Ady went down to the village first this morning to give Steve and Claire a hand moving some firewood from one end of the village to the other. We have a wee trailer lent to us from Chainsaw Dave (who I’ll henceforth refer to as Chain as everyone else does) which meant it was a two journey chore with the car rather than a 20 journey trip with wheelbarrows for them of about a mile each way. I like Claire and Steve a lot and they don’t always get a lot of help from people. Often I think this is because they have rather used up favours rapidly in the past so I am ever cautious of becoming their carers but they certainly do us plenty of favours back whenever they can so it all balances out.
I then went down to the village for a meeting with Lesley about venison. Neil who is actually my co director is off island but Lesley suggested getting together with her over the weekend so I went down. It was really nice and I ended up staying for a couple of hours mostly chatting about all sorts of island stuff before we actually did the venison stuff. She’d bought me some Lush stuff as a birthday present but hadn’t seen me since my birthday (we went off the day after have not been out in the village much since). I like Lesley a lot, she is very funny and one of the key players in community stuff – she is a IRCT director, chair of the RCA and works for SNH so is on lots of the same steering groups as me. She is also the other crofter. Her twin, Ross also lives here and the few times I have mixed with her socially I’ve always gotten on really well with her but never felt I’ve scratched the underneath and she is a bit of an enigma as she doesn’t really have a female friend on the island. Another of thse people my path would not really cross with if we lived elsewhere but I could see us being close given time. We talked house build stuff and I learnt more of her recent history here on Rum too and then we realised the time so I came home for lunch.
Ady was out with Bonnie having some exercise so I had lunch with the kids and caught up with them a bit. Before I’d gone out we’d talked about stuff to sell to tourists this year and Davies got all inspired about some stories to do with vikings and trolls on Rum while Scarlett dug out some seaglass jewellry we’d made and decided on some pricing, she needs to sort out packaging next and would like to gather some more seaglass and maybe shells. Perhaps we’ll manage that this week sometime. Ady came in and I went out to help him gather a couple of barrow loads of rocks to start building a wee path to the horse box and we caught up on each others mornings.
Then we fed the animals and before we lost daylight we came indoors to take Bonnie’s stitches out. Ady held her while I did it and Davies held a torch for really good light on it. Scarlett surprisingly was a little squeamish about it and was not up for taking photos which I’d hoped she might do. She did watch but found it a bit icky watching me pull them through. Bonnie was totally chilled and actually wagged her tail through most of it. One of the stitches was a little more healed over so bled a little when I pulled it out but it’s not bothered her and the actual wound is nicely knitted together. So that appears to be that really. She has full energy back and although we’ll try and get her to stay a bit cleaner than usual until it all fully heals she is ready and raring to get back to her normal life again of running for hours and hours all over the place.
Ady was getting dinner on and I was sorting out some wools when my Mum phoned all teary about missing us and not having much contact with Frazer 🙁 So I ended up on the phone to her for well over an hour as it got dark outside and the dinner smells wafted through. I had a chat with Dad too and then came through for dinner which we ate watching Back to the Future.
Some more My Side of the Mountain and then bedtime. I’ve been fiddling with the isle of rum website and website fiddling is always a real time sink so somehow it’s now gone 1am!