I can whistle while I’m humming

This morning I was manning the office again, Shirley was on day off, Jill was volunteering at the local Tourist Info Office and Amanda the office manager was at her son’s school for a leaving ceremony.

I was tasked with ‘doing stuff on ‘Twitter and Facebook’ so I uploaded some pictures onto the facebook site for Middlewick but in trying to then comment on it as me I managed to log out and couldn’t log back in again. I did some twittering and then got distracted by a fellow WWOOFers blog. I ran out of steam then as a social network marketeer so I settled instead for writing lots of positive reviews about the four cottages we have stayed in here on various review sites – all honest, I do think they are lovely cottages in beautiful surroundings with friendly and helpful staff 🙂

Ady joined me for coffee mid morning, he was doing gardening. The kids came and sat with me in the office for an hour or so too and we chatted. I’ve really enjoyed their company again this week; we’ve been a bit ‘back to normal’ with them asking interesting questions (such as ‘does water float’ and ‘how do you get grass seed, I’ve never seen grass flowers on a lawn?’). Interestingly we realised today that despite being ten weeks into our WWOOFing adventure only two of the places we have stayed at so far have been actual WWOOFing hosts, the rest have been accidental or friends of WWOOF hosts, even next weeks host isn’t actually in the WWOOFing book, I guess that is likely to remain the case this year though, the week after next we are turning a friends holiday cottage around for her between proper guests as she is away in France and it happened to fit in well with our travel arrangements.

Amanda arrived and Jill came back soon after with donuts for everyone so we caught up with her, confirmed we can have tomorrow off and discussed what she wanted us to do this afternoon. Then we had lunch and spent an hour or so cleaning the cottage we’re in, making up the spare beds and getting clean towels and bedding ready to change over in the morning as we’re moving out of this cottage and back into a smaller one for our last few nights as it is fully booked here again with a hen weekend arriving tomorrow afternoon.

Ady went back to finish his gardening, he’s mowed the lawn and clipped some hedges, cleared all the areas around the public footpaths that run through the land and generally tidied up. It’s been another week of quite hard work for him this week, he says he feels his age (which gets another year bigger tomorrow!). The kids and I meanwhile headed to the swimming pool – they had been tasked with scrubbing the steps into the pool while I was cleaning windows. I did my bit but they were struggling as the dirt seems to be unmoveable. I helped but I’m still not sure we made much difference. We did enjoy about 2 hours in the pool though, all to ourselves which was nice :).

Back at the cottage Ady cooked the kids tea while I had a go at cutting my hair – it had gotten to the long and scruffy looking stage which is hard enough to deal with at home let alone in a campervan when I can’t guarantee I can wash it daily so I was just tying it up all the time which is always my cue to chop it 🙂 We were planning to read a Roald Dahl book we’d found in the library but all got distracted by an animal programme instead which had quite a bit on the dolphins in the Moray Firth and Chanonry Point. The kids made cards for Ady, Davies wanted to write a poem but had left it rather late, he did manage ‘you are my Daddy, I know you’re not a baddy’ though 🙂 which I’m sure Ady will be most touched by 😉

The kids went to bed, I cooked our dinner and now I need to stick the dishwasher and washing machine on as we don’t have either in the little cottage, lay out Ady’s presents and head to bed myself.