I hate...

I HATE Easyjet. I hate Gatwick Airport.
For a variety of reasons (some down to Easyjet and some to Gatwick airport) my Sunday flight has been over 2 hours late for the past 4 weeks and again today. This means bed at something like 2am or three weeks ago 3am (which is 4am in France - the timezone I got out of bed in). Plus the cost of a taxi as they have moved our flight to the North Terminal and it is just too much to get to the train once we are so late - and the train may be cancelled by darn Southern Trains anyway.
This week the innovative excuse is 'refueling' no more detail than that. Don't they refuel before every flight? Why can they never never run this flight on time??
Easyjet claim that 70% of their flights from Gatwick are on time (within 15 mins of the schedule) I would say for this Sunday evening flight it is on time about 5% and more than an hour late 70% of the time. It is so frustrating and not really worth ranting about as I have no alternative and just have to put up with it, but every now and again the knowledge that tomorrow will be an exhausted mess just gets on top of me.
The travelling is fine when everything is on time but Easyjet are really really not helping with that.
Southern Trains have been trying to mess it up even more by cancelling pretty much every other train even when there is not a strike. It gets expensive in taxis!

Finally some skiing

It was lovely weather this weekend and having missed skiing in the sun last weekend we fitted in moving things around going skiing.
This is the first time I have worn my Christmas present from Doug - a pair of salopettes (skiing dungarees for non skiers) from Sweaty Betty. The original pair had to get returned because they had a manufacturing error.
Doug took several photos of me but all of them were dud - operator error. This one made my head look too big and my feet tiny and I have a stupid expression on my face (of course that is Doug's fault!)

This one I have too much of a double chin...

Here is arty picture of me and my phone reflected in Doug's shades

I am not quite sure why Doug took this photo. Possibly rebelling against the endless photo requests and complaints about double chins, stupid smiles etc

Perfect!!

Moving in to the temporary accommodaton

Having moved the fridge and dishwasher last weekend we finished off moving everything we need to be able to cook, eat and sit in comfort in our tiny (but clean, warm and perfectly formed) new living area.
It was hard to get photos that really show how much is crammed in as it is so small you cannot get far enough away from anything...

This is the view from the shower. Although there is now another unit crammed in, to the right of this one so you cannot actually see to the fridge.

It appears we have hundreds of dogs as there is one in each photo 

The super swanky new kettle. You can set the temperature it heats to so you can make green tea with 90degree water for example.

This is the induction hob small cooker. We are almost certainly going to get an induction cooker in the main house when we get to doing the kitchen so keen to try it out. It worked well for popcorn!

You can see from this photo that the heat is not as spread out as on gas. I think special pans would help it spread out more evenly but it was fine anyway. This is a much loved steel pancake pan (as I will be in London on Shrove Tuesday...). I think 'proper cookers' rather than this mini one might have a bit bigger induction areas anyway, but I need to look in to it some.

The next bit of the house to do is the bedroom which is above this. It is partially done but needs the electrics finishing as well as a ceiling and floor adding and finishing touches like a built in wardrobe. Before that though there are various things on the land that need doing like some fencing and cleaning up some fallen trees and branches so that we have firewood for next winter and the one after.

Rodents

We keep all the animal feed in these bins. They are metal because the rodents chew through plastic.
I noticed the other day that one of the bags had been chewed through. We took all the feed out and tried to find where there was a hole - but there just wasn't.
We eventually worked out that they were climbing up on that pile of hay by the further one and then in under the lid which isn't very tight fitting. Doh!
So we have rearranged the hay and hopefully the number of rats we are catching will reduce again as they have less food.

Chicken door opener

The door opener on the main chicken house broke late last year. It had happened a few times before but this time it was not fixable. So we bought a new one. The old one was inside the house with a sensor poking out. Good from the point of view of being sheltered from the weather but it meant the chickens were always knocking the string off the door. This one fits to the outside of the house and has the sensor built in to it's body. Much better, but we have not fitted if for ages because we couldn't work out how to get it to raise the door which was inside when it was outside.
I suddenly had inspiration on my long drive from Toulouse on Thursday and realised we could move the door to the outside!
This is the chickens view from their house. Well a bit above their house. Aren't they lucky!

New opener in place

More fun than skiing!

The 'workshop' as we call where we will live while renovating the rest of the house (because that will be it's function eventually) is finally ready for us to move in. We moved the fridge and dishwasher this weekend, the dishwasher was easy, but the fridge was an epic undertaking - it weights 150kg. The weather was perfect for skiing and I am kidding when I say this was more fun - but sacrifices have to be made in the interests of getting the house finished.

The finished tiling

Close up. Nice trim isn't it!?

This is the fridge happy in it's old location. We realised that we have NEVER cleaned inside the fridge (except wiping up spills) or behind it in the very nearly 5 years we have had it. We are ANIMALS! It was getting a bit too much so it was a relief to take it all apart and give it a good scrub. Hopefully in it's lovely new shiny location we can keep it this way

Before we started we carefully measured all the doors it was going to have to pass through. The fridge is a fraction under 70cm and the narrowest door 70cm. Hurrah! No problems!
However we hadn't taken in to account the door handles, we had just measured the body. Doh!
As there was NO WAY we were failing to get the fridge through once we got this far we decided to remove the door frame. As this turned out to be made of metal and concreted in to the floor we had to cut round it, so there is no way it is going back on. Sorry if you were planning on coming to stay - the spare room now has not door and is even more like a corridor in to the 'workshop' now.

The walls are made of kind of cardboard and plaster waffle, fortunately quite easy to cut.

Hurrah we got it in to it's new place. There is a set up of about 10 cm then down of about 25 cm into the 'workshop' from the rest of the house. It was quite challenging to get it over there as between us we could not lift it completely off the ground, just tilt it so one side of the other is off. We ended up tipping it on to its side and dragging it down a ramp made from some planks. There were points where it seemed we might both be crushed!
We have decided there is no way we are getting it back up the step again so it is just going to have to stay in here and we will have to get a second one in the real kitchen when eventually it is done.

The dishwasher has a filter on it's pipe which means we cannot get it fully back in to the space until Doug adds a 90 degree joint

This is a small induction hob that we are going to use while living here as there is no room for the gas cooker. At the moment everything is so clean and nice at the moment. We are really really hoping to keep it this way as the rest of the house is very neglected as we get depressed cleaning when it still looks a mess.

After successful moving we went for a walk around our land (well just in to the neighbours really)

Saucisson tasting

We tasted the chorizo a few weeks ago and it was good, so we had some saucisson this weekend. Also yummy. Some of the other ones are thicker and taking longer to dry so we need to wait a bit before eating them ALL.

Pizza with pineapple, egg, mushroom and saucisson

Cute picture of rabbit kits

They are three weeks old now. They come out of the nest box a bit but haven't started being a mighty nuisance yet - they will soon. They drive their mums mad by trying to feed all the time and eat all the grain which is bad for them. We might need to stop feeding grain to their mums as they start getting out more so they don't eat it.

Quick walk

I had a horrible cold this weekend so unfortunately we didn't make it skiing. We did some useful things around the place like vaccinating the bunnies and some tiling and hoovering and all sorts. We also took the dog for several walks as she gets annoying if she doesn't get enough exercise and Doug doesn't always have time in the week.

This is just above our house, looking over where the house is to the mountains.

Religious chickens?

Our chickens reliably lay far fewer eggs on Sundays - it is obviously their day of rest!

We have been getting six or seven a day recently. Today we got three.

Some pictures of cute fuzzy animals

The cows and horses seem to have grown extra fuzzy coats during the recent cold snap

Vaccinated the baby bunnies

I mentioned in the post about the baby bunnies being born that we are paranoid about them dying of a thing called clostridial enterotoxaemia and that there is a vaccination for it that we get from the vet called Coglavax. We were not sure whether to do it this weekend or wait another week until they were a bit bigger. In the end we decided on this weekend. They all seem to have survived.
We had a baby count for the first time and there are 7+6+5 = 18. Two have died that we have seen. One got out the nest box in the night and was dead by morning, the other appeared to have been strangled with a bit of sheeps wool.

Here is mum looking in and checking what I am up to.

This is them sleeping the next day, apparently they survived the ordeal. There was a lot of screaming when the needle went in. I think they try to scare of predators like that.

They need redoing in 6 weeks. Fingers crossed they all live that long. They are very fragile little things.

Wind and rain

There has been a lot of wind recently. A couple of biggish trees have come down. The other one is bigger than this one.

It is always worrying as the wind howls around the house what we will find outside in the morning. So far nothing drastic. In some ways it is nice feeling snug and warm by the fire when you can hear horrible weather outside.
It is quite unusual for it to be so windy at this time of the year, normally it happens in Autumn or perhaps Spring.

In between the windy spells it has been very rainy making a muddy mess in a lot of places. It is the worst thing about winter - mud mud EVERYWHERE.
People say about wood, that it warms you three times. Once when you cut it, once when you stack it and once when you burn it. I think hay is a bit similar, you have to move it from where you bought it to your barn, from your barn to where you feed the animals and then clean up the animal poo. Most places we just leave the poo, but outside the stables it just makes the mud too stinky and horrible and isn't good for the horses feet either. Doug dug off a lot of mud with the mini digger at the start of the winter, and it is a lot better now. But we still have to remove many barrows of poo and mud each week. This is it recently cleared. Pretty sure the horses spot when we do it and come and lay some new ones just for a laugh.

Tiles

Tiling is coming on well. They still need grouting

The tape is helping the trim along the top stay in the right place till everything is dry.

It is soooooooo nearly done in here. We are hoping to move in next weekend! But we have been hoping for a few weeks now - both of us have horrible colds this weekend which doesn't help things. It will probably be a slightly phased move over a few weekends really as the effort of carrying everything through will be significant.

Mrs Suffolk has died

She has been with us since the first year we were here. Quite a few of the sheep from that flock died last year of various (horrible) things, so there are just three ewes and a ram left. Mrs Suffolk was getting on a bit, so not a massive surprise, but upsetting nevertheless.
We are thinking about eating North Uist (the ram of this flock) and combining the two flocks until the house is finished for easier care and a bit less fencing.

How sad am I?!

A few years ago (probably more than ten in fact) I remember sitting in a pub with friends and we got on to the subject of fridges. We were all getting quite excited when we suddenly realised just how old and SAD this made us all. We spent some time lamenting how this showed that we were old and responsible now, and moved on to other subjects.
This week I got excited about getting a new hoover. This must plumb new depths of sad behaviour!
We have a giant hoover that is great for cleaning up after building work, but is quite an effort to get out of the cupboard and move around the house. Adding to this size problem is the fact the house looks a grotty mess whatever we do because of the oldness and filled with boxesness of it all - plus things like this don't help the dust and grott any.

So we hardly ever hoover, which means, what with having a dog and living in the country, that everything is gravelly and covered in cobwebs. It gets wearing living like that!
So we have bought a cordless dyson with the hope that we can whip it out frequently for a quick wizz around. We shall see. Maybe we will still be too lazy (tired!) but I hope not.

I find it odd that they make it's rollers and stuff inside clear plastic and of such pretty colours. Surely they get grotty in anyones house not just ours?! We had a dyson before and I kind of hated it, it was cheap and plasticy looking and quite flimsy, the cleaner kept trashing bits off it which was expensive. It did work well though. This one seems a bit similar but will hopefully stand up to use better than the previous one.
We have used it twice in three days which is some kind of record - but could just be initial excitement.