Friday and Saturday I had decided to stay in the caravan and continue resting the ankle of doom. I did lots of crochet, tea drinking, online bits and pieces and ukelele-ing. I was having a bit of a crisis of confidence with the ukekele but chatting to various folk online persuaded me to keep at it and five days later with probably an hour most days of practise I actually feel like I have made some proper progress. I still think the bloke on youtube who said the best thing about ukelele is that it’s piss easy was lying but it’s not quite impossible either…
Saturday was a lovely Graham Norton sandwich too with radio in the morning and Let It Shine in the evening. I do love him lots. Watched the downloaded Friday night chat show on Sunday too so a GN filled weekend 🙂
I made a start on a crochet midge to send to Lynda who had asked for a green one to go with the blue one I sent her last year. It just needs wings now. Need to knock out a few more of them actually as there is only 2 in the shed just now.
In the afternoon we did our hour of RSPB birdwatching. Considering we live on a National Nature Reserve we don’t get a lot of birds actually landing here on the croft although obviously things like eagles, herons and ravens are regular spots overhead. We tallied up three hooded crows, a robin, a wagtail and a dunnock in our hour or staring from three windows.
I started learning Creep on the uke. Ady made a very lovely Chinese style curry in honour of Chinese New Year.
Sunday – I decided outsideyness was back on the agenda so headed out with the drill to finally dismantle those cloches. All now done, ripped plastic disposed off, wood stacked up with screws removed for building other things or burning and hoops now secured with bamboo cane stakes. The plastic is down there ready to go on the hoops but I need to weed the strawberry beds first and cover the bare soil with some sort of mulch to inhibit more weed growth. It was so muddy and slippy that I fell over twice in there and decided that weeding in those conditions was ill advised. I did plants a few trees (we have about 30 leftover from the big tree planting) but my dibber snapped off in the ground and then I slipped over again so decided it was lunchtime!
During the welly removal ceremony I managed to slip again and fell on the sporran hurting the backs of both legs, one knee, one hand and in still finding new bruises three days later I appear to have also hurt my lower arm… Arses! So that put an end to my intention to go back outside after lunch and instead I learnt Amazing Grace on the ukelele in an ironic fashion.
Monday – I was very stiff and so Ady did the run to the village for various things but I did chop up a massive load of firewood so felt productive even if I was pretty immobile. More uke-ing and a nice dinner.
Today – was the AGM for the IRCT so after we went to the ferry we headed along to the bunkhouse for that. It was a good turnout and a fairly good meeting although was quite un-dynamic which helps cement the idea that moving on is right. Nothing much is going to change here any time soon and while I passionately believe in being the change you want to see in the world I also don’t believe in imposing your will on others. If so many people (hard to define ‘so many’ when there are barely 20 adults I know) are so obstructive and resistant to change then it is probably best to find somewhere and someone who is more on the same page. That sounds negative and defeatist and was not really the tone of the afternoon, I just know from a bigger picture point of view that our needs not being met current feeling is unlikely to change any time soon.
This afternoon when we got home I did more ukelele-ing. I have very sore fingers but am starting to feel a sense of achievement to to go with them.