Tuesday – In the morning Ady and I went to the ferry as we had a butchers order coming off. Caught up with Ali for a chat, nipped to the shop for some milk (real milk again, it’s been nearly a week! Tea is simply just not the same with longlife, it’s somehow not quite wet enough!) and then to the Green Shed for Ady to write down some animal feeding shift hours on his timesheet and have a quick catch up with Lesley. Back home for lunch and restringing my ukelele as the new strings had arrived. I had a quick strum and tune up but my index finger is still numb and I am disheartened by the two songs I most wanted to learn (La Vie En Rose and It Must Be Love) containing way more chords than I have already mastered. I was promised learning C, F and G would mean I could play millions of songs!
Then I set off down the hill with drill in hand to dismantle some more cloches and hopefully get to spreading some seaweed. Except just as I stepped off the path and onto the mud leading to the polytunnel I slipped. it should have been a soft landing on my bum but I was messing about with my phone and also holding the drill so I suspect I twisted myself somehow to save one or both and ended up rolling my right foot beneath me and hearing a horrid crack. I was fairly convinced I had broken my ankle and laid there for a moment swearing a lot before realising I was getting very wet in the mud and actually even if I yelled noone would hear me so I was going to have to get back up or at least crawl back up the hill. I managed to get up and get to the bench a few steps away and sit down to compose myself a bit. I fully expecting my ankle to give way when I tried to put weight on it but despite hurting ever such a lot it took my weight so I very tentatively wobbled back up the hill, told Ady what had happened, put the drill away and came indoors. Getting my welly off took some effort, I suspect if I’d not been wearing them (and they are my newish very expensive but highly recommended wellies which have very sturdy ankle support) I may well have sustained more of an injury actually. I stripped my sodden and very muddy jeans and pants off, put pjs on and sat down quite tearily.
Scarlett (who is utterly wonderful and you would totally want on your team in pretty much any situation unless it required reading, in which case she would probably find a way round it anyway) made me a cup of tea, soaked a tea towel with very cold water (the closest thing we could sort to an ice pack) and propped my up with stool and blankets and cushions to elevate it. I googled quite a bit and based on the pain think I may have done some damage to a tendon in my lower leg along with the sprained ankle as it hurts right up into my knee particularly when doing things which would stretch my calf muscles.
It completely drained me actually and I felt exhausted and could easily have gone to bed and slept, don’t think an injury has ever affected me that way before.
It was ridiculously windy all evening, easily the most windy it’s been this season, I took the clock down before I went to bed as it had been alarmingly bouncing against the wall. I was in bed very early for me, expecting a bad nights sleep thanks to my ankle and the wind but despite both I was asleep quickly and slept well with just a couple of wakings up.
Today – Continued wild wind for almost all of the day with added hailstorms and even a flurry of snow briefly this afternoon. Not a nice day at all. Ady was out for most of it sorting out the pig fence so we can leave the animals to be fed as easily as possible by the various friends who have offered to take shifts. I rested my ankle for the morning and had a flannel soaked in witch hazel on it as a cold compress and to try and bring out the bruising a bit as it is amazingly not really bruised at all. Then I was standing for a couple of hours making bread dough, pastry, venison pie filling and tortilla wraps for lunch and dinner. That brought on the swelling but I think did it good to be used as it was feeling quite stiff and now it feels looser again and the pain higher up towards my knee has eased. I read some magazines – we subscribe to 3 or 4 different small holder type magazines and they tend to back up unread so I won’t be renewing the subs when they run out. We had been keeping them all but last week I went through them all and ripped out articles worth keeping then took the rest down to the hall. There is a pile of December, January and February which we’re ploughing through reading and so I got through about four of those. Always such good reads when I actually sit down and read them, it’s just that I don’t do that nearly often enough to justify getting them all and it’s more a source of sometimes inspiration than practical knowledge or how to stuff I get from them as we have loads of really good books way better than the articles on growing, animal husbandry and so on. Maybe I need to find a couple of blogs to get the inspiration and ideas injections from instead.
Spent some time this afternoon talking about various subscriptions we have for film / books and music between us and signed up for a free trial of netflix again. Four people all listening to music, reading books, listening to audio books, watching TV and film together and independently does justify them particularly as all of them are shared between at least 2, usually 3, often all 4 of us, just need to check we are not overlapping or would be better served by different ones.