Yesterday was a wonderful day – I spent almost all of it in the polytunnel sowing hundreds of seeds. Seeds in containers, seeds in egg boxes and seeds in the ground. I just love the poetry of planting tiny little bombs of potential amazing plants and flowers and food and waiting to see what might happen – it;s like giving birth to a million tiny children and waiting to watch them grow. The sun was shining, birds were singing, chickens came and hung out with me and I sang along to my music.
Ady was getting the replacement wind turbine that we have had since December but not gotten round to fixing up back up and running. Steve and Trudi came up and chatted with me for a bit which had the dual outcome of really winding me up and really making me grateful I’m not a director any more. I ranted at Ady for about 15 minutes after they’d gone which made me feel much better. I’ve withdrawn my name from the running as chair of the community association too. I really am determined to just live here this year and only give my time to fun things I want to do for pleasure rather than things which feel like the ‘right’ thing to do.
One of my rants yesterday was people like Steve and Trudi and indeed Mike who keeps telling Ady we don’t know how lucky we are having our view and our life here that we do indeed both know how very lucky we are and fully appreciate what we’ve got but have also worked really hard, made lots of compromises and tough choices, put up with the challenges of living off grid in a caravan on a remote island miles and miles from family and friends, put hours every single day into just surviving and have come from 20 years of working in demanding jobs prior to this life, unlike pretty much anyone else here. We got our croft as a result of a credible, feasible business plan and an interview and have poured tens of thousands of pounds and four years of our lives into making what we have here from a bare field to what it is today. Every choice has been researched, discussed, agonised over, every purchase has been pondered and considered, every livestock loss felt keenly, many many night spent lying awake, many conversations between the four of us as to whether we are doing the right thing. So fuck off with your ‘you don’t know how lucky you are’ bollocks actually.
Anyway…. worked that off my chest didn’t I?!
After polytunnelling I came in for a shower, we played games and I made quiche for dinner with some of the suddenly huge stash of eggs we have 🙂
Today was firewood day – it took us a while to get the chainsaw running, it is new (although we’ve actually had it for about a year!!) so we filled the fuel and chain oil tanks but it took a while to get started and I think we flooded it. It had been our plan to go down to the woodland to cut some stuff but we faffed with it for so long it got late so in the end we just chopped up a load of stuff that we had around the woodstore and had not been able to split with the axe including the remains of a picnic bench. Given us a good weeks worth of wood though. Will do some more over the next few days. We had lunch – outside! and then I went down to Crafternoon with Fliss, Ali and Deb. Topics of conversation were mostly bitching about yesterdays directors meeting.
Home to shut up the shed, water the seedlings and enjoy Ady cooking dinner. We watched some River Cottage and episode 1 of Haven which we got from Lovefilm on the basis it’s similar to Warehouse 13 and Eureka. It is indeed very similar, maybe too much so.