Not the day we’d planned, another of those Rum type days where time runs away from you.
I had a shower this morning and the water ran out, just as I had lathered up my hair and body and was stood naked and sudsy. Ady had stepped outside so I suspected I would be left to deal with it all by myself but he reappeared back indoors so I could yell for him to fix it somehow! His solution was to hook the pump up to the water butt so that I could at least finish my shower.
That done he got his oranges on and headed up to look at the source of the water. There must have been air trapped somewhere along the system so he bled it all and now it is not only fine but the pressure is way better than it has been of late. We’ve all learnt a lot in the last three years but Ady has gone from being one of the least practical men I know to someone who can not only have a look at all things electrical, plumbing or gas / heating related but probably sort it out. I know none of our systems here are in the last bit sophisticated but it’s still something that makes me very proud of him and he of himself.
While he was doing that I carried a couple of bags of logs up the hill and started to chop them up. We have had about ten bags of logs sitting in the trailer at the bottom of the croft for well over a week waiting for us to get them up and on the odd occasion that we are at the bottom of the hill empty handed we have both brought a sack up but there were still about 7 left to bring up and get chopped. It’s amazing how quickly the wood dries out once it is chopped and stacked with air circulating around it in the woodstore, certainly not the well seasoned, nicely aged firewood one would burn in an ideal world but not entirely green either.
Hmmn, not sure paragraphs about our firewood and plumbing are desperately interesting reading really but it’s our day!
And at least there are paragraphs. Even if there are sentences starting with the word ‘and’ 😉
Then it was lunchtime. It has rained on and off so between showers I read Davies and Scarlett the first half of the latest David Walliams book which Davies got for Christmas. Scarlett is doing lots of writing and trying to spell things out at the moment. Interesting how both of them will have learnt to read by learning how to write…
After lunch we saw someone heading up the track towards the croft just as we were about to try and start the washing machine up. It was Sean the rat, coming to give us some rat advice after the rats in polytunnel and rats eating through the wheelie bins storing animal feed incidents of late. I left him and Ady to it while I worked through all the wood chopping as Ady had brought the rest of the wood up the hill for me before lunch. All now chopped and stacked and drying out. We have probably just about got enough to see us through the log burning weeks ahead til spring although we will gather some more before then and are planning to get a chainsaw of our own later this month so will get more efficient at processing firewood.
Ady and Sean walked all around the croft looking at various areas and discussing ways to deter the rodents. Sean is here doing his phd in rat behaviour and is one year through the three year course. I think he only needs to be here for one more year on Rum and then can spend the third year writing up findings but his girlfriend is hoping to move here soon to volunteer with SNH so maybe they will end up staying longer. He has learnt loads in his first year from lots of observation, setting tracking plates to monitor footprints of rats, catching and microchipping about 50 rats and spending lots of time out on the island watching. It’s an interesting subject once you get past the eww factor of it being rats and as we are relatively low in rat predators and relatively high in rat food as an island it is a good study location. Sean says that the rats here are so clean and disease free that you could actually eat them. No one plans to but given how closely we all live to them here it is heartening that at least they are not spreading nasty diseases.
I finished chopping and came in to read some more to the kids. We had an interesting conversation about dominoes leading to potential items to make and sell to tourists using Rum resources such as simple old fashioned games made from wood, stones etc as counters. Ideas such as jacks, tick tack toe, dominoes and so on all came from a set of wooden dominoes my Dad has that his dad made for him as a Christmas present when we was a boy. I can think of lots of charming Davies and Scarlett produced Rum gifts they could create to sell in lovely handmade little bags….hmmmm
By then it was starting to get dark so I started sorting out dinner – leftover gammon in a suet pastry roll and various potatoes according to taste / preference for various people.
Our usual evening ‘routine’ of an episode of The Good Life followed by one of Will & Grace.