A simple job, aye right :-)

I stopped giving ‘wee dug’ bones years ago cos Molly just doesn’t no when to stop, no matter how big the bone is she’ll gnaw away at it until it’s vanished, growling fiercely if you try and remove it from her vice like grip. Now I guess that’s quite normal behaviour and for a regular sized dug would be fine but she would literally chew away until she burst or at least chew away until she was the size of and as hard as a small barrel She would then become constipated and be unable to pooh for days. Sure she would try but nothing would come out and when it did, after several days I’d marvel at the size of her deposit Hope you’re no reading this over breakfast and if you are I apologise. Anyway the bone from Sunday’s lamb roast was just too good not to share with my faithful companion so much to her delight I gave it to her yesterday afternoon outside. At least then she’d not be eating it on my bed or sofa and I could remove it from her and put it in an outside bin before she went solid about the waist.

Apart from her vanishing with it, this seemed to go to plan and I manged to find her and distract her long enough to remove the bone by loosing off a few rounds with a shotgun. The one thing Molly loves above all else is the prospect of me shooting something, the very act of unlocking my gun cabinet will usually have her by my side whining in seconds. Obviously cos she was outdoors somewhere I actually had to fire the gun at some fictitious pigeon before for she came charging round the house whereupon I retraced her steps and deposited the remnants of Sunday dinner in the bin.

Trouble is wee dug has been getting up every couple of hours since and whining at the back door to go and look for her bone Still, there’s some bits of meat left from my ‘left over’ feast last night that I can add into her dinner tonight, hopefully that’ll give me peace and a better night’s sleep. Not that I’d have had a great one anyway, I seldom do, especially the night before returning to work. I’m actually quite excited about the prospect, barring my fortnight in dry dock I’ve not worked for months, between broken ribs, docking and holidays I’ve not actually worked on the Raasay route since August!!! Not that that is unusual for the rest of the country with furlough and all but it does feel strange. Hope I can remember how to shutdown the ferry tonight then start her up in the morning

Turned into an epic

I’ll not be ‘turning to’ until late afternoon right enough so I’ll have time to do a few more Land Rover, croft related tasks, the first of which will be to find Rodney, Bismarck and Tirpitz who spent the night ‘off the radar’ and never came home last night. Then I guess I’ll clear up the bomb site that is my workshop, yesterday’s simple task of getting my front lights working turning into ‘major surgery’.

   

The day getting off to a fine if not greyish start which set the tone for the day so I didn’t feel so bad at being inside the shed all day working on my lights.

 

The left hand side loom to the front I’d already joined to the original one yesterday so before refitting the headlamps I buffed up the Perspex lens with toothpaste. Basically cos that is all I could find, the best thing I’ve found for repairing glazed plastic headlamps is Duraglit  or Brasso

but I had neither. You need something that is ever so slightly abrasive and I’ve found Duraglit ideal for removing tiny scratches on glasses, lenses and CD’s that jump. T cut also works but after hours of fruitlessly searching for mine (I have now just remembered where it is) I went and raided my bathroom for some toothpaste, it too is like a very fine abrasive paste and I’ve used it in the past for gently lapping in diving compressor valves. Sure you can actually buy special kits for refurbishing faded headlamps but I guess they’re just rebranded metal polish or something.

   

All that went ‘damn fine splendid’ until I came to the drivers side where I couldn’t easily remove the old loom to join it to the new one. It was only a few inches short right enough and I could have just spliced in a new section but I’d planned to fit a new outer wing anyway. The old one had a dent in it which would have meant removing it to repair and I wanted to get rid of the side repeater lamp and it’s hole. Rather than fiddle about blind with spanners I just cut the wing off at the seam and removed the now easily accessible nuts and bolts with a socket and ratchet or grinder if they were seized, which one or two were.

  

It was once the outer wing was removed that I noticed the large hole in the galvanised inner wing so I removed that with a view to repairing it. Another boodly epic cos you have to remove everything that is attached to it in the engine bay first. I gotta say, I was tempted to fit new ones. The later plastic ones are about £110 each but I figured I could effect a reasonable and invisible repair by welding them (chances are the left hand one is the same) then giving them a good painting prior to refitting.

Almost 9:00am now, found the wee piggy’s about half a mile away grubbing about in the birch wood looking very pleased to see me, or at least the feed bucket.

  

Molly greeted them by trying to bite their ears and well all trundled back to the croft,

  

the crows having stolen another three apples and the deer watching on with amusement

Three apples!!!!

Another fine day ahead methinks, perhaps not sunny but mild and dry by the look of it. Orion greeted me this morning as I awoke at the sane time of just before 6:00 minus the usual weight of ‘wee dug’ on top of my clean quilt cover. Dunno if she doesn’t like the smell of t he new fabric conditioner or she just wanted to be near the remnants of yesterday’s roast lamb, which, thanks to my neighbours and dinner guest was served with an abundance of mint sauce Obviously someone had been reading my blog, perhaps after this and the anchovy episode I should post my shopping lists on here more frequently Many thanks to all concerned

The normal ‘hot water bottle’ that resides by my feet

being curled up in the living room, rather than on Klimt’s The Kiss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kiss_(Klimt)

Or perhaps she felt threatened by the presence of Orion outside the bedroom window. Anyway, I’ve done my morning stretching, demolished a pot of coffee and ‘wee dug’ has still not stirred, I guess she’ll be saving her energy for pig feeding shortly, whereupon she’ll accompany me in an attempt to steal their food, talking of which.

 

My dinner guest brought me a box of apples yesterday for Rodney, Tirpitz and Bismarck so I deposited one in each of their troughs before going to let them back on the croft for the night. I guess I was a little early as they were not waiting for me by the gate and like me are still a little ‘confused’ by the clock changing nonsense. By the time I’d found them and led them to their dishes and tasty apples, the apples had gone!!!!! all three of them and without a trace!! Sure it must have been Murdo and John my two resident hoodies but how the feck does a hooded crow fly off with a whole apple? Sure I’ve seen them lift eggs and even dig up spuds and peck at them on the ground but how on earth do they lift and fly with an apple in their claws or beak. Not only that but there’s only two of them, so one must have returned for the third apple. Gotta try and get a picture of this after leaving more apples for them today

It works

 

Before basting my lamb shoulder in finely chopped garlic, rosemary and olive oil for its spell in the oven I returned back to yesterday’s conundrum, the low fuel warning light. After bypassing that wee ‘secret’ PCB taped inside the instrument cluster loom and replacing it with a wire that now went all the way back to the red (rearmost) connection on the tank sender unit.

  

After that it was time to set about the front light wiring harness which was also an amalgam of two different ones but a much more straight forward task of simply connecting like to like using crimps and ‘shrink wrap’. The mini blow torch proving better than the heat gun when it came to multiple individual connections rather than larger sections.

   

Amazing what a difference 20 minutes can make hey, there’s the moon at 8:00am and the Storr at 8:20, now it’s time for first breakfast