Saturday – Post office for me in the morning, good to be back behind the counter again 🙂 I was busy with visitors rather than anyone actually needing the shop or post office though. Ali, Fliss, Stevie, Mike, Trudi (3 times!) and Neil all came in. Stevie, Trudi and Fliss all hung around a bit as though they wanted to talk / ask something but seemed to all be in each others’ way so none of them did. I had a cup of tea and chat with Neil though which made everything feel a bit more back to normal. I was supposed to collect some food from the freezer but Trudi walked part way home to the croft with me which distracted me from the detour so I forgot. I remembered just as I reached the croft gate so came home anyway for lunch.
It was snowing, sleeting and raining on and off but after lunch it turned into proper swirling snow for  a while and Ady and I went down to the village together to the freezer. We took a dead battery down to charge up and collected a bag of coal, some peat blocks and a sack of dog food from the car on the way back up.
I did our tax returns online when we got home. We are about to draw up a business plan for the next three years here on the croft which will help shape our tax returns for the year 2016-2017 and make things a bit more comprehensive. On the list of things to do while indoors…
Sunday – In the morning Ady emptied the loo. It does not drain as quickly as we had hoped so we have been pondering ways to sort this out. For now we have invested in a wet and dry hoover which allows us to pump it out to put on a humanure heap and means it is a much, much quicker task to do. Ady is really pleased with this idea and it worked well. I cleared all the shelves above the windows in the lounge and started on cleaning up the kitchen area, taking all of the herbs and spices off the shelf and throwing out and cleaning up that area. It looks much better. In the middle of that Ali and Eve came up for a visit. Scarlett and Eve went out to feed the animals and then Scarlett sat and played with Eve for a while, while Ali and I chatted and Ady came in and joined us. Scarlett was really good with Eve. We needed to get some stuff from the freezer so Ady and I walked down with Ali and Eve to the village. We had planned to go and collect seaweed in the afternoon but the day got away from us with them coming up so we postponed that.
Today – we had planned to postpone it to today but it has rained all day long so instead we have caught up on various downloaded iplayer things which were running out (two David Walliams book screenplays and the first two in a Gordon Buchanen polar bear series), I have crocheted, mostly finished the monthly newsletter, written the info sheets to send to Jen who is croft sitting for us in a couple of weeks and done an inventory of the seeds we have and a list of the ones we need to buy. Ady fed the animals and did some tidying up, Scarlett watched animal documentaries and did some painting, Davies watched stuff with us and did some modelling clay stuff. It was a nice day.
Maybe tomorrow we’ll get to that seaweed…