Many Things In A Jumble

Here’s a pile of all the news for the last… how long has it been anyway? Seems like months…

I saw a couple of fawns on the lane on the way home one evening. No mum in sight, haven’t seen them since. Hope they’re ok.

We had a caravan destruction party, invited Rich with predictable results. Nobody destroys things quite like Rich. Good to have you back, mate.

Managed to lay waste to one of them and strip the other. Everyone worked very hard and hopefully had a good time. Several people suggested I could charge for the right to come and hit things with crow bars.

Always with the fire and sausages.

And back to work. Having shoveled a ton (literally) of quicklime into buckets and wrestled it up the hill, I set about making hot mix render. I got good at it by the end. A scholarly paper will follow just as soooooon as I get around to it.

I had trouble finding much instruction on the subject when searching, so I am going to be one source of a detailed what-we-did-and-how-it-went article, at least. Thank every god and Anthony we had a cement mixer. I would have died mixing it by hand.

Here’s Rae getting at the awkward bits.

And Miki getting at the only slightly less awkward bits. The whole site was awkward, but they did a beautiful job. It all went as well as one could possibly expect right up until the last day when it all went a bit to hell.

We ran out of the good sand, ordered some more from a different supplier, it was crap, tried to remedy it with some other sand… hose exploded about 20 times… it was all a bit dire. So we sacked off the last bit and will do it when I’ve had a chance to get some more decent sand.

Anyway, reasons to be cheerful: the roses are all in glorious full bloom.

And we had a lovely visit from Julian’s brother Paul, visiting from Croatia, hopefully the first visit of many.

And the weather has been at least occasionally glorious, which Jack wastes no time in exploiting.

Nor do we. We spent Saturday morning wild swimming at the best place for wild swimming that I know in the whole world. Not telling. You’ll have to get yourself invited to come with us if you want to know.

And finally, a gratuitous plug for my other business: I Make Everything. I made my own swimming costume after being unable to find anything that a) I liked, b) could keep my considerable assets where I wanted them and c) didn’t cost, like, £400. Go read all about it at my other blog.