OMG the weather

When I was thinking about this week, the main thing that came to mind was”cold”. It’s been incredible weather, we’ve had strong winds, torrential rain, blizzards, woken up to snow on the ground and on the windows, whilst seeing our own breath in the static caravan. Its been blooming freezing, but then the last few days have been sunny and its warm in the sun, though not quite bikini weather. Ha ha.

The week started with amazing white horses on the sea, dark and stormy skies and all of this meant on one day I was really not keen to get out and work on the shed. So I pootled in the caravan and made soup (garlic and kale - trial recipe, but was delicious even if I say so myself. Not the normal Julia “blow your head off” spicy numbers I normally make!!), and made yet another sourdough. Daughter Lucy’s starter is just amazing and several Collites want some!! So thank you Luc!

In addition to the really crap weather, I’ve also been suffering with major carpal tunnel. Excruciating at times during the night, I have been so tempted to chop off my hands.... but then how would we build our house!! So I resorted to another Amazon prime order and got myself some wrist supports. What a difference, I sleep and my hands also seem to be less painful during the day. Its really awful this getting old, and also neither of us are used to such continuous manual labour!!

Its been another week of our kamikaze rollercoaster ride. Again we have had days of feeling like we are not progressing, both been in foul moods and the weather hasn’t helped. And then days like today when we made the form for the concreting of the shed slab, and it worked. So good and bad days, but I’d have expected that.

So what have we achieved this week? We did further drainage around the back of the static caravan, which has proved successful. The land is drying out and we were able to join it to our culvert drain, which should improve everything for the house. The track continues to need more hardcore and will have to be sorted for when we start on the house. So at the moment we are doing the bare minimum to keep it in good repair. For the 60m2 shed, the next challenge was to compact the ground. Keith was excited as he had borrowed a 90kg “whacker” from Patrick, and couldn’t wait to get going. He fired it up expecting to go forwards, but he bounced a couple of times and then started sinking. OMG what to do!?? It was hilarious. We decided the local gravel simply wasn’t good enough and luckily we’d had a new delivery of Type 1 (more on this later) and The Man in the High Castle (aka Keith in the digger) shifted several buckets of this onto the site. It worked brilliantly and was duly flattened by the Whacker, creating a solid base for the concrete.

The form has been built, and is true, I have sawn stakes and we have both measured, measured and remeasured. Tomorrow we will just check all the height levels and then will input the second layer of Type 1, and get that “whacked” too. So a GOOD week.

My highlight this week was that my delivery from Tescos arrived. I had done the “click and collect” order, had told Maclennan Motors (who deliver to the island) and then hadn’t heard a bean...so I wasn’t sure it would arrive. But it did. Yay. Mostly we tend to buy from the local shop as we only have our tiny 12Volt camping fridge on as the fridge and freezer in the caravan require constant electricity which is difficult for us to supply ! So we cant keep too much fresh food.

The most stressful event of the week was the delivery of 20 tonnes of type 1 which came in a huge dumper truck. Firstly Andy had to drive the fully laden truck up our track, which seemed no problem (good news for the trucks due to deliver materials for our house) and then he had to navigate the track curve where we had put in our culvert the week before. Would it hold? was it wide enough? .... Andy made it but one of the wheels was in mid air as he hooned over it, our hearts were in our mouths! So all good to that point. Then a hitch, the mechanism for opening the dumper truck load door didn’t work, and the wheels were steadily sinking into the ground. Various phone calls to the depot, and then a suggestion of just giving the mechanism a bang with a hammer (bit like computer boffs who’s first line at any problem is “have you tried turning it off and then on again!!). In the end we discovered there was a manual way to open the load door and thankfully he was able to offload. A much lighter lorry to reverse out!! I had thought Keith’s hair would turn brilliant white - the stress levels were intense! The 3 of us celebrated with a well earned cup of tea and Andy’s very entertaining stories.

It was a surprise one morning to be joined on the plot by a solitary sheep. How did it get there? We have supposedly got stock proof fences all around?? We watched hoping to find out. To our amazement, it climbed onto a rock and jumped back over the fence... I had no idea they could do that. Said sheep is now known as the ‘Woolly Jumper’ 😂 She has now visited us 3 times and been chased out 3 times, and we are undecided to either let her eat our grass or heighten the fences.

Further snow, sleet and freezing temperatures continued until a day ago. I was dodging the snow showers whilst traipsing between Lennie the Leaf and the laundry at An Cridhe. Great to have clean clothes, but not being a regular user of a dryer, most of our clothes are shrinking .... no, we are not putting on weight, well I hope not, but my pyjamas are now definitely 3/4 length and they used to be full length. Oh well, summer is coming at some point, and they will probably be shorts by then.

I know you all loved the fashion corner of my last blog, so a quick update on that. My Helly Hansen waterproofs had a bit of a disaster and have split at the seam. Thankfully it’s only one of many layers (unlike my skiing onesie 😂 ..just for you Tillie!). My wrist supports, one black and one beige, are just gorgeous....Not. I’m such a beauty at night! And when I get my swim socks and gloves, I have been told by Karen (a hockey friend) I will look a treat going for a wild swim!! Thankfully Coll is not the fashion Mecca of the world and we are all just happy to be warm.

Keep safe my lovelies x