The ‘Good Samaritan’ :-)

Well I managed to stay in bed until 5:50 today, no doubt assisted by that bottle of African red my dear mum gave me. Must be loosing my tolerance to alcohol after two weeks without a drink because I’ve got ‘the mother of all headaches’ We’re not going ‘teetotal’ or anything daft like that we’re just not buying drink anymore as it’s too dear. This house building carry on is boodly expensive and needs a clear head

Anyway, I left you yesterday just prior to stirring the rest of the household ready to meet the day, our son was off to Portree High and a week in the hostel there and wifey was on ‘de cluttering’ duty. The house will be going on the market this week and it’s still full of carp. We keep taking stuff out, binning it, burning it, selling it, giving it, hiding it or just re arranging it but still there’s more to go

I was wanting to finish painting the roof before it went on the market but that’s not going to happen today and I’m back at work tonight. Still it’s almost done and I’ve managed to find a picture of it from 2009 which is quite ‘representative’ as the estate agent said

OK, the ‘Mayflower’ is out but at this rate it will be in bloom once more in a few weeks.

Here’s how it looked in Charlie’s time some forty years or so ago

This is it now, or at least three years ago, it’s a little muddier just now

Once the family was sorted the boy and I set off leaving wifey in charge of the pigs, it was raining but the chap on the radio told be it would stop and like an idiot I believed him. In fact it pished down the whole day. With son deposited on the school bus I continued onto my parents on the mainland for my fortnightly visit. After my last trip there and walk with my dad I was hoping for another but the incessant rain put the kybosh on that. Instead I changed the water filter, checked the supply and cut some kindling, leaving a little earlier than usual due to the freshening wind.

My Faith restored

It was supposed to reach near gale force by 16:00 and the last thing I needed was a night away so just after 13:00 I headed for Kyle. I was needing some shopping, not much as I’ve mislaid my wallet (again) and only had £30 cash. After some tw*t reporting me to SEPA for extracting water  from Loch Beag and another stealing one of my full gas cylinders from the pier my trust in my fellow man has been somewhat diminished of late. Well today it was well and truly restored by an angel from Kyleakin

Not being the best shopper on the planet and being used to paying by card I arrived at the checkout only to discover I was a tenner short Proceeding to haul stuff out of my trolley, starting with the wife’s chocolates I was halted by a young lady who graciously handed me a ten pound note. I have no idea who she was and she refused to let me reimburse her, insisting it was her good deed for the day.

Whoever you are thank you very much

Still being well ahead of schedule for the 15:00 ferry I decided to call into  http://www.iosea.co.uk/ and get our little piece of paradise on the market. It will be Easter in a week or two and people will be doing there holiday thing, and hopefully feel like leaving the ‘rat race’  or buying a cosy wee holiday home I had a good chat with the ‘Sales Negotiator’ (I love these titles) and she said they’d be over on Thursday to take pictures, so that’s it then, I’ve done it. Twenty three happy years here, by far the longest I’ve lived in one house and I’ve put it on the market

I made the ferry, which is just as well because it could well have been the last one as it waited at Sconser for the school children who normally catch the 16:15. By the time I arrived home it was almost 16:30 and pure miserable. However I spent a couple of hours outside in my oilskins moving a gate for my neighbour,

checking the hydro turbine inlet,

whilst the rain may stop painting and turn the place into a swamp it does produce a lot of power

And that was about it really, I gave the barn a good clean out and went in for my dinner at 19:00

 

which was far far nicer than it looks. Going by the name of ‘Aubergine soup with mozzarella and gremolata’ wifey dug this little number up from here http://www.amazon.co.uk/400-Best-ever-Soups-Recipes-Delicious/dp/0754816532 a five star book she got for Christmas.

 

Containing some bizarre concoctions we’ve yet to try a bad one

 

Anyway, that’s it, it’s almost 7:30 and time to go and feed the pigs.

Mighty mulligatawny :-)

I dunno whether you can catch depression or if there’s such a thing as ‘viral depression’ but the whole household seems to be suffering from a dose of the blues. It’s probably just the time of the year, short days, the ‘come down’ after Christmas, a mountain of chores to do, a pile of tasks on the ‘back burner’ and of course the abysmal weather Whatever it is it seems to have affected the whole household, wifey’s ‘nippin my heid’ the boy’s pukeing in the spare room and I’m not long out of bed

I’ve just been ‘pure shattered’ of late,

even at work Now before I get a ‘written warning’ it must be an old picture because the 2011 year planner is still up and it would have been on my lunch break anyway. Thing is I just found it on an old camera that must have been left lying around. Well that’s my story and I’m sticking to it

Anyway, no posting last night cos I was in my bed at 18:30 wrecked, I did get up again around 22:00 for half an hour but returned to my pit and slept right through until 8:30 this morning. It’s not like I did a great deal of physical effort or anything on Thursday, far from it. I’d got up after a good sleep at 7:30 and gone out to feed with one of my boys pals Robert. He’d gone to attend to the Tamworth’s on the hill and I to distract Jamie Lea with a dish of feed well away from the ark.

Wee Tam was needing the first of his twice daily .2ml jag of  anti-inflammatory and I was unsure how she’d react.

No problem as it turned out, I nestled wee Tam’s head in my toasty ‘red neck hillbilly’ jacket and gave him the shot in the leg. Piglets can scream ‘blue murder’ but if kept snuggled up in the dark they’re quite calm and feel safe. The important thing is not to keep injecting him in the same place, not easy when he’s so small and has to have so many

Once done I placed him back in the warmth of the ark,

the others being outside with mum.

After that I headed for the 9:55 ferry to do a little ‘water work’ at my parents house, leaving wifey to deal with the pigs and pig feed from Portree.

Now, I know that’s just a boring picture of the Loch Striven but the sun is actually shinning on it, not only is it the first time that I’ve seen the sun this year but it’s the first time I’ve seen it for weeks

It was a bonny day indeed, at least by recent standards and I spent most of it sorting out my parents water supply.

The deluges of late having torn off the filter and allowed stones to block the 63mm water pipe. Normally it’s just a matter of uncoupling it lower down and ‘rodding’ clear with a length of 32mm saved for the purpose. However no amount of ‘rodding’ would shift the blockage, even cutting the pipe 2m before the filter and trying to clear it with a proper set of drain cleaners failed to clear the obstruction

In the end I had to cut out the blocked section and insert another. I tried being clever by connecting the old and new sections together then ‘pulling/pushing’ it through the gravel bed of the dam but it didn’t work So in the end I just had to dig a fresh hole, feed the pipe through and refill it.

That done, a plate of smoked salmon pasta demolished and the water filter changed I headed home,

to find the boys working in the dark on the Torran path, what a team No flies on these boys, no lying in bed until after lunch and expecting mum to wipe their backsides with these chaps, a credit to their parents

Friday

Not long after that I was in my bed leaving wifey reading Terry Pratchet and the boys playing ‘Modern Warfare II’ or some other mindless pish on the ‘idiot box’. I am not a fan of video games, TV or the plethora of junk that our children and adolescents are subjected  to. However I think that if  children are ‘involved, encouraged and engaged’ with other stuff  it does no great harm. Certainly doesn’t seem to have fried the brains of these three yet

This morning, after yet another 13 hour sleep we went out to feed and medicate the pigs, prior to a trip down south to help a mate with some pipe. This time however it was two injections for wee Tam, an antibiotic as well as his anti inflammatory, poor wee chap

 

It would be mostly ‘winch work’ for the ‘Warn 9500XP’ but we took the quad just in case.

 

The day went well, despite a rapid deterioration in the weather

 

and eventually we’d achieved as much as could be expected

Cold, wet and hungry we returned north to a poorly piglet and an awesome bowl of soup. Wee Tam was breathing a little more rapidly but I stayed with him to make sure he got a drink off mum before retiring to the kitchen for a bowl of Jamie Oliver’s soup.

 

Now this version of a ‘curry soup’ of Tamil origin is a serious and fulfilling winter dish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulligatawny . Wifey plucked it out of the book I’d bought her for Christmas http://www.channel4.com/programmes/jamies-great-britain and I really had to laugh when I started to ‘Google’ for the recipe  http://yummychooeats.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/the-mighty-mulligatawny/ for someone else had obviously got the book for Christmas and had tried it out recently

I couldn’t find the recipe Jamie so I hope you don’t mind the infringement of copyright Either way, your soup is awesome, so much so that the entire team had seconds. OK, my boy is now in bed throwing up but I’m sure that’s more to do with all the cr4p he was eating  in the back of the Land Rover than the soup