Broody Minni (by sarah)

Minni has been stealing Tiger Lilly my little kitten toy - you know one of the pound puppy variety, she licks it and curls around it all the time.

These pictures are obviously posed but she did then clean the toy kitten, we find this toy in the most bizar of places including under the fire place in the ash - wondering if Minni was trying to litter train it!

This is just a cute picture of Minni in one of her favourite sleeping spots - Jeans blue bouncy chair.

Poor Sore Paw on the Van (by sarah)

Thursday morning i.e. a week ago Al notices when he bends down to do some of the parking area that the front wheel of the van is bald on the inside. In fact it is more than buld it is down to the fibres - in the words of our one and a half year old uh-oh and oh dear!

The next day it is supposed to drive nearly to Wales!

So Friday morning sees us at the tyre place after dropping Jean off at Nursery on route. No problem they say - but then the wheel won't come off!

We had assumed that we had been bad and not noticed the wheel and it had been like it since the tracking was changed but we thought Uncle David would have told us or just changed the tyres! We really could not work out how we had missed it for so long.

The answer?

We probably hadn't missed it because the wheel was on really tightly at one bolt - who ever had last done the wheels had used the little gun thing they have with the torque setting too high and had cross threaded all the bolts - one of them had snapped off in the nut when they tried to take the wheel!

It was all a bit mangled - so we ended up spending over seventy quid when we'd been expected 10/20 🙁 Not happy. This of course also eat into the time we needed to get ready for going camping!

So now we are trying to track down the last time the wheels were changed/taken off - sigh.

No Jeany-bow! (by sarah)

Well it's finially happened - Jean has taken it upon herself to start the interior decoration of the Bakery!

We have been doing drawing and colouring after breakfast each morning with much emthasis on 'only on the paper Jean,' however she got hold of a biro up in our bedroom and though Alaric saw her with it he noted that it was one with a retractable nib and the point was inside so he didnt worry. My policy is that reguardless she is given paper and told only to draw on that.

Poor Alaric didnt realise that the nib doesn't retract properlly and only discovered this fact when Jean drew on my lovely iridescent note book!

We then discovered that she had 'decorated' the sheet adn duvet cover 🙁 Oh well at least it wasnt the walls (yet!).

We showed her sheet and said, 'no bad bobble you only draw on paper,' then just to make me feel really guilty, her little smiling face disolved into tears :'(

Still she was really good with her drawing this morning and only got upset when a crayon broke - she gave it to me saying 'oh dea, oh dea,' and didnt belive me when I said I couldnt fix it!

Potting up the seeds (by sarah)

Yesturday we started digging over the plot and putting a turf path through the middle of it to make two smaller managable plots - I could not really get to everything last year so we are going to see if this improoves things!

We still have a bit more work to do on the plot as we have the ground dwelling catipillars to get rid of for a start!

Still today I started potting up seeds but becuase I am a skin flint I decided that the peat pots from last years house guest forgetting to water cuasultys could be used this year - so there I was and later Al, emptying them and trying not to crack them in the process!

I used the soil from the wormery - and oh what bliss! Compared to last years mole earth and riddling compost through sieves milarky!

However I did randomly find a pice of blue j-cloth in the wormery along with some of those stickers they put on fruit! The bizarest thing was that the j-cloth had some how become rubbery and elastic when the ones we use are not elastic at all!

The only down side to the wormery soil is that I had to extract some worms before using it but I dont think this is too high a price to pay!

I potted up cucumber seeds, cauliflower, carrots in a seed tray (this is a bit of an experiment and is completely against the instructions!), lovage and tarragon.

I was sad to find the globe artichoke packet upside down with no sign of the seeds especially as I was going to give some to Barabara who had realised she had forgotten to get any this year and wanted some.

The Lunderette (by sarah)

On Tuesday we decided to finially take the bedding to the lunderette as we had no power. So off we went - first off we had to walk down quiet a long road and as we had Jean and three dovets! this was quiet a challenge and one we managed to muck up!

Yep - we managed to walk past it - of course I was looking for it on the wronge side of the road for a start and then we managed to get into a deep conversation about how the universe works or the like.

Then it turned out that niether of us had change, well I did but I hadnt expected it to be that pricey to be honest. So after a quick trip for Al to the little corner shop for a bottle of coke we turned our attentions to the machines only to promptly discover that we did not have the right change for the soap powder machine. So after a quick trip to the corner shop for me to buy a bottle of diet coke with lime, we were ready to roll.

Ok fist off we were using the big big machines and we couldnt find the tray to put the powder in so I thought we just put it in the machine - WRONG - it goes in wholes on the top of the machine which even Al had trouble seeing though he at least could reach them - grrr to the hieghtest person who thought of that one!

Then Alaric managed to get the money jammed in the machine - there are two slots but niether of us realised until we had jamed it that one was for the pound coins and one for the twentys - the poor staff had to dismantle that section of the lunderette to fix it and they took our money so that they could put it one once fixed and told us we didnt have to wiat.

Now we had bumped into our publisher friend on route which might have been part of the reason we walked past the place as we were chatting - she wanted to meet up with me for coffee so I hurried out but managed to go the wrong way. I realised after a while that something was wrong and turned around - I met back up with Al who took me to the coffee shop but of course this had all taken so long that our friend and her duaghter where no longer there 🙁

I'm afriad that I got grumpy with slow dawning realisation discovered that I was very hungry as it was 3 o'clock and though Al and Jean had eaten I hadnt yet had breakfast what with having wanted toast when we had no electric!

One sandwitch and coffee later I was a civil human beign again and we went back to check on the washes - they had finished so we put them in the tumble dryers and headed off to explore the oriental and forieng supermarkets along the same street - these were excelletent and we were very happy picking up those odd ingredients that cost a bomb in the normal supermarkets but in these shops were pennys (as these are things that generally can not grow in this country unaided we do not fret that they are not local produce).

We went back to check and sure enough the tumble dryers were finished so we checked and the dovets were still really wet, puzzeled we put the machines on again but had to go and change a pound. We were still faffing with the third tumble dryer when the other two stopped - ah... thought 20p was cheap.

So surely we need to put more 20pees in yes? Yes but you can only put in one at a time for a whole 5 mins of tumble drying - GRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!

Anyway so off Al with a grumpy Jeany whilst I sat there with a pile of 20 pees fortunatly I had some work with me I could do. I still somehow managed to melt the out side of one of the dovets, even though the bleep bleep thing was still damp!

By the time we had finished this comedy of errors it was getting dark then when we got back we found that the power had come back on at 3 o'clock! So Al got grumpy about all the working time he had missed - sigh. Steep learning curve - thats my current mantra to deal with our lives lived in Interesting Times!