One word? When seven would do…

Argh – all that time unblogged!

I’ve been noting stuff as I go along but it’s hit a point now where trying to catch up properly is all but impossible with time, power and internet constraints, not to mention being rather busy generally!
So, my notes read:

Saturday – up early for the boat – the Saturday morning ferry is before 9am! We had a lovely day planned of celebrating Eurovision together on the croft with a camping evening, sausages on the barbecue, toasting marshmallows, listening to Eurovision on the radio and spending our first night on our land. We set the tents up, moved a goose house down onto the croft ready for our arrival of geese sometime in July and had a really nice afternoon with various visitors coming up to the croft including Rachel and Ian who sat and chat and enjoyed the sunshine with us.

We returned to the static, gathered stuff for the evening and headed up to the croft at about 7pm only to be foiled by midges. It was horrendously midgey and after half an hour or so of sitting in our midge nets feeling really miserable we admitted defeat and retreated back to the static. We still had our sausages and our beer and listened to music instead.

Sunday – A very frustrating day. The sun was shining but I had offered to bake for the teashop so spent the morning getting really stressed with the internet as I couldn’t get online on my blog or emails and then the afternoon roasting in the kitchen baking various things while Ady was on the croft and the kids were swimming in the river with Vikki and Claire. It felt really wrong that we were working while other people were having fun with our kids and I was particularly grumpy when they all came back to ours for teas and coffees! I recovered and we had a nice evening at Vikki’s as we went there for dinner.

Monday – Further internet woe as far too many hours of my life were sucked into trying to sort it out. I delivered the cakes to the tea shop which went down well and we got our veg box on Monday evening. We generally only go to the shop on Monday and Friday evenings now, otherwise too many evenings get sucked into drinking and sitting around with the islanders, which is lovely and sociable but expensive!

Tuesday – I spent some time at Vikki’s and at the Trust office trying to sort out the internet and finally decided not to bother and set up a googlemail account to bypass any more issues. My cakes had all sold so I did some more teashop baking. It was another midgetastic evening but I did call down to Vikki’s for a glass of wine in the evening as she had got one of the builders round for a drink and was wobbly about what his intentions were so wanted me to pop in and check on her.

Wednesday – we did our photoblog day so that is sort of recorded on WW blog. We met the ferry, had a quick glimpse at the new kittens and then Fliss and Sandy popped up for the afternoon. We took them up to the croft for a look round and had a really good chat with them. Scarlett and I went down to meet the kittens – we’d been given the little tom but Lesley was keeping them all til the following day so they could settle down. Vikki came round in the evening and it was another late night drinking too much wine!

Thursday – We went on the Shearwater and saw a pod of dolphins. It turned out later they were part of a superpod that was in the area so where we thought we kept seeing the same ones it was likely we were seeing different ones each time. We collected the kitten and tried to settle him in.

Friday – A very busy day 🙂 It was a year to the day that Vikki arrived so we were celebrating Rum’s Vikkiversary 🙂 Thalassa who had been staying on Rum for a month studying the newts gave a talk in the evening about her studies and findings and then we had some official people over for the small isles consultation which several of us came along to attend. We then drank fizz with Vikki and it turned into quite a session at the shop and about half the island ended up coming up to our static for dinner. It was a very late night 🙂

Saturday – Ady and I met the ferry first thing, lots of walking wounded from the night before! I had a really bad day on Saturday – in the morning there was a really nasty dog fight at the teashop between Zappa and Zara, two bitches who have always not got on and been tussling over Top Dog position. They locked jaws and had to be strangled to be parted despite trying with hoses, shouting and pulling. One of the owners, Norman ended up bitten (and is now in hospital with septacemia!). It really, really shook me up and disturbed me a lot. I’ve worked so hard to get over my dog fear and now actually love a dog of my own so to see all my worst fears and phobias summed up in one big event like that had me physically shaking for about an hour. Horrid 🙁 Still no internet.

Finally after lots of talking and consideration I decided the kitten was a mistake too. Ady had never wanted him, the kids were not as attached as I expected, he was very hissy and unfriendly and I was really worried about him and Bonnie. The lack of space in the static and my general feeling of being unsettled meant I made a rather shotgun decision to rehome him. I went to Ross and Jinty who had loved him when he arrived and they took him, but he is now back with his sister at Neil & Lesley’s as Neil had always liked that cat the most anyway. Right decision, lots of ribbing!

Sunday – We’d arranged with Vikki to walk up Hallival. It was quite epic, we had to carry Bonnie some of the way back down again as it was way too much for her really. I had one moment of wobbliness when I felt a bit dizzy and wondered just what I was doing but soon got past it and was glad to have done it. We look out on Hallival from the croft, it’s a very dominating peak of Rum so to know we’ve stood atop it and added a stone to the stack is a good feeling :). We’d never have done it without Vikki and to be honest I’d probably not bother scaling any of the other peaks any time soon but I’m glad to have done it. The views were stunning, you could see the sea all around with the whole island spread below us – it made it look quite small really. Skye, Eigg, Muck and Canna were all around with panoramic views of the mainland and the outer Hebrides in the background and it was all very perspective giving and gorgeous. I really liked being able to see down to the static and across to the croft too.

We came down and Vikki offered me a bath at her house 🙂 I went round and enjoyed a lovely soak with a glass of wine brought in to me aswell. Love Vikki :).

Back at home Ady had cooked a lovely roast dinner too. It was a good day and the perfect recovery from a bad day the day before.

I’m leaving it here as I’ve left my list behind on which I’d noted the various days but will try and come back to it later.