I made bread dough this morning and finished off the newsletter for the Friends of Rum – a Trust run organisation which anyone can join for a tenner a year, gets them two newsletters a year and various discounts etc. Set up mostly to harvest contact details and get support from various people who love Rum and want to be a small part of our community without actually living here. It used to be a winter and a summer newsletter but I took it on last year and wanted to hold back the summer one to announce the opening of the bunkhouse which meant it was more like an autumn newsletter so the winter one slipped to spring and actually I think spring and autumn may be more appropriate to update on news of the coming season and report on the one just passed.
Ady was out gathering together materials to build a pig pen – I was waiting til 11am when I had arranged with a TV researcher to be somewhere with phone signal so she could call me. That ended up taking about an hour, she was very friendly and easy to chat to and we talked about all sorts of things. She confessed to being really interested in Home Ed so we talked about that a fair bit. I expressed my usual concerns about sensationalist TV reporting and was assured that was not the sort of show they are looking for. She is hoping to come up and meet us and scope things out a bit more but it all sounds quite promising – and we’d get paid! 🙂
Scarlett was out checking out the goats who are still hanging around the bottom of the croft, we helped carry a few more bits of galvanised sheeting up and then came in for lunch. I then left the others to it for the afternoon – Ady finished building the pig shelter, Scarlett hung out with the goats more and Davies spent hours on a Doctor Who app he had downloaded which looked really good with some excellent problem solving and logic puzzles. I went off to Fliss’ for Crafternoon – Fliss, Ali, Deb and I. Deb was spinning with her fold up wheel, Fliss was knitting, Ali was making friendship bracelets and I was knitting a scarf. Individually I do like all three of them but I always feel a bit hemmed in at these afternoons – it’s all too nice and too twee and too polite. It makes me feel a bit Tourette-y as though I want to randomly shout ‘Fuck!!’ just to get a reaction. I think I might be weird 🙂
Back at home Ady had finished the pig house – we are moving Tom & Barbara up to the top corner of the croft, they have been on the current bottom corner for well over a year now and it is very muddy and ready to recover from their time on it before starting to graze it with the geese or more likely some sheep before being ready to start growing on. Barbara’s litter is due at the end of this month so we could potentially have up to 10 pigs on this new bit within the next few weeks and two pigs are far easier to move and settle than 10 so we want to do it before she farrows. We need to separate them fairly soon too as the jostling about at feed time is not good for her the further into her pregnancy she gets plus she will start to get bad tempered as she gets closer to farrowing. The house is built, we need to create a small pen for Barbara inside the bigger pen for all of them and then do the actual move. Hopefully sometime middle of next week to give them a good 2-3 weeks in there before she has the piglets.
I made bread and then cooked dinner – Â ‘breakfast for dinner’ of sausage, bacon, eggs, beans (for Ady), fried bread, mash (for Scarlett) and garlicky potatoes cooked in the bacon fat (Ady, Davies and I). Very nice 🙂 We watched the last couple of episodes of series 1 of Eureka so that it can go back tomorrow.
Early start for me tomorrow, I need to be in the village for 9am for a board meeting.