Still on holiday.

Sorry, all.  I’ve been taking a longer holiday than expected from the world of blogging.   Everything is fine; I’ve just not been using the computer very much in my personal time, but don’t worry, we’re meeting the architect tomorrow and I’ll have more to say after that, I’m sure.  I’ll even have some more floor plans to upload.

Architect?

More floor plans?

Can’t you make up your mind?

Well, y’all, like marriage, building a house is about compromise.  We’re both so fed up with the whole process (and the whole process not getting anywhere), that we’re not putting up as much as a fight as we would have a while back.  We just want a house to live in, because we’re sick and tired of living in a caravan or on a pull-out couch with sleeping bags in the flat.  (Although, I have to say we’ve been VERY thankful to have the flat in the middle of the coldest winter Aberdeen’s seen in years.)

So, I’ll see you over the weekend…probably on Sunday!

 

 

Sewing Space

Ah…sewing space. How I do miss you.

We’ll be together again, one day, when the water system has finally been fixed and the zombie mice have been eradicated.

Update (from when I wrote the post two weeks ago) – The zombie mice have been vanquished!  The water system is still bust: waiting for a part for the boiler.

 

 

What We’ve Been Up To…

I think that I get so wrapped up in my day-to-day life that I forget that this blog is to update my family and friends on my day-to-day life.   There’s facebook, of course, and I keep in touch using that medium, but not everyone uses Facebook (and good for them for not getting sucked in), and, let’s be honest, we all know I’m a passive, not an active, user.  Same with the whole email thing.  So here’s the latest update:

Work…is work.   I’m in the same position, but will be in a slightly new role by the time you read this.   Hopefully, I’ll be a bit more in the background and less in the front-line, but still doing things that are necessary and have needed done for a long time.  We’re still short-staffed, but here’s hoping this slightly new set-up works…or I’m out of there.  Life’s too short for work to be this stressful, especially with the house-building and the infertility.  Which leads me to the next update…

Infertility.  A word that is beginning to bug me.  I’m fertile, dammit.  It’s just that the egg and the sperm can’t reach each other because of some sassin-frassin scar tissue.  Totally pisses me off.   We’re paying for the next round of IVF.  I’ll keep you updated.

House.  We’ve come to an impasse with the current design our architect has presented.  Over the Christmas holidays, while we were in our fancy-schmancy hotel, I designed a house I could happily live in for the next 20 years.    At the time of writing this, I still needed to pass it by our architect to see whether she is willing to work on it with me.   I don’t know how to address this with her and I don’t know how she is going to react.  Pleasant and professional would be my guess, as that is how she’s been with us from day one.  Still, what words do I use?  How do I introduce the subject and phrase this?  I simply have no idea. [Update: have spoken to the architect and forwarded the plans to her.  She was pleasant and professional and made me feel fine about dropping this bombshell on her.  She's to get back to me after she's had time to look at the drawings.]

Flat.  Our goal was to complete it as best we could over the Christmas holidays, seeing as we were both off until the 5th of January.   Then we caught the flu.  I mean we really caught the flu.  I don’t remember the last time I was that bone-achingly ill.  Now I understand why elderly people with low reserves don’t recover from something like that.  Next year I’m wussing-out and getting my flu shot.  No way am I going through that again.

Mobile Home/Static Caravan/Trailer home. We’ve been idiots.  There was a very small leak in the central heating system that we just. could. not. find.   We had to drain the radiators, etc, earlier in the year to fix a separate problem and didn’t want to fill the system with anti-freeze until we could find the leak.  And then it got cold, and I mean very cold.  -20C cold, one night.  Which was fine because we kept the central heating on a continuous low when we weren’t in the trailer so that it and the plumbing wouldn’t freeze up.   And then we went away for 36 hours, and instead of turning the central heating down, my traitorous wrist turned it OFF!!  Not realising I’d made this mistake, we had a great 36 hours…until we returned to the caravan to find everything — and I do mean everything — frozen.  Then, when things thawed , we found that something in the boiler had cracked.  Thankfully, we had spares from the first boiler we bust and my wonderful, handy husband was able to replace the broken piece.   Then the temperature dropped and everything froze again.  When things thawed, we found that the copper pipes inside the trailer had cracked.   With the use of much solder and flux, hubby thought he had them fixed…maybe…but everything had frozen, again, for the third time so we couldn’t turn on the water to check.  This drama began a little over five weeks ago.  It’s not over.  So we’ve been camped at the flat, where it’s noisy, but there’s running water and functioning central heating.  Oh, and we also have mice in the trailer.  Five caught in traps, so far; probably more of them around — I know this because one of them had been decapitated by the trap…and we never found the head!!  It’s been hauled away somewhere by its mates and probably eaten by them.  Blech.  (Do they call it headcheese in their mouse-language?) [Update: found where the mice are getting in.  Arms are too short to reach the hole and stuff it with steel wool, so went to B&Q hardware store to buy expanding foam to fill the hole.  B&Q had ONE canister, but sans nozzle.  ONE.  needless to say our zombie mice are still getting into the trailer.   Yes, zombie mice.  Eating brains of your own kind means you're a zombie.  I watch TV, I know these things.]

And that’s it for now.

 

Do Laundry While the Water Runs

(Not quite as catchy as make hay while the sun shines, but apropos none-the-less.)

Six loads in thirty-six hours.  Oh ya.

 

Howling Gale

It’s howling a gale outside and flapping plastic and preposterous dreams have ensured my wakefulness.  It’s actually quite crazy-wonderful, with the trees whipped into a frenzy by the (warm!) roaring wind.  I know, because at 4:30 I was outside checking that the plastic surrounding the caravan/trailer was actually still stapled to said caravan/trailer.  (It was.)   You know, instead of staying in bed, I’m going back outside to enjoy the weather while it’s still dark and the rest of the world asleep.

* * * * * * *

Later that day…

The howling gale is now a cold howling gale with stinging rain.  The snow has thawed, but the ground has not.   The streamlets are running clear with snowmelt and have burst their (miniscule) banks, and all our paths are under about four inches of water.  The chickens are most unimpressed.

 

And on the Sixth Day…

Umm…well…the sixth month…

Do you see it?

No?  Let me give you a closer look.

The chickens gave us EGGS!

Well, okay, it was one chicken and one egg.   We’re expecting another one tomorrow, though.  We know this because a second legbar is acting like the first one was today:  wandering around on its own, checking out small enclosed spaces.

“What’s that you said, Crystal?  A legbar laid today’s egg?”

“Why, yes.  It did.”

“So that means YOUR EGG IS BLUE!!”

And I answer, “YES IT IS!!!” (with three exclamation marks and one happy dance)

Let’s take a closer look, shall we?  Notice the upside down heart?

And here’s the egg all cleaned up and in some lower lighting so you really see the blue.  (I was going to hold it next to a white egg for contrast, but it seems we only have brown eggs in the house.)

“Wait.  What’s the material behind you, Crystal?  I don’t remember having seen it before.”

That’s because you haven’t seen it before, friends and family.  It’s new, having been purchased just yesterday as a heat-retaining strategy.

As you know, we keep looking for ways to keep the heat in our tin can house.  I’ve stapled fiberglass under our living room and bedroom, I’ve put old haybales under the caravan as a wind-break and to retain heat (…please don’t bring in mice, please don’t bring in mice, please don’t bring in mice…), I’ve had my dad buy and post shrink-wrap plastic for windows from Canada, since stores are no longer allowed to sell it over here in the UK.  [Note:  if any UK people know for a fact that I'm wrong about this, then please, please send me the name of the store that sells it, so that I no longer have to import the stuff.]  Today’s curtain is the final step and will help keep the heat in the kitchen and living room, rather than having it dissipate in the hall.  It took me four hours of hand-sewing and I now have a hole in my middle finger where the needle kept digging in, but it was so worth it.

 

It’s cold, here.

Oh happy day and glory-be! We have a boiler that is on the wall and pumping out hot water to all the right places.

Whoah. Deja-vu.

That’s right. Graeme and I have been living without heating for all of January in a temperature of — on average — -3C. You think -3C isn’t cold? Imagine living in your fridge…and having to turn down the temperature because it’s too warm. Now imagine sitting in your fridge, and sleeping in your fridge, and having to sit on a toilet seat that is colder than the inside of your fridge. Now imagine no hot water. But that doesn’t really matter becuase there’s no cold water either since your pipes have frozen during the night. But thankfully there’s some water in a gallon jug you were smart enough to have filled the night before, which means you have some water to heat in the kettle so that you can shiver over the sink for a quick wash. Imagine wearing touques and sweaters to bed, and your freshly washed laundry taking a week to become merely damp.

To be honest, I don’t think we could have hacked it if it wasn’t for the electric blanket, and you would have seen us descend upon my father-in-law’s. Throughout the whole month I’ve wondered how people coped before central heating. Then I would remember the Old House, and waking up to frost on the inside of the windows. I don’t remember being cold, but we must have been at times because the only heat in our second-floor bedroom came through a vent in the floor that was over-top of the woodstove. Grandpa tells me he remembers waking up in the same house with a drift of snow across his bed. People dealt with it.

And if I’m very honest, I’ll admit too feeling a bit smug about having had to deal with it, too.

 

Two Words: Spun Glass

Okay. I was going to go on about ‘spun glass’ in this blog, showing a few hideous pictures before getting to the lame ‘punchline’ that what I’m really talking about is how great I am for finally insulating the floor of the living room. Which is not an easy task, I might add, when I’m on my back underneath the trailer, stapling the stuff to the bottom of a floor which is only eight inches above my face, choking on the glass-dust.

However, in my search for hideous spun glass creations I came across this site which is has much more interesting things on it than anything you’ll get out of me. Case in point: the following 1932 hat article…

Well why didn’t I know about this before?!? Who cares that I don’t smoke?! My next craft project is this hat! No more of that awkward digging in a handbag I swore I would never own and then found out that when I turned thirty I turned into my mom and bought a big-ass handbag that now holds three sets of keys, two open packs of gum, 15 old receipts, and two tubes of lipstick that I never wear and I’ll save the five minutes it currently takes me to run a brush through my hair in the mornings.

And who hasn’t wanted to be a feminine martian? Now your dream can come true with this glorious swimming mask, circa 1930. Run out to your nearest vintage store, today!

 

Be Careful What You Wish For…

The hard frost over the holidays made the land look as if it belonged to the Snow Queen.

Beautiful, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, it meant that Graeme and I returned home to this:

Which means that we need a new one of these:

Guess who the numpties were who remembered to drain the water pipes before they left, but forgot to drain the radiators.

 

If The Cabin’s a Rockin’…

…it means batton down the hatches and tie yourself to the mast ’cause we’re in trouble. There were winds of up to 70 knots in the Norhern parts of Scotland last night.

What’s that in real money, you ask? Well, I found this handy-dandy little chart which tells me that 70 knots equals 80.6 mph which — for you young ‘uns — equals 130 km/h. “Well, fair enough,” you say, “but I drive faster than that on the [401/autobahn/insert name of large highway], so what’s the big deal?” Good question! Many of us act all-knowing when we hear the weatherman say, “the wind was X miles per hour last night and great devestation rained down upon all,” but, be honest folks, it’s not the cold, hard number that catches your interest, it’s the description of trees falling on cars and granny blowin’ away in the gale. So here’s a chart for y’all:

Windspeed in MPH	Description – Visible Condition
0	Calm smoke rises vertically
1 – 4	Light air direction of wind shown by smoke but not by wind vanes
4 – 7	Light breeze wind felt on face; leaves rustle; ordinary wind vane moved by wind
8 – 12	Gentle breeze leaves and small twigs in constant motion; wind extends light flag
13 – 18	Moderate breeze raises dust and loose paper; small branches are moved
19 – 24	Fresh breeze small trees in leaf begin to sway; crested wavelets form on inland water
25 – 31	Strong breeze large branches in motion; telephone wires whistle; umbrellas used with difficulty
32 – 38	Moderate gale whole trees in motion; inconvenience in walking against wind
39 – 46	Fresh gale breaks twigs off trees; generally impedes progress
47 – 54	Strong gale slight structural damage occurs; chimney pots and slates removed
55 – 63	Whole gale trees uprooted; considerable structural damage occurs
64 – 72	Storm very rarely experienced; accompanied by widespread damage
73+	Hurricane devastation occurs

Well, lookin’ out the window this morning, although the rocking of the caravan and the howlin’ of the wind made it feel and sound like we were in the 70mph part of Scotland, the fact that I find our trees are still trees and not fire-fodder tells me that we did not experience a ‘storm rarely experienced’. Slates did crash to the ground, though, so I’m thinking we were in the 47-54 mph ‘strong gale’ part of Scotland.

Oh, and we did end up burying our water-pipe a couple of weeks ago, so no more waterless mornings for us. Yay! And here’s a picture from the snow-fall we had a few weeks ago.