It’s hard to get motivated. I really want to be outside digging the house plot. But it is so cold outside that within five minutes you can’t feel your fingers or your toes, it’s so windy your hat keeps getting blown off and any loose clothing flaps around, it hails every 15 minutes and, well, it’s just January in Scotland. Outside is not really somewhere people are supposed to be.
Yesterday the internet kept going on and off. Mel rang to say she hadn’t slept much the night before (the castle basement keeps flooding which means the boiler cuts out so there is a constant petrol pump running to pump the water out. There can’t be an electric pump because the power capacity on Rum can’t cope with such a big draw. So the petrol pump needs refilling every couple of hours through the night and she had been doing that. So the postponed Christmas party was postponed again. She did say that while she was not up to hosting a full on party she would still love for us to come down though so we did.
The kids played X box, we had a nice bits and pieces dinner of Mel’s defrosted festive leftovers, Ady and I both had baths and it was all very nice. Mel headed off to bed around 11 and Ady and I sat up for another half an hour with a last glass of wine and chatted. Feels odd to be sitting in a proper room late at night chatting just the two of us.
It’s been one of those crazy Rum times where we give fate way too much of a hand in what happens next and as usual Rum gives us signs (and yes, we probably choose to see them, I do know that) that we are supposed to be here. I was utterly pissed off with Rum people but then the whole island came out to celebrate my birthday and offer us beds for the night and just generally be lovely all this week. The fact is we have built a life here for ourselves the four of us. It is home, really, properly our home. We just need an actual physical home now to enjoy rather than endure the tricky bits. While we were talking an email pinged onto my phone from someone who reads the blog, is just starting on a home ed journey with a 3yo and wants to come and help with the cob build responding to the newsletter I put out yesterday. Another sign?
So a decent nights sleep, a walk home in a bitterly cold but finally still and dry landscape this morning, Tom & Barbara Pig all happily tucked up in their pigpen all filled with straw looking cosy and warm and all the birds rushing down the hill clucking, quacking, shrieking and calling as soon as they saw us. I love coming home to the croft.
Today Ady and I have dodged the hail and snow showers to chop up masses of firewood, we have a good weeks worth all processed. We kept tethering and untethering the wind turbine too so the kids got to sit in the warm and play on tablets, use the internet and listen to music -January stuff :). We made a big roast dinner as we had all had way too much of other people’s home made pizza and jacket potatoes over the last week and were feeling a bit Goddard food deficient.
And I did our tax returns 🙂 And finished the Rum monthly newsletter. All adminny stuff and paperwork done, firewood processed – the weeks tasks are already being crossed off at a fast rate.