I didn’t blog yesterday because I had a bad day 🙁 Nothing major or serious, just one of those walls all four of us hit every so often, coupled with some PMT and a day of crappy jobs.
Ady was off to market, where he had a good day selling meat and pasties. When the kids and I got up and went in for breakfast there was a note on the side to say ‘gone to collect the car, carry on with the shed if we’re not back’ from Emma. ‘The Shed’ is one of those polishing a turd type jobs, which I bloody loathe. It’s the huge barn which houses four stables, two of which have piglets in, the cutting room, various little side rooms and a huge area of tools, workbenches and various garage-type stuff. Ady and I had already done a fair bit of work on clearing areas and to be honest I’d hoped we’d finished with it really.
Emma and Pete arrived back and I thought I was just doing some time filling until Pete had fed the animals and was ready for my help in the cutting room but I ended up shed tidying until about 3pm. Davies and Scarlett spent some time watching TV – the telly is on *constantly* here, even if no one is watching it, which does my head in. Then they came to play outside for a bit, but I felt for them as I wasn’t doing anything they could really help with, although Davies did sweep up for me.
I went in for a cup of tea and then came back out and decided I’d had enough. I am prepared to do the crappy work that is relevant to farming or the type of host we are staying with – I’ll muck out animals quite happily for example and I am also happy to do our share of cooking or other housekeeping related stuff but this was one of those tasks I was learning nothing from, getting filthy dirty and pissed off with the promise of no more than a cheese sandwich for lunch while Davies & Scarlett bumbled around looking for something to entertain themselves. So I went in and spoke to Emma and said I was prepared to blitz it all into one place and sweep up but sorting through tools I have no ideas of the purpose for or trying to clear up stuff that may or may not be destined for the tip was beyond me (or beneath me ;)). I got free rein to do what I wanted with it all, a corner pointed out that I could shove everything into and then spent about 2 hours doing that with a vengence and had the whole thing cleared.
I sat in the sunshine with the kids for a while chatting which was nice before going to find out what they wanted me to do next and was asked to muck out the piglets! Which is where Ady found me, ankle deep in piglets and pig poo in a really bad mood!
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I ranted at him for a while and he came and helped me finish up, we packed up some bacon ready for markets and then were done for the day so we walked across the road into the woods with the kids. Emma and Pete are really desperate for us to stay and I know we are helping them enormously, we are learning huge amounts and from a helping us decide what we want to do next, getting a really good grounding in all sorts of skills and really feeding our imagination with ideas this is a fantastic place to spend time. But, it is incredibly frustrating as they are so very disorganised, totally broke (they have 4 cars and only ever fill them up with petrol cans because they have run out, they live from week to week off the market proceeds and are constantly running out of animal feed, people food (hence cheese sandwiches) )and work crazy 14 hour days. The kids are not getting enough from this host and are losing Ady and I for too much of each day as we are busy learning or helping so although we are pleased to still have another week here we are also pleased to have got to two thirds of the way through. Amanda and Zoe leave on Monday which the kids are really pleased about as they are not at all keen on Zoe (neither am I) and she spends a lot of her time giving them grief about Home Ed and other such nonsense.
Anyway, we talked it all through, I got all my moaning off my chest and everyone felt much better – hard not to in such a gorgeous location. We came back for dinner, which was home made lasagne and everyone was so nice to us about all we have done that they were either aware I was pissed off or had realised how rubbish the shed tidying job had been so all was well again. At bedtime I managed to kneel on a corner or the bed and broke a hinge so in one of those so bloody mad it’s funny moments Ady and I were crammed into one corner of Willow with the tiny screwdriver from our toolset and a torch trying to screw it back together having a whispered hissing rant at each other so as not to wake the kids at about 1am.
What larks!
Today has been much better all round – Ady has been with Pete, doing various bits around the farm and campsite – we have camping neighbours again this weekend, the kids have had a Zoe-free day as she has been with me and Amanda while we were at a local Royal Wedding Day event selling burgers, sausages, bacon rolls, meat, pasties and sausage rolls.
We had a good day and took nearly £300 which is a lot of burgers and sausages! At one point Amanda had to run to the nearest supermarket for more rolls and we split open some sausages to hand shape some burgers when we ran out of those too.
Back at the farm we had an hour in the van chatting and catching up on each others days before dinner, followed by a story at bedtime and an early night all round as we’re off to another market tomorrow bright and early.