Murky ??? :-(

Well, that’ll be the telly fixed It died a couple of months ago and cos I rarely watch it I never got around to fixing it, what with all my other ‘wee projects’ on the go. I’d kinda been putting it off on account of where the antennae resides, which is in the loft above 900mm of insulation. I’d a feeling it wasn’t a good idea fitting it up there when I installed it 3 or 4 years ago as it would obviously be loosing some efficiency through the slate roof. However, external TV antennas and dishes in these latitudes usually get battered by the wind, loose signal and inevitably leave rusty streaks down your walls. Anyway, I’d traced the fault to the booster which was no longer showing its ‘powered up light’ and fitted a new one with a built in amplifier and 4 way splitter. That was of course after carefully peeling back 3 x 300mm layers of insulation from above the loft hatch and carefully picking my way through it complete with breathing mask and gloves. Boy does that stuff irritate or what. So, now I’ve got my gazillion TV channels back but after a quick look through them tonight I figured I’d be as well off on here How is it possible to have so many channels full of 5h1te?

Thursday

  

Yesterday I once more borrowed the neighbours ‘Tank’ to go and get stone from Sconser Quarry, this time 20mm ‘chuckies’ for the drive around ‘Callum’s shed’.

Thanks to a Windoze or Firefox update I’ve lost most of me pictures right enough but I was really chuffed with the outcome

  

MV Loch Bhrusda, the noisiest ship on Scotland’s west coast and FV Sarah the best clam diving boat on the planet Don’t let looks fool you

Friday

Sure Thursday did have a great deal more to offer but as I mentioned previously I lost all me pictures thanks to an update Why do we need all these friggin updates (please don’t answer that). My first laptop was an old IBM Think Pad with a pirate copy of XP on it running Firefox. I had that laptop for years and cos it had this pirate software on, it never had a single update installed in all the time I had it. The thing preformed faultlessly for years until the actual laptop keypad failed and even then I fixed it temporarily by putting it in the freezer overnight. Every time  install a Windoze or Firefox update something barmy happens is it just me?

Anyway, with the weather being so settled and me having ‘worked my butt off’ this last wee while I figured I was due some ‘me time’. So after getting the Searider all ready for sea and polishing up my diving gear I went for a ‘blast’ I had spent the morning dropping off my neighbour and collecting cement from Sconser then returned home to take generator, mixer, poker and wot not down to the shore at me slip. The tides were just about as small as they could be with a HW of only 4m at 13:05. They do not get much smaller than that and my goal during all my slipway ‘civil engineering’ had been to make my slip usable at ANY ‘high water’. Well today I did it I managed to launch the Searider around an hour before at around 3.93M Sure the wind was from the east and the pressure high so it was probably even lower than that but I was ‘well pleased’.

 

And after a quick tour of Loch Arnish

and a visit to the ‘Horses Cave’, which looked like it had suffered another ‘roof fall’, I sped around through the Fladda Narrows into Loch a Sgurr for a dip.

  That’ll be the ‘Huntsman’s Leap’ on Fladda, legend or is it ‘nonsense’ has it that someone jumped the gap on a horse ‘aye right’ Anyway, it’s pretty spectacular and as you can see from the vegetation devoid of sheep and deer

 

Managed to drop my anchor almost on top of the first scallop this ‘clam diving’ is a bit like ‘riding a bike’

   

I gotta say though that I was severely disappointed with the water clarity, it was a tad murky, which was a surprise after all the settled weather. Perhaps it was a plankton bloom cos the water temp was 8 degrees!!!! which from memory is a good 2 degrees higher than normal for this time of year.

 

Once I’d finished ‘catching dinner’ it was a mad rush to Sconser quarry to load up a couple of tons of aggregate ready for tomorrow’s mix, if it ever happens

 

Aggregate back home, dugs fed and then back down to the shore to recover my trailer, diving cylinder and dinner. I gotta say, it’s much easier with a digger than Land Rover I had just one scallop for me dinner fried in the same pan as a cod fillet and some chorizo, it was boodly amazing

The eleven hour pour :-)

A cracking few days behind me, in which I have achieved much, mainly on account of having no Internet We lost it the day after I last posted, which I guess must have been Thursday, sorry I cannae be more specific but it has been a bit of a blur. Sure I missed it but to be quite honest I doubt I would have got the 20M square slab for the 5m extension to ‘Callum’s shed’ poured on Friday had I been able to get ‘online’. At least I wouldn’t have been able to mix the 2.5 cubic metres AND go and see Willie Campbell playing at the Isle of Raasay Distillery https://raasaydistillery.com/

 

As it was I managed to start mixing concrete at 6:30 and had it finished by 17:30, leaving me just enough time to get cleaned up and get to the gig for around 8:00pm. This just gave us enough time to order a couple of lemon juices and sit back in a cosy corner of the lounge and listen to Willie’s first hour long set. I was driving and Darling Wife would be doing an early shift so it wasn’t going to be a ‘full on sesh’. No, it was just a great night of Willie’s eclectic mix, a few of his own tunes and songs, some country and western, a little traditional, a dash of Gaelic and the odd ‘sing along’. A ‘perfect end to a perfect day’, tis a sad person indeed that considers mixing concrete for eleven hours ‘perfect’

  

Sure, a 20m square slab 125mm thick is a little ambitious for one man approaching retirement with a Belle mixer but conditions were ideal. It was mild and damp to stop the concrete cracking, a gale of south west wind kept the mixer happily churning away for the whole day on wind energy The mixer was parked in the shed out of the wind so no eyes full of cement and I kept the trailer fed with aggregate from my stockpile with ‘Calum the Kubota’.

   

Barring the tuna salad I had for lunch I never stopped and was well pleased with my effort Sure I was mightily miffed I couldn’t tell anyone about it on Facecloth or check for the likelihood of a downpour ruining my handiwork on XC Weather, but had I done that then I’d have probably missed Willie.

Draught proofing

Despite the visit to the distillery I did manage to get in bed at a sensible time and arise early without a headache thanks to the St Hellier lemonade   http://www.sthelierfruitbeverages.com/product-2#about-st-helier I’d been drinking all night. Saturday was a cracking day and I set about making a windbreak for the wee garden. I had knocked one up last year using netting and steel poles but the winter’s gales had bent all the poles and the netting was full of holes from rubbing on the poles. Still, it had served it’s purpose and allowed Darling Wife to establish the makings of a lovely wee garden.

I’d drilled the rocks to support the original 6mm steel posts and most of them were now actually stuck into the rocks so I just cut the poles leaving around 75mm sticking up. I then drilled the bottom of some 75mm square posts and hammered them in. Sounds far simpler than it actually was cos none of them lined up and there was a great deal of messing about. However by making up custom brackets, drilling more holes in the rocks etc. etc. I got on just fine.

 

That cheap Evolution mitre saw from Screwfix cuts steel just as well as plastic conduit and wood https://www.screwfix.com/p/evolution-r255sms-255mm-single-bevel-sliding-mitre-saw-220-240v/1062x Methinks that’s a newer model than mine as mine was under £100 but worth every penny of £125 they’re asking for it now.

 

It took me just about the whole day to do that

 

and I managed to finish it before starting to at last paint Sonas

  

Sure, I didn’t get very far before having to pack up, get cleaned up and head of to Raasay House https://www.raasay-house.co.uk/dining-raasay-restaurant-skye for our 16:30 ‘table for two’. This week I had roast pork belly and Darling Wife roast beef, both of us choosing a starter rather than dessert, me going for a hot smoked salmon salad whilst herself had haggis fritters. It was all totally delicious as usual and well presented by courteous staff but I gotta say the haggis fritters were pure amazing.

That ‘time of year again’

How I hate this feckin around with the clocks business, I don’t really care who’s time we are on, BST, GMT, UTC or CET but can we just stop changing the feckin things. I’m gonna spend the next six weeks or so feeling hungry at ‘stupid O clock’, the dugs will be following me about wanting fed at the wrong time, the hens won’t know what is going on and I’m bound to forget to alter at least one clock!

Anyway, that’s it, it’s 8:00 PM which is really 7:00 PM so I’d better go and shut the hens in an hour later Whatever, I’m going to bed, but it’s only 19:00, guess I’ll be up at 4:00 tomorrow

Still, at least the clocks moved the right way