One good thing about Hurricane Ba’bag was that it forced us into finishing the upstairs painting. We’d been putting it off because the double height ceilings are so hard to do. Otherwise, Ba’bag and his cousin on the following Tuesday, gave us plenty to think about, I was so pleased the new greenhouse stood up to them! Even the locals thought it was all a bit much but there appears to have been surprising little damage.
It took a while to get the painting finished because most of it had to be done from the top of an extending ladder using a brush rather than a roller. So there’s only a few bits and pieces of painting left to do and we’ll try to get them done before the New Year. All we need now is some furniture but Suse won’t have anything that invades her “Practise Space”.
Work in the garden has almost come to a standstill because of the weather, although we make frequent trips to collect seaweed for the vegetable plot. When the wind and rain finally stopped they were replaced with snow and ice. The fire has been on most days and the log pile has sufferd as a result. We have emptied one bay but managed to refill half of it. We hope it will dry out before we need it.
Scraping mud off the old driveway has been happening occasionally and we unearthed some large cedar trunks that had been buried under the slab wood which had been piled where we needed to make the drains. They were too big to move so had to be cut up in situ which wasn’t straightforward. The chainsaws didn’t like the mud on the trunks and were going blunt very quickly. Fortunately, Andrew Woodhouse had given me a special grinding wheel which I’d looked at previously but, without instructions, hadn’t fathomed out how to use. I got the hang of it during a particularly wet afternoon and was inspired to cut the logs into 50mm thick roundels which we’ll use as part of the garden paths. They’ll probably get a bit slippy but if they are too bad we can always burn them!
This was Suse’s 60th birthday present from me. It’s a sewing box and it’s spooky the numbers of times in a day you find yourself staring at the puffins. IKEA have a lot to answer for.
We had hoped to squeeze under the wire and have a p.v. array installed before the feed- in tariff changed. Suse’s retiral pension was deemed ‘trivial’ so she could get it in a lump sum and this seemed like a good thing to invest in for lots of reasons. But Ba’bag put paid to that as the country ground to a standstill the week before the government’s revised deadline. We may still go for a solar thermal kit so that we don’t have to use the electric immerser for showers next summer but we are waiting to see whether the court rules that the government’s decision to halve the tariff before the end of the consultation period will be deemed illegal. There’s no rush to do anything until we get some daylight back.
We’ve spent the last few days “rustling” our christmas tree ( we got the top of a small cedar that B’B had blown down and added some spare branches) and it’s now decorated and waiting for somebody other than the two of us to see it. Incidentally, I dragged the tree past the skeleton of the “family” christmas tree that we used for many years in Bathgate but which didn’t survive the transition to the west coast. Make what you want of that! We bought each other our Christmas presents in October when we went to see Bob Dylan in the Braehead Arena. Jo and John had bought tickets for us when we were in Melbourne so this was twice in a year. Unfortunately the acoustics in Glasgow were poor.
The Barber Shop have been “singing out” recently. Three times in one week! Emily and Richard braved the horrors of the A83 and joined us in Southend Village Hall for the first one. They said they enjoyed themselves but we wondered afterwards what they could possibly say to their friends and work colleagues when asked “What did you do at the weekend?” I was in church for the second time in 3 weeks for the second one, a carol service for Christian Aid. Suse says that only some of the congregation noticed that one of the Barbers was actually singing a different song at one point! Our Christmas party followed the final sing out at one of the old folks’ homes in Ardrishaig. We had the Bangladeshi restaurant to ourselves and I loved the bemused look on the waiter’s face as we belted out “Sentimental Journey”. Who would have thought it?
We’ll be teaming up with Steve and Sharon and Emily and Richard for Christmas and are looking forward it. Meanwhile, Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year! We have sent out an email Christmas letter but if you are reading this and haven’t got one, sorry, you can see it here
