey and shading, along with recreating characters from Adventure Time and putting them into his own stories, changing expressions etc. He really is very talented with his drawing. Scarlett spent most of the afternoon decorating the cover of a notepad with drawings and sticky things – it looks fab. I love that both of them have a trademark cartoon style character of themselves they draw, I must get photos of them.
Ady made dinner with Davies as sous chef and it was delicious. I scored all of the applicants for the Dev Officer job and filled in the matrix we have for essential and desirable skills. A couple of clear interwviewees to my mind, hopefully the other people scoring agree.
Tonight I’ve done a good job of clearing my email inbox. We’re off to Mainland Land for an overnight next Monday to Tuesday for a dentists visit – we have a car booked, will have time to scoot round Morrisons and Lidl in FW before the dentist then straight back to Mallaig where we’re staying at Martin’s for the first time. Martin has a guest house and an actual house in Mallaig and introduced himself to us during our first week here to say we would be welcome to stay there anytime and if he could ever help bringing stuff across or having stuff delivered to him as a mainland address he was always happy to help the islanders. Our mainland mentality always prevented us from taking him up on it but we decided to try. Plus he is taking a turkey off us – Ady killed it this morning, so we are able to pay him back in kind which feels better. So that trip needing some final details sorting. I’ve also emailed a list of suggested topics for articles to the Scottish Island Explorer magazine editor for 2015 to see if he takes me up on any of those. I got an email from the COb course woman yesterday confirming our places and receipt of our deposit and saying they are looking forward to meeting us and hearing all about Rum 🙂 Our test blocks in the polytunnel have all dried rock hard and it seems that our soil is just right and will need very little added to it at all. We think we have worked out the chicken house design, just need to draw it on paper so we have some idea of plans and then we can start digging!
So car aside all is well.