Well it seemed like a stormy night here if the voltage on my battery banks is anything to go by, I was up several times during the night and on each occasion the kitchen voltmeter was hovering around the 59.V mark.
It’s 6:30 now, reading a much saner 50.2V and I cannot hear a breath of wind outdoors but by all accounts it was pretty stormy elsewhere in the country. Here the forecast looks good with big smiley sunny faces dominating the outlook on XC Weather. I just can’t make my mind up what to do today, yesterday’s lumb clearing being something of a failure. My plan being to try and clear the avalanche inside the lumb from below using a small battering ram on the end of some drain clearing rods. This initially met with some success but my ‘ram’, whilst dislodging much rubble couldn’t seem to break up the larger rocks so I figured more weight and a ‘pointy end’ might help.
This brought to mind a hardened steel pick for my demolition hammer that I’d purchased some years ago only to discover it was the wrong fitting for my Hitachi breaker, so, I welded it onto the steel bar on the end and went to have another go.
It certainly seemed to be bringing down more of the debris but kept getting jammed up there. Having already lost several heavy objects inside the boodly chimney I decided to abandon it until I could modify the back end with a grinder so at least it wouldn’t jam on the way down. I also had in mind to ‘find’ three meters of 63mm thick walled blue water pipe as I knew where there was several hundred meters lying in the heather, or at least there was a few years ago 
I figured that 63mm pipe would be solid enough to batter with a sledge hammer but bendy enough to go up the lumb. I’d already tried 90mm and it just wasn’t bendy enough.
Back to the ‘Old Girl’
Truth is, I was boodly knackered after all my battering and rodding so I went home to do some more work on the Land Rover, leaving my quest for 63mm pipe until later when I was expecting some deliveries from the ferry.
I had already destroyed my exhaust down pipe trying to remove it to access the starter motor. A new 90 degree bend was on it’s way but the one fitted on Steve Parker’s 200TDi conversion is swaged slightly smaller at the manifold end and I’d battered that to death.
So, I heated up the damaged end, straightened on a mandrel, chopped it off and fastened it onto the end of the £15 bend, I wasnae paying £150 for one of Steve’s again
Seemed to work just fine.
I then headed to the ferry to collect more bits required for the ‘Old Girl’ calling by the new EE mast at Cnoc an Uan on the way.
No visit to the south end around lunchtime would be complete without a stop at the Larch Box for a snack.
Yesterday’s choice being a brie, sundried tomato and pesto toastie, yum, yum.
Armed with more Land Rover parts I headed home via the water treatment plant to see if the long lengths of 63mm pipe were still lying in the heather.
Sure, they were but it wasn’t that that caught my eye, it was the broken ‘pecker’ lying outside the compound which Molly and I ‘rescued’ with some difficulty. It was quite a way from the car and boodly heavy. I had a plan yet another for the lumb saga.
Saturday
Well, it almost be 8:00am now the stags are roaring outside and the hinds gathering
he’s been busy rolling in the peaty mud trying to make himself look bigger and more attractive,
the girls, well, they don’t seem too impressed Me, I’d better go feed the pigs, if I can find them, they never came home last night 
It is of course the prediction of an Englandcentric Radio 4 so probably bollox but we’ll see. Certainly there was no sign of it last night when I returned to my beautiful Island home. 
