Yesterday morning I spent some time baking – wraps for the kids lunch, bread dough for later and several batches of peanut butter cookies for general snaffling through the week. Â Ady was doing stuff outside. At midday we got changed and headed down to the village to attend the annual Familiarisation Day lunch. The Rum Visitor Management Group (which I used to sit on until one of my rationalisation of all things voluntary a year or so ago) holds them every spring when all sorts of local tourist services and accommodation providers from Fort William to Mallaig and inbetween are invited over to Rum for the day. Trudi the ranger meets them in Mallaig and the Seafari Orion boat is chartered to bring them all across. They get a castle tour, visit the bunkhouse, walk along the front to see the various Rum sights, have lunch at the teashop where they meet local business people and then have a bit of a walk out onto the NNR before being boated back to Mallaig again.
Ady and I went to talk about Croft 3 Produce and Rum Venison. There were various folk there, from Calmac, Skye, FW tourist office and so on. There was free lunch and nice cakes, lots of general chatting and promoting Rum and gently easing ourselves back in to answering tourist questions again.
We heard that our animal feed delivery had arrived the previous day so walked back up to collect the car and went to the pier to pick that up. Ady brought that all up to the croft in 3 wheelbarrow loads while I chopped a load of firewood. We spent some time fiddling around with water tanks and starting to work out how to make the flushing loo in the caravan we’ve been talking about doing but started to lose light so went no further that talking and planning. Tom & Barbara did a bit of leaping from one pen to the other as Ady had separated them in the morning which they always take a while to settle in to the idea of.
I made dinner and we watched the last episode on the Lovefilm disc of Eureka! I’d been getting text and email alerts of a good chance of northern lights so after dinner the kids and I went outside and sure enough there they were 🙂 We took some photos and later after everyone else had gone to bed I went back outside and took more. The caravan rather annoyingly is in the way of north so you can’t sit on the sporran with a hot chocolate and watch – another design fault we never appreciated! 😉
Today was All On The Croft. Ady had been down to the castle first thing and done a load of laundry  and brought it back up so I got that hanging out to dry. Davies and Scarlett headed off down to the village to do some cycling while Ady and I made a start on Operation Flushing Loo. Predictably some bits we expected to be tricky were really easy and other bits we thought would be straightforward proved difficult. But by the end of the day we had a loo which fills, flushes and is suitable for weeing in with the flushed liquid draining into a tank below the caravan, a basket inside to catch solids and filter that and the liquid flowing in a pipe under the caravan and right away down the hill. Next step for that is to dig it in and create a drainage sink for the water but for now it is very, very diluted wee which is fine to just drain out and run away. Tomorrow we will perfect the basket to catch the solids which will then need emptying once a month or so into a composting system we are creating with another old water tank which will be filled with composting matter such as leaf litter and sawdust and a whole load of worms. That will get topped up by the drained, dry (ish) solids as the tank under the caravan needs emptying and will then compost down ready to be used on crops. All very exciting and potentially a massive improvement both to the caravan but also to the general list of tasks we have to get through each week just to survive here. By tomorrow evening that should be set up ready to use, after a few weeks we will know how successful it has been in terms of a longer term option. I mostly had a big tidy up of the bathroom, taking absolutely everything out of it, going through it all and chucking out and reorganising and cleaning everything before putting it all back in. We need to do that with every room really, it’s a great way of properly clearing up.
The kids came back for lunch so we all stopped and ate together, then they headed back out again and Claire appeared with the sad news that Mad Ben the Fencer who we met a few times when he was over working here in our first year here and we even did a bit of paid work for has died. Â Pretty shocking and poor Claire who was quite close to him was very upset so I made her a cup of tea and stopped to chat with her for a while. Claire then headed off to feed the pigs some scraps she had brought up and then the kids walked back down to the village with her. Ady and I tidied up, fed the animals and headed down to the village for a few bits of shopping and a beer. Alistair, from Eigg, who got our caravan up onto the croft is over doing road repairs so we bought him a drink and had a general chat with the various islanders who were at the shop. It was a nice atmosphere down there – a sunny Rum day :).
Back home for showers all round, mammoth hair brushing for Scarlett, a collaborative dinner effort from Ady and I and my planned early night not quite panning out. A busy day tomorrow with Post Office in the morning, followed by First Aid training, doctors appointments for both kids, Crafternoon and then dinner with the Kinloch Castle Friends including Mairi and Big Dave who all arrive tomorrow on the boat.