Goddards, Puppies, Vehicles and Cheap Cider

What more could you possibly want on a Saturday? 🙂

We are trying to be very sensible with our petrol consumption and combining journeys wherever possible. So yesterday was ‘stuff over Chichester way’. This started with a long overdue visit to Julie – we’ve not seen them since February as they have been poorly ever since we got back 2 weeks ago and we were desperate not to catch any more germs having been ill far too many times since November.

But the sun was shining, all Goddards were in fine fettle and good health so we went there to finally meet Mable, their new puppy. The kids had a great time playing in the garden although Scarlett quickly decided Mable was far more exciting than cousins and spent most of her time sharing a chair with the dog stroking her and falling in love 🙂 That girl needs a puppy! When she wasn’t falling in love with the dog Ady was, doing lots of training to sit and stuff. That man needs a puppy! 😉

After lunch we marched off at quite a pace across the fields to Julie’s friend Lesley who runs a fortnightly film club at her house. It’s an Activeo event (local Home Ed group) but Julie had cleared it for Davies and Scarlett to attend this one and Lesley (who is an avid WW follower and commenter) was most excited to have ‘Dragon and Star’ in her house for a couple of hours :). The kids watched Five Children and It which they all enjoyed and talked about afterwards. In the meantime Ady, Julie and I walked back across the fields to their allotment. We had a few minutes of utter hysteria as Julie took Mable off the lead. She’d been doing a fine impression of a very exhaused puppy, having run alongside Scarlett for the mile or so between Julie & Lesley’s houses so Julie thought it would be a great time to try it. Mable paused for just a split second before racing off like a greyhound! We watched her blur into the distance and were not sure whether to be horrified or amused, we went for a combination of the two. She did come back though and although she then ran off again she returned that time aswell. 🙂

We did some weeding for an hour or so and a bit of digging over. It was so lovely to get dirty hands and work on the land 🙂 Julie was telling us that she’d like to buy a second hand yurt to put on our croft for them to use whenever they come up so they have their own space to make a second home. We’ll be able to use it too for friends to stay in but it will be Julie’s. We love the idea, not least because she is intending bringing the kids up at least twice a year for 3 weeks at a time. Six weeks a year of Julie, Jack, Maisie and Lorna is a fabulous idea 🙂 She has already booked in for May and October!

We walked back to Lesley’s again to collect the kids and then back to Julie’s where Chris had arrived home so we stopped for a cup of tea and chat with him. It was only when we sat down we realised quite how much walking and digging we’d done – three solid hours since we left the house.

Then on to Bruce’s. We paid him for the horse box, which we arrived to find him still working on 🙂 Sealing up a small hole in the roof, having checked the brakes and the bearings and done some work on that along with further cleaning it up. It is looking good 🙂 We’ve kept back the best bits of the carpet from our hall and stairs so will be using that to floor it even nicer than it is now. We’d bought a new lead to connect the electrics from vehicle to trailer so that got tested and is now on the trailer. Then we went over to Paul’s to look at the Pajero. We’d been debating quite how much boot space there is and whether it was four or five seat. I thought it was five seat and had a decent enough space to fit camping mats, sleeping bags, pillows and a bag of clothes for when we go visiting friends. Ady was convinced it only had four seats and a microscopic boot space so we’d been debating getting roof bars to fit our roof box to it. I was right 🙂 It does have five seatbelts and the boot space will be fine.

It has passed it’s MOT and is ready to collect so it will go to Bruce’s in the next day or two and we will actually collect it on Sunday or Monday next week once I’ve taxed it but I now have the log book and MOT for it and we’ve sent off the log book so it is officially ours now. 🙂

From there it was on to Caz and Bid’s for a family sleepover that had morphed from just Bid coming here for the evening to all of us going over there due to various changes of plan. It felt very odd to be sitting on our sofas watching our TV, eating off our plates and then going to sleep on Scarlett’s old bed covered with Davies’ old duvet cover. I had a minor wobble about having given stuff away and some bad dreams as a result but felt fine again this morning. Odd the things that make me wobble – one was the Spider video (we took two sacks of videos over for them) which I remember loving watching so much with both our kids, but particularly Davies to the point that I bought the video off ebay for us to watch. I’d been looking at it all misty eyed last night and then woke this morning to read of Em watching it with Os on Friend feed!

We had a really lovely evening – kids off playing, adults chatting and then watching silly youtube clips, no one getting to sleep very early….

This morning I sat in the garden with my cup of tea and was joined by Ady and then Caz & Bid. It was so lovely out there with birds singing, flowers in bloom, blossom on the trees and the sun shining. It mostly made me hanker for sitting outside my own home looking at my own view with a cup of tea and contemplating the day and hoping that day comes as soon as possible. Ady and I spent some time reminiscing about WWOOFing and concluding that we are so glad we have another, just as exciting adventure lined up otherwise we’d be really grieving that period of our lives being over.

Caz and Bid were off to the local carboot sale so we joined them, walking through Chichester on a route with Ady pointing out all sorts of memory lane stuff for him (he lived in Chichester for several years from about 17 to about 25 so plenty of very funny anecdotes 😉 ). The car boot sale was stupidly busy and I was really glad to get to the end and call it a day. We said goodbye and then walked back to theirs to collect the car and drive back to Worthing.

We got to my parents literally moments ahead of Mum who had been to visit Granny so we sat in their garden for a bit and then Ady helped Mum move some garden ornaments about while Dad and I walked up to Sainsburys for some stuff for lunch. We ate with them, Mum & the kids sorted some more of the stuff in the kids room there out into boxes (although Davies said we’ll need to go through them again as Mum was pushing them to bring stuff to Rum now that he thinks we probably don’t need there yet taking up space). Dad and I had a good chat about various stuff including what I am taking as a compliment 🙂 I was talking about how neither Frazer or I are like Mum or Dad and he must look at us and wonder where we came from! Dad said that I am like his mother and that she was always very enterprising with different ideas to everyone else. Every so often I think he gets a glimmer of understanding about what we’re doing even though he’ll never quite equate our lifestyle with living a dream!

Back at home we faffed with some making good in the kitchen – some putting aluminium edging on the worktops to tidy them up and I had decided to make a curtain to hide the pipework under our boiler (not that it isn’t beautifully painted Kirsty 😉 ). I’d bought over my sewing machine and small stash of material but there was nothing really suitable until Ady had the idea of using the telescopic curtain pole from Davies’ bedroom and I had the idea of actually using one of the curtains from there aswell! I only had to do some very minor sewing and it looks perfect 🙂

Dinner was a very eclectic mix of leftovers – pasta bake for Davies, some mackerel for Scarlett who loves her fish (actually both kids do, bodes well for life on Rum – there are fish in the lochs and rivers on the island and of course in the sea, loads of free food!) and leftover curry for Ady and I.