Crash

Well, my laptop crossed at the weekend. This had the potential to be a bit of a disaster, but luckily Ian was able to sort it. When I say lucky, it was lucky for me, not for him. Ian has been nonstop over the last couple of weeks and Saturday was the first day when he didn't have anything to do for this client, and he spent the whole day and part of the next trying to sort my laptop. Which he did.

As fast as Ian has been making money, we've been spending it. We are now the proud owners of a robot vacuum cleaner. So far we are really pleased with it. It is very clever and runs around picking up a surprising amount of dust. When I say surprising, obviously it is not surprising that we have a lot of dust - but it is surprising how much it picks up. The plan is that we will let it run around hoovering every day and hope that this helps us keep the dust under control. We've also bought a floor cleaner, which should be here on Wednesday. This is a wet cleaner and we're hoping that this will help us actually get the floors clean. The next thing we'll look for will be a floor polisher. So far this works out less than what it would have cost to get the floors professionally cleaned. We can probabaly buy the polisher and still save money.

Our parcels arrived today from Keynsham - thanks Jim and Viv for sorting these out. Included were rather a lot of wall sticker things that I bought from ebay. In fact a few more than I was expecting - hence the fact that the parcel was so heavy!

We are also the proud owner of an Internet radio. This plays radio from the Internet, without us having to play it through the computer. Because we are rather remote here, we don't get a digital radio. Ian found this and it was an absolute bargain - probably because it is shocking pink! He noticed that there were several hundred of these pink radios available - perhaps it was not to everyone's taste! So far we have listened to Bollywood from Pakistan, and punk from Belgium and Greek folk music. Because we pick up Spanish radio on our normal radios this holds less interest - but Syberia Broadcasting Corporation - where would we be without it?

Chickens Hair-Dos

We've been looking at our chicken's heads. Silkies are notoriously difficult to sex and even experienced breeders say that the only true way is to wait until one has an egg. Apparently, however, one way of sexing silkies is to look at the top of their heads. Females should have perfectly formed feather pompoms on top of their heads, boys have a more swept back 'Elvis' look. Needless to say we appear to have five silkies with swept back locks. I've tried fluffing some of them up, but it they do seem to fall back into a swept back look afterwards. Having five male silkies would be exceptionally bad luck!

Pics

Painters Having Fun

The painter is having fun now! He has given all the old wood doors left in the house a makeover and has given them a wood effect. Everyone agreed that they were not in good enough condition to strip, so this is the next best thing. They do look good.

He's also started re-marbeling the pillars. They will look different to how they looked before - lighter. However, it is in keeping with the new fresher look in the hall.

With any luck he'll be finished this week. Although then comes the cleaning and trying to get back to normal. We're going to try and spend two days a week on this.

We had a bit of a panic when the carpenter said the internal doors would be here in July - then worked it out that this is only six weeks or so's time, so we'll probably only just be finished cleaning and sorting by the time they arrive.

Pics to come...

Blogs at Their Best

I was listening to an interesting feature on the radio about a man who had found his grandfather's letters from the first world war and had published them in 'real time' on a blog, 90 years to the date since they were written. Here's the blog - http://wwar1.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2006-01-01T00%3A00%3A00Z&updated-max=2007-01-01T00%3A00%3A00Z&max-results=5 . He's now had a book published. The link takes you to the beginning of the letters.

Just goes to show that blogs can occasionally be more informative than people wittering about chicken behaviour!!

Davy Not Helping

Cats love boxes, which is why I always have to wrestle Davy out of the light box before I can take photos.

Teaching Chickens to Roost

The chicks are taking well to life in the barn, although we shut them in my workshop (in their box) at night. The biggest problem is teaching them to be chickens. So far we've had to teach them that their food won't always come to them in a bowl and that they will have to scratch for it. When we throw food on the floor they look at horror and wait for nice clean food to be presented in a bowl. They are 'gradually' getting the scratching idea, but still won't roost.

The only option is to for one of us to take on the role of Mother Hen and for Ian to spend a night with them stood on a pole. Predictably, he said no!

Workshop

Ian and I were talking about having a proper workshop area. Not a crafty workshop, but a DIY workshop and we decided to make part of the garage over to a DIY corner. There-s both natural light and electricity (talking of natural light, now we are back to working in a room without natural light and with poor lighting and I was rather surprised to see the color combination of some wool I was spinning when I saw it with proper light!). This will be a priority as we will have lots of things to do when the painters have finished and it would be nice not to have to hunt round from tool pile to tool pile looking for a screwdriver. Ian said he'd knock something up from some old doors, however with visions of Steptoe's yard in mind, I have suggested that perhaps we'll look at some cheap worktop.

We've moved the chicks from their box into the long barn at the back. They spent all day yesterday hiding inside their night accommodation (one of the dog baskets), refusing to come out, however this morning they came leaping out with glee as though they had always been there. They are quite funny, running round with their wings flapping. We are currently thinking there are three boys, one girl and one unknown....