Nice and easy

I’ve never been so glad to finish a weeks work in my life, normally the working week flies by with only my diminishing bananas to remind me what day it is. The sore back this week meant that apart from doing a couple of hours in the wheelhouse to relieve the skipper, juggling a few cars on the deck and doing the routine maintenance I’ve done precious little else 😦 The net result of which has been a very long week indeed.

 

The light dusting atop Glamaig on Monday crept slowly down during the cold breezy day

that was Tuesday.

I had fully intended to write a few lines last night before I got stuck into the bottle of ‘medicine’ that a good friend had procured for me from the Co op wine counter. However after four hours of filling in a form to ‘Ofgem’ regarding my wind and hydro turbines and failing to convert a ‘Jpeg’ of my wiring into a ‘PDF’ I gave up and went to bed in a huff! Not only was I physically useless but now I was mentally incompetent as well 🙂

Having said that, the medicine might have had something to do with it because it worked fine this morning 🙂

 

As I was slaving away over my hot computer this morning the swineherd had the easy job of feeding and mucking out the pigs in the fresh snow 🙂

This bad back does have its good points! hopefully it will encourage me to complete my VAT return on time and wade through a mountain of paperwork that’s been on the ‘back burner’ for months. I’ve made a very encouraging start by getting that form off to ‘Ofgem’, despite having months to get it in I submitted it just before the deadline tomorrow 🙂

More important than the VAT return was the return of Winnie the back person who’d been away for a few days and whom wifey and I both had an appointment with. After 40 mins on her couch I left felling two inches taller and wifey went in for her session.

 

Leaving me with time to watch the ‘opposite shift’ battling with the north wind

until they reached the relative shelter of the old pier.

It also gave me a chance to go and see what had been going on at the new car park in front of the shop

where I found three freshly built cairns with three beautifully carved slices of tree set in the top.

Each one commemorating, (which hardly seems like the right word as most were forced and many died) the departure of generations of Raasay folk, (though it was the same throughout the highlands and islands) to the four corners of the world.

Four months on a sailing ship!!!!!

 

When the old mill is restored and this walk and the car park finished it really is going to be a bonny wee spot.

That was about it really, I’ve spent most of the day sat bolt upright in the kitchen writing letters and phoning people, both of which I don’t like doing. One good thing though, the money that had been ‘siphoned’ out of my business account last month by someone of French ancestry with an Orange mobile phone who supports Birmingham FC and likes to stay in Travelodge hotels on the way to a foreign holiday had been replaced 🙂

I know, it’s a pretty rubbish effort but you try sitting down for a week and trying to make it sound interesting 🙂

So I’ll leave you with the weather and get on with my work 🙂

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No Lights :-)

The summer timetable is here with British summer time hot on its heels but it certainly didn’t feel like summer this morning when I was confronted by a very light dusting of snow on the Land Rover this morning. That will be the ‘lambing snow’ here thinks I, the ‘lambing snow’ being the snow that always seems to arrive round about the same time as the spring lambs 😦 It’s still a little early for lambs on Raasay but you can bet it’ll be freezing when they arrive! As it happened the snow came to nothing, the frozen puddles that I crashed through on the way to work all melted and the day turned out ‘no bad’.

 

 

Despite losing an hour off the morning it was still light enough to not require headlights on the way to work and this mornings wildlife included these two fine stags near the youth hostel.

Monday, as usual was pretty hectic on the car deck with all the returning harbour workers and a few more early tourists. My working day, despite the perfect painting weather was restricted to light duties and a couple of hours in the wheelhouse due to the sore back. It might have been quite hectic on the car front but marine traffic was light with the most exciting thing to pass being the tug David Andrews which I presume had been working at the harbour.

Not only was the car deck busy it also had a couple of ‘oldies’ on it through the day

and by that I mean the four cylinder ‘Fergie’ and not the driver 🙂

Much to the annoyance of our purser who had just missed out on adding this fine old tractor to his own collection by a day or so 😦

And just to rub salt in the wound I asked him to drive it off the ferry 🙂

 

Preceding the 1957 Ferguson 35 tractor was a fine 1969 Series IIa SWB Land Rover hardtop full of what looked like geologists. This particular Land Rover being unusual, if not unique in not leaving a puddle of oil in its wake on the car deck 🙂

The short wheel base 88” Land Rover was supposed to be capable of carrying seven fully kitted infantrymen. Now I know that people were smaller in the ‘olden days’ you just have to look at the height of the decks on HMS Victory or step inside an old cottage. The Land Rover however was conceived just after world war two and I’m sure that people were not that much smaller then 🙂 This one was only carrying six fully kitted geologists and not one of them had a rifle 🙂

Anyway that was about it really, the lack of any real job to get my teeth stuck into due to the sore back meant that the day was quite slow in passing. However some new painkillers given me by my good friend ‘Buffalo Bill’ from Balfour Beatty seemed to help and I even managed to do a little deck scrubbing in the afternoon 🙂

              

 

A little snow appeared on Glamaig during the late afternoon possibly as a precursor to the stuff that’s forecast for the next few days but on the whole it was pretty nice.

 

 

 

Though by the time I’d driven home ‘nice’ did not even come close, in fact words failed me!