Sunday – Ady’s birthday 🙂 We’d made cards and he had a variety of gifts mostly bought from Jinty’s shop and labelled rather than wrapped. Including a box of biscuits ‘for snaffling’, several chocolate bars ‘for further snaffling’, a four pack of lager ‘for beer o’clock’, a sherbert fountain ‘for remembering your childhood’ and a pack of chocolate muffins ‘for breakfast’.
The weather was horrid, howling a gale all night and buffeting the static about but it stood up to it okay and it was a good test really as winds reached about 50mph gusts and some branches came down off trees so it should be the worst it will have to cope with. Note I said ‘should’ 😉
We drove down to the pier to have a look at the loch, it was fairly calm in terms of crashing waves but the wind was lashing spray across it rather impressively. We dropped off some rubbish, collected some water and then popped to the village hall to catch up online. It was very cold in there with various camping tourists taking refuge from the storms. A window which had been loose in it’s fitting opened and closed too hard taken by the wind and the glass smashed so we cleared that up and managed to wedge it shut.
We went home for lunch and I helped Davies bake a cake for pudding (it was his turn for Come Dine With Me) and prep his veg for later which I made some bread dough to bake when the oven was on later. The weather was still fairly exciting so we togged up and went to see how the croft was looking and check on the birds. They were all soggy and fairly miserable looking so we decided to put them into their shelters early. The river was running amazingly high with all the water washing down from the mountains and was a good 3 foot higher and way wider than usual. Quite shocking to see the difference really, places we’d been standing just 24 hours before were now well under water and the bridge was totally submerged with the road flooded. A first taste of the extremes of living here I think.
Back home again to dry clothes and the fires on (we ordered a portable gas fire too so have a heater at each end of the static now, it does a fine job of warming the whole place through so we’re confident we’ll be fine for at least one winter in there) and I helped Davies get his dinner sorted. He’d been as ambitious as Tarly cooked roast chicken, roast potatoes, mash, roasted carrots and parsnips, suet pudding, stuffing and gravy. He did a fab job and I was really impressed with him – clean plates all round :).
We were all stuffed after that and the sun had come out again so we took Bonnie and walked down to the village to wear off some of our dinner and give her some fresh air – we’d not taken her to the croft as she often swims in the river and we were scared she’d not be cautious enough to avoid it and get washed away! No one was about so after a wander round we headed back for coffee and cake and an early night snuggled up with blankets and dvds.
Monday – Weather back to normal 🙂 The washing machine at the castle was playing up so Ady strung up several large posts and washing line and we did some hand washing and pegged it out. I dangled a string bag of washing in the river to rinse it out – love this life 🙂 🙂 We met the ferry but aside from our midge jackets there was nothing for us on it. We called into see Vikki in the office as I needed to print off some paperwork, get some DG notes and also check on some Odd Job stuff so picked up the keys and met a couple of residents at the gas cage to give them gas bottles too.
Back home for lunch and then I headed down to the teashop to do some online stuff and get a food shop ordered while Ady stayed at home to meet Dave as our static is remaining static for a few weeks yet in it’s current location so we’ve steadied it a bit while it’s there and removed the landrover that was infront of it for now. Ranger Mike had his birthday so there was a bit of a gathering at the shop involving much alcohol so I went and fetched the others back down for drinks too. We collected our fruit and veg box from Jinty (she does it at wholesale plus 20% which is less than you’d pay in supermarkets and I’m pretty impressed with the quality. We’ll get all our fruit and veg that way in future).
I walked along to put the birds to bed and got the ducks in and the chickens eating out of my hand but not in bed. Eventually I decided we are babying them too much and left them to it – all fine this morning so we’ll wander up at least once a day to feed them and check on them but won’t put them to bed and let them out anymore now they all know where to go. They are big enough to see off a rat which is the only real threat to them here.
Ady cooked – chicken curry with leftovers from the roast the night before.
Tuesday – an early start as we were due to meet Ranger Mike at 7am for a Rocky Shores Biodiversity event. We were the only attendees and it was fab 🙂 We took hot water, stove, bacon and home made bread and started with coffee / tea / hot chocolate before looking at the layers of habitat around the shore, starting with the end of the grass / moss / trees and the start of the rocks with lichen, sea pink (or thrift) and the odd ferns, moving down to seaweeds and lichens and then further seaweeds. We identified bladder wrack, sprial rack, channel wrack and serated wrack aswell as sea lettuce and various lichens before moving onto creatures – we found dog whelks, sea anenomes, shorecrabs, limpets, barnacles, sea snails. We put them into a tray and looked at them with a scope which was really cool – you could see all the little tentacles on the barnacles and everything :). It was beautiful down there, sun shining, sea glimmering 🙂 We saw a seal. We looked and learnt for about 2.5 hours before deciding it was bacon o’clock and cooking some breakfast to share. We ate sitting near the otter hide and chatting more about wildlife and swapping life stories, talking about WWOOFing. Mike is really nice, quite aside from being so lucky to have access to such a knowledgable ranger he is a top bloke who we have really clicked with :).
We called it a morning at about 11am and then went off to the croft. We took everything out of the horse box again for another reorganisation and got some more clothes out for the kids, got in our washing and also gathered things like my knitting stuff and some books. Three barrow-loads later we were back at the static for lunch. Davies and Scarlett have their lego and playmobile so are very happy 🙂 And we’ve signed up for Lovefilm so have dvds on their way to us too 🙂
We’ve got Vikki coming for dinner so I need to go and sort food out and I’ve just had an email to say I have an interview for the admin job on Thursday which could well be the key to all our cash flow in one go – 12 hours a week at £10 an hour would pay for our food, diesel and water rates so other than crofting spends which should hopefully be met by the crofting profits we’ll be well on the way to making it work here. The tenants are in and paying rent which is covering our mortgage and paying my Dad back what we’ve borrowed (that will be repaid in 2 years if the tenants pay on time and stay 🙂 ). I have a mountain of paperwork for the croft which I need to start ploughing through and we have our pigs hopefully arriving next week :).