At last :-)

Five am and all is well 🙂 much as I tried to stay awake last night I failed miserably. In just after 18:30, fed shortly afterwards and plonked down in front of the laptop, I just could not keep my eyes open 😦 By 20 :00 I gave up and sat down in front of the TV to watch mindless pap but quit that after half an hour or so and went to my bed.

It may not have been a very long day but it had certainly been productive 🙂

An early rise had me out feeding the herd just after 7:00, the majority of them being in an arc at the bottom of the hill near the fish farm slip. They really love it down here and are making a fine job of digging up the bracken roots. What puzzles me is why they pick a certain clump and avoid others. They’ve not touched the ones near their insulated arc but demolished loads at the other side of the road.

As they seem now to prefer exploring to hanging about the croft we’ve been leaving the gate open and even Bracken herself moved out. She gave up on the barn yesterday and I found her this morning inside the old Arnish net shed some distance away. Her head buried in an old trawl net and seven piglets on top of her, a priceless picture but I wasn’t quick enough 🙂

Whilst round there I cleaned out the intake for the hydro turbine which has been blocking daily on account of wifey clearing some ditches. Disturbing all the drains and ditches has been sending clods of earth blobs of frogspawn and bits of rushes down the burn, all of which end up in my header tank.

After that I went down to the turbine itself but all was fine so continued onto Torran to check the batteries, inverter and turbine there.

The boys had already done it on Saturday but I wanted to top up the batteries myself. They’re quite capable of doing it, but the batteries do contain sulphuric acid so I’d rather I was there when they did that particular job. And I really must get myself a container like that one in the picture for doing my bank, with its tap on the bottom it make the job so much easier than decanting into a jug the filling each cell via a funnel.

 

All was in order there so I continued on to my friends house along the track to have a look at a hen house (don’t ask 🙂 ) as the prawn boat Jacquie B sped into the loch.

 

I also found some treasures to keep future archaeologists happy, 

 

 

I hate this obsession with ‘returning to green field site’

definitely better to leave some gems in the undergrowth for future generations 🙂

 

Nine months later !!!

After ‘second breakfast’  I started, at last, on the final coat of paint on the back of the house roof. I’d started this job in June of last year, my favoured time for painting but got distracted. May or June is the ideal time, long days, generally dry and still no midgies. Any later and you need wind or heat as well as lack of rain to keep the ‘wee devils’ away, though the heat won’t stop the cleggs (horse flies). These blood suckers will attack you through your clothes !!!

The last time I painted the roof I made the mistake of doing it in August when the sun was high, it was obviously far too hot as the paint lifted a couple of years later on the south side 😦 The north facing side being being just fine. This was a right PITA as I had to power wash, scrape and feather t

he edges of the old paint and it’s taken me rather a long time to do it 🙂

It was a rather dubious day to attempt the task but all the forecasts I checked assured me that it would be dry, Just, for there was a risk of the odd shower at the south end of Raasay.

One 5lt tin of the Teamac ‘Farm oxide’ usually just does the rear of the house in May but in March it’s a little cooler and I was this much short 😦 Not usually an issue as I’d four tins, but the one I chose to do the rear was probably ten years old.

However, whilst it did look a completely different colour, it dried in just the same 🙂

 

Anyway, that’s it, rain forecast for today so a spot of fencing and quad repairing perhaps, whatever, it’s now 6:30 and time for breakfast number one 🙂