Monday – In the morning I chopped up some firewood and helped Ady move a barn door from the bottom of the croft to halfway up. We’ve used it as the floor of a pig pen a couple of times and it was in a house Ady has dismantled to use the bits for a new house. We have two rehomed pigs arriving next week so needed to finish creating a new area for them next to Barbara, Waddles and Ben Fogle (current three girls – Barbara and Waddles will be staying, Ben Fogle may be pregnant so we’ll wait and see if she is but eventually she will be sausages. Does that all sound a bit too much like I’m blogging in code?!) so they can meet at a distance before fully integrating them. Ady is working on that this week with odd bits of assistance when he needs them.
We had pancakes for lunch in  celebration of the chickens finally starting to lay eggs again then Ady and I went to the boat. Calmac and Johnston Bros – the chandlery and fuel station in Mallaig – had pulled out all the stops to get our jerry cans of petrol back to us on the boat, Calmac are really very lovely to us from the Mallaig office and really go out of their way to be helpful. We collected that and called in to the shop to get the shop key as I am Mrs Post Office for the week while Jinty is off.
Back home and up the hill with a 20lt jerry can each, trying hard to love the hill after a lecture from Fliss and Ali about doing the hill more if I am finding the hill hard on Saturday night! It started to spit a bit so having unsuccessfully tried to burn a load of empty milk cartons after feeding all the out of date milk (from the shop) to the pigs who loved it and drank from the bottles like babies, I came in for a cup of tea and to sort out some dinner prep. We had home made bagels with chicken and bacon and home made coleslaw so bagel making (make dough, prove dough, shape dough, allow to prove again, poach the bagels, bake the bagels, toast the bagels….) and coleslaw making took time. Scarlett grated the carrots for me which was fab as I hate grating things. We played games and had dinner while watching two Warehouse 13s.
Today – Post Office for me. Not sure if word was out or whether it was normal Tuesday morning behaviour but it was madly busy, I must have boiled the kettled 10 times as people kept coming for coffees. I had a long chat with a tourist and generally enjoyed being down there and sociable. Home for lunch, a bit of helping Ady and then baking cookies with Scarlett. It was grey and drizzly outside so Ady was dodging showers while getting more done on the pigs pen. I had a message from the pig rehoming woman to say she can bring them next week so booked them on the ferry. Exciting! 🙂