Wow - Electric Lights....

When I travel back to the UK, as I have on a few occasions on my own, I think it accentuates the fact that we are relatively isolated here. The house is on a road, we have a couple of neighbours, and the odd car and several tractors passing each day - but, it can be lonely too. The positive side of that is, when I am away, Craig is very proactive, so that the time passes quicker. I come back and find all sorts of things have been started and/or completed, and its exciting to guess what is going to have changed !

Craig managed to get electricity into the sheds opposite one time while I was away - well nearly, as I had to help with the last push. There was a water pipe going under the road from an outside tap, so he isolated that, and pushed the cable through the old pipe - it worked ! This means that now, we can use electricity for tools, and for security reasons too. That was a surprise when I came back from a trip away - and a bonus, as at one point we thought we'd either have no electric there, or have to pay to have it connected.

While we were working on the electricity, we decided to fit the lights for the kitchen. Like every job here, it takes longer to prepare and clean up than to do the actual job. This was no exception, as we needed to work from the upstairs floor....

...and as you can see, it is not easy to store 'stuff' and move everything around to work. Arthur likes to 'help' if he can.......

While we were working like this, we decided to knock the 'wall' down upstairs - what a mess. Everything had to be burnt, as it was so rotten - sadly nothing could be reused or recycled.

One day, after a trip to the Builders Merchants, we had a visit from our neighbour to say that they had seen a fox take one of our chickens....we were devasted, and spent a good while searching the area for any evidence. Several hours later, Craig went to put the animals away, and the chicken was sitting by gate trying to get in. She was bedraggled, bloodied and had a few feathers missing - but she was there. She'd escaped from the fox, and found her way home - what luck - she was to be called Lucky from then on....she even laid an egg the next day ! We had several days keeping a look out for the crafty fox, and actually spotting it a couple of times too, eventually catching it, to keep our little chickens safe.

We started to have a few problems with the sheep - the 'orphan' lamb would run to us when we went to feed her, and decided to jump the fence to find us on occasions. Once she did this, of course, the other sheep would follow her, and this caused us a lot of problems - we were nervous about leaving them, and had to sort the fencing out so that they couldn't get out - it felt quite a responsibility. 'Lara' became a right pain to be fair, and we now knew why people laughed when we proudly told them that we were bottle feeding a lamb. I now know that I wouldn't take on an orphan like that again  - however cute they are !!!