The Thin Red Line

I can’t believe that it is five days since I posted.  I checked my drafts but there is nothing there. Perhaps I dreamed that I posted. Or maybe nothing whatsoever has been happening. Yep, that’ll be the one.

It snowed!

I often wonder what that means: “it snowed”, “it rained”, “It was windy” – what is this “it”? I cannot be “the weather” – replacing “it” by “the weather” would result in a very clunky  “The weather snowed”. The day snowed? The sky snowed?

You work it out. I can’t. I just believe that there has to be a more elegant expression to report the summary of a day’s weather – it just consistently escapes me: There was snow on Friday.

The van is pretty much cleaned out now but needs another go since Mr L has been doing some odd jobs on it. We have a new radio fitted and a leak in the water heating system has been traced and remedied.

What else? More cooking and baking and it all went well. Some very appealing baguettes appeared from the oven on Friday and a nice old-fashioned Leek and Bacon Pudding was devoured with relish. Mr L cooked a curry on Saturday as usual but yesterday there was no cooking. The day kind of got away from us.

Due to a small contretemps with a building in Laugharne the other week, the details of which have yet to be revealed (but will be one day soon over at Two Snails), we needed to replace one of the awnings on the new van. All the necessary components had been assembled: material and sticky tape came in the mail, beading from the old awning had been rescued for reuse, and a straight edge for cutting borrowed from Gill. Sunday was the day to do the job. We had A Plan.

The Plan did not take in to account the Central Heating failing on us. As has been said elsewhere this should not have been a problem in mid-April but this is Orkney and we had snow a couple of days ago.  Clearly the Central Heating had to take precedence. Once that was sorted we evaluated the task ahead of us and I had a really good idea: if we worked on the kitchen floor we could put the underfloor heating on high and that would make the plastic fabric more flexible and help all the creases to drop out. So, we turned up the heat and went for a coffee break… and what with one thing and another, it was 3 pm before we knuckled down.

Preliminary planing had taken place. Measurements had been taken, and we checked these again yesterday. All was well. We had definitely taken in to account a margin for the seam and another for wrapping around the beading. Good to go. We measured up the width and trimmed to size, ditto for the length.

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I suggested a test, using one of the offcuts, to ensure that we had the seam allowances working correctly.

Good job that I suggested that course of action.

Mr L found that working out where he had gone wrong in the planning was just too much for his poor head, befuddled as it is by his continuing Man-flu. We packed everything away for a better day and then realised that it was too late to crank up the AGA for cooking, We had a ham and cheese sandwich in one of my nice baguettes (and very good it was too.) The boiler now functional, we had a nice hot bath and then went to wallow with Green Wing.

I had cold feet last night (Mid-April!) and had to unearth my bed socks. This was clearly an error as we have new flannelette bedding on the bed and my lovely Jitterbug socks are now festooned with little pills of cream coloured cotton…

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