15 minutes
I reckon I may get 15 minutes out of a ‘fully charged’ battery on the netbook so I’m having a quick bash at blogging at the static to upload at some point.
Last night after blogging, finally uploading the photos to moonpig for a fathers day card and walking back up to the static I got in just before Ady served up dinner. We’d ordered some mince from Jinty but it had all sold out (she can be a bit random in remembering to keep stuff by for you that you’ve ordered bless her) so we got some bacon with the intention of making pasta bake, except we had very little pasta! (Reminds me of that saying about we could have ham and eggs if we only had some eggs. And some ham.) So Ady cooked that for the kids and then cobbled together something for us using spaghetti, cheese sauce, a jar of sauce we’d been donated from the students with tomatoes and marscapone cheese and some bacon. It was delicious but I think I paid for all the buttery richness later on 🙁
It was still very light so at 10 ish I decided to walk up to the croft to hang the washing out. The kids were watching something on the dvd player (also on it’s last legs, the hinges have gone and the speaker doesn’t work anymore) but they wanted to come too so we all ended up walking up there with Bonnie too. The chickens, pigs and ducks were most surprised to see us all again! I hung the washing out and the kids rang my parents for a chat. They are coming up in two weeks 🙂 Mum told me she’d been in a car accident on Monday and had 2 hours of dental work on Tuesday – she is understanding of the fact we are only really communicating in emergency situations at the moment but it still felt a bit rubbish to have not talked in a couple of weeks and then got all that stored up angst from her. I doubt we’ll ever bother with a landline here as the cost will be huge in setting it up but we do have pretty good mobile signal up on the croft so hopefully we’ll be able to chat more often soon.
Back to the static for bedtime. I woke in the night with dreadful stomach cramps and was awake shivering and wishing for a flushing toilet for about an hour 🙁 I’ve been fine, if rather fragile today so I am assuming it was a reaction to the rather greasy dinner rather than anything more sinister or contagious.
This morning Ady went to feed the animals and lop down some branches along the route that the tractor is taking on Sunday. I got the kids up, breakfasted and we did some reading / writing / drawing stuff. Having addressed the envelopes of things we walked down to the shop to get some stamps and get a form signed by Ali who is one of the directors. It is also her birthday today so we wished her happy birthday. We called in to see Sandy and Fliss for any more developments on the tractor and trailer and then returned to the trail to do some more lopping. We checked for eggs and found five today 🙂 More chickens had gotten out though so some more fence proofing was required.
Back to the static (looking forward to just saying ‘home’ or ‘the croft’ very soon) for lunch and then down to meet the ferry. We needed to empty the loo and fill up waters on the way and the kids came with us but we had cut it very fine and ended up arriving as the boat was pulling out. Ian and Kate had very kindly started loading their car with our stuff as we had two large amazon boxes, two from the CoOp and 10 sacks of various animal feed (mixed grain and layers pellets for birds, pig nuts and dusting powder for chickens and wormer for pigs) arrived from Harbro, the feed supplier in Fort William. We helped unload the van for the shop, took our stuff from Ian and Kate and headed back up. The Pajero has been really playing up, we think the turbo has gone. It seems to struggle with the 10 miles an hour, barely getting out of second gear driving around the island and has been chucking out nasty smoke, making a knocking sound and not getting up the hills but it seemed to be running okay so with the massive incentive of not needing to hand carry / wheelbarrow 10 sacks of feed we chanced the drive and got all the way to the croft and up to the horse box at the top of the hill too 🙂 Yay! The kids were so happy playing on the riverbank we left them to it and came back with the car. Amazon had delivered a couple of cake cooling racks, 24 bags of pasta and some wheat flakes – am loving subscribe and save which delivers free and has been brilliant for bulk orders of sacks of flour, sugar, loo rolls, washing up liquid, dried fruit and nuts, rice and pasta. Once the static is on the croft we’re planning on shelving out the horse box to become a proper pantry / food storage area and stocking up ready for the winter when boats are unreliable.
Some very friendly American tourists came along the nature trail path at that point so we chatted to them for quite a while. It’s funny how quickly we’ve become used to being islanders and knowing the answers to the ‘usual’ questions. I guess being long term Home Educators is good practise for the same old things being asked again and again ;). They were really enthusiastic and excited about what we’re doing too which is always nice :). We gathered the kids up who were busy creating a little world out of the clay around the beach and making dams and islands. Davies stayed at the static with Bonnie but Tarly came with Ady and I to see Fliss briefly, sell some eggs to Jinty (one box sold while we were still in the shop 🙂 Love seeing Rum Croft Eggs written on the boxes :)) and have a couple of drinks including one with Ali to celebrate her birthday. Ady and Scarlett returned but I stayed for another as I was chatting to various people including Mark, a student who has been here for six weeks studying small mammals. He is really nice, would love a croft himself and is a fellow Hugh F-W and John Seymour fan. He’s back in mid July and has already promised to bring a book along with him he thinks we’d like to read. We get some really cool and interesting people passing through Rum, plenty of them end up staying or returning time and again.
Back at the static I got both the kids showered / bathed (the shower tray is about 6 inches deep so almost bath like for kids) and cooked their dinner and put some bread dough on. Then I prepped our dinner and walked down to find Ady who was doing more lopping. We both had showers, ate dinner and read the latest copy of the West Word (local newsletter) which has us mentioned a couple of times and our welcome pack from SCF (Scottish Crofting Federation) while the kids watched a film.
This time tomorrow Alasdair will be here. This time on Sunday we could actually be on the croft. I’m torn between thrilled and excited and bloody terrified!
Saturday
Well he’s here!
Today has been a little like Christmas Eve, but when you are a bit afraid of Santa….
This morning I woke to my ferry alarm. The ferry comes on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, twice each day during the summer and as it comes at different times each day I have an alarm set on my phone for 10 minutes before it arrives each time. Saturday mornings that is at 845am which often is what wakes me on a Saturday. Ady went off to meet it as we are never entirely sure if something might come for us and we have promised to collect Vikki’s washing machine if it comes so we need to meet each ferry anyway. Meantime I got up and baked the bread I had proving overnight. Ady returned with Sandy and they went off to do some chainsawing and clearing the path to the croft. The kids and I breakfasted (on freshly baked bread, is there any better way?).
I made a start on packing stuff up and then walked down to the croft following Bonnie and the kids who had all left separately in that direction. I headed to Jinty’s to get some cash out of the post office and by the time I came back up Ady and Sandy were drinking tea in the static so I joined them. The kids were down at the river – can’t wait until that is within sight of the static 🙂
Sandy left and we had lunch, fully expecting the kids to reappear hungry but they didn’t so eventually Ady went off to do some more strimming and send them back. I fed them and carried on with my tidying. As ever when tidying I got caught up in the small stuff and found myself creating piles of paperwork to categorise into different things and I now have a filing system of sorts; Rum Stuff, Croft Stuff, Money Stuff… that sort of thing.
Ady reappeared with a dipper chick during the afternoon. We are assuming it had been evicted from a nest due to the chainsawing down of trees along the path. He had rescued it from the clutches of some hoodies and we put it into a margarine tub for a few hours but it’s mother still seemed to be searching for it so we returned it and later saw it with her again. Fingers crossed…
The kids have been doing bedroom sort outs as we had assumed Alasdair would stay with us so had planned for Davies to go in with Scarlett so he could have Davies’ room. In the event Alasdair has gone in to a caravan down in the village although after much fussing and fighting about sleepovers the kids have ended up asking to sleep together anyway.
I stuck some jacket potatoes in the oven and after lots of knuckle crushing and teeth grinding (we are pretty stressed about this challenge) we headed down to meet the ferry.
A bad start when the tractor didn’t come off the ferry as it’s battery was flat and it needed a jump start. Which didn’t happen so it ended up towed off. I’d love to pretend I pulled off nochalent at this stage but I so didn’t! We drove round to Sandy’s where Alastair was headed to charge his battery up and then back to the static. Sandy (who has become our project manager ;)) and Alasdair came up and we walked the path. I don’t even really want to think about how it will all pan out tomorrow but it will either be fine or it won’t. And that will be fine somehow. I’ll deal with it if it’s not.
We went down to the shop – the kids were busy watching The Witches on dvd – we’ve just finished the book and had a few drinks. Some new people have arrived to work at the castle. It’s clear to me how much Rum feels like home, everyone expresses surprise at how we’ve only been here 6 weeks or so. We’ve a midsommers party planned at the croft on Thursday – hopefully to celebrate actually getting the static there rather than drowning our sorrows…