Friday – In the morning we iced cupcakes, Scarlett is now chief cupcake maker I think, she is way better than me. I fixed the new tap on a water butt and did a bit of weeding in the walled garden before we had lunch. We went to the village to meet the boat, sent petrol off, collected a few parcels (including a delivery of shampoo and conditioner from Holland & Barrett that I was utterly convinced had gone astray). We collected some stuff from the freezer, picked up the clean laundry, dropped the baking off at the Barbecue hut ready for the people coming on the passenger boat and then came home. I hung the washing out and was about to head off to do more weeding when a journalist I’d been exchanging emails with arrived for a chat. She had been trying to sell a story about us to various magazines and newspapers but not managed it. She came along to meet us and take a few photos anyway and is planning to carry on trying to sell the idea of a story. I suspect we might be over exposed already to be honest, but good luck to her! I made pizza dough and then Ady and I headed down to the shop for a couple of Friday night beers.
It was quite nice down there with a few folk out and some regular visitors over . We’d watched the first couple of episodes of Supernatural the night before and so watched the second couple finishing off the disc with dinner.
Saturday – I love my Saturday mornings and this was a good one. Graham Norton, some crochet, my cat, baking. I made four sorts of pies: venison, chicken & mushroom, cheese & onion and a mix of veggies suitable for vegans, with all the various cooking this meant every saucepan and frying pan being used, every bowl as I made pastry, cookie dough and Scarlett made cupcakes. It was fun though.
In the afternoon once everything was cooled, wrapped up and labelled I transferred all of the jam which was in the back of the Rangerover into a huge plastic clip box and burnt all the cardboard boxes then Ady and I took the Rangerover down the hill, tidied out the Pajero and put the jams in there for storage. Ady did a lovely curry for dinner.
Today – after realising late yesterday that there was an order for a loaf of bread today too I made the dough last night and baked the loaf this morning while Scarlett iced the cakes. During this activity the customers actually appeared to pay for it all and arranged for us to drop everything off at the hut for them as they were heading to Kilmory. We packed some food and flasks, headed to the village to drop off their delivery, put some extra pies I’d baked in the freezer, collect yesterdays post and then off to Kilmory ourselves to have our lunch in the deer hide. We saw a little bit of parallel walking, chatted to Ali, heard lots of roaring stags and a tiny bit of harem swapping but it was pretty quiet compared to previous years.
Back at home we cut in half a roll of shading cloth which was 2m wide to make double the length at 1m wide. We used one half to reinforce the sheep pen. Ad stapled it to the posts which I pinned it down with home made staples cut from tension wire. Fingers crossed it stops the sheep escaping.