This morning I made pancakes for breakfast to use up spare egg and milk mix that I made too much of for the quiche – using up leftovers, free eggs and applause from children – result 🙂
We walked into Lancing to tax the Pajero. Wikipedia tells me various interesting facts about Pajero but my favourite is that it means ‘wanker’ in Spanish. This amuses me more than I can possibly say but Ady and I have thoroughly enjoyed using it as an offensive name for each other. I fear we have further expanded our children’s knowledge of swear words in ways Dora never would but surely that counts as modern language expansion?! En Famille has nothing on us 😉
Back at home we had lunch in the garden and then disappeared as we had a viewing on the house. The feedback was that it is too small for them which is a shame but at least the agent is getting people here to look at it, two viewings in the first four days is pretty good going. It will be even easier next week as we won’t be here at all so no need to pre arrange times with us or for us to dash around shoving things in cupboards and running the kettle under the cold tap so it can be put away cool.
Not to mention finding a suitable place to hide a hamster!
We went to the tip to drop off some carpet and one last bag of rubbish, the charity shop with one last box of stuff and Argos to collect a reserved airbed. It had mixed reviews and has a built in footpump which made it more expensive than another one we looked at but I wanted this one because it is kingsize rather than double and I remembered I still had a voucher from leaving the library which had some money left on it so that paid for half of it which made it cheaper than a cheap airbed anyway. It actually inflated really easily and whilst I’m not a big fan of airbeds it is definitely more comfortable to sit on that the camping mat so I am hopeful it will be better to sleep on too.
Back at home we debated cleaning out the Sharan ready to give to Bruce on Sunday but decided to put that off to tomorrow and also debated finishing off the loft but also put that off til tomorrow. Instead Davies did some writing – he’s decided he wants to improve his handwriting and do some written stuff generally so asked for a notebook with lines and is wanting to keep a sort of diary, his words ‘I want to write about the future, things like what I think it will be like on Rum, what new DS games I want and stuff. And then I will write about what it is actually like once I’m there’. His first entry is a picture of Luigi and ‘I hope this game is really good. It had better be it costs £34’ 😆 Ady was helping him (I use the term loosely) with spelling and punctuation which led Scarlett to ask ‘Daddy what did you actually do at school?’
We rang Donald ‘the Hen’ McDonald on Skye (as recommended by Neil on Eigg) and ordered 10 hens, 1 cock, 5 ducks, 1 goose and 1 gander to arrive in May (geese in July). He doesn’t do drakes and he doesn’t do turkeys but he recommended somewhere to look for ads for those. Ady spoke to him and said he sounded great, a real character. We’ll grow our flock by letting them hatch their own but this will get us going with some good egg and table birds.
We rang Calmac and discovered they will take delivery of stuff for us at the port and then bung it on the next ferry, charge us for carriage (for a 237kg shed it will be a tenner) and even help us off with it the other end. I had been told that it worked like that but assumed it was for smaller items only, looks like life will not be *quite* as tricky as it looked yesterday, so chicken shed to be ordered to arrive at Calmac the week after us. Ady also spoke to Richard from SNH about a vehicle permit and got that all arranged too.
I took care of emails – two gas bottles ordered and an invoice to pay for them, they’ll be there ready for us when we arrive so cooking, heating, fridge and hot water in the static all sorted. I’ve also emailed the hostel to see if we can stay there and the static people to try and chivvy them a little.
Ady cooked, I had a very long bath, the kids did drawing and Davies did a little animation on his 3DS too. The kids and I took Humphrey upstairs into one of the empty rooms and let him have a run around. Can’t quite believe that 3 weeks today I will be going to bed on Rum.
3 weeks. Wow.