Blueberries and Hammocks

Well, the little bastard birds are having any blueberries I don’t pick every day, so this is what a day’s haul looks like, ’cause I can’t leave them to build up. Still, just enough to be worth eating in my porridge.

Ryan and his friend Becs came last weekend, and we went down to the beer shop for the first time in ages. It was great, we played cards, and Ryan kept telling me I was giving him “The Look” so I tried to capture said look…

Ryan, Becs and Alec did an absolutely admirable job of clearing the plastic from the underside of the roof of the bottom shed. I think it must have been put there to catch the falling bits from the ivy and nettle roots that had colonised the roof and were pushing through the slates. It did a very good job of that, so that there was a moist compost heap on top of said plastic, rotting the roof timbers. A not-very-pleasant job. But the timbers weren’t as bad as we’d feared and it looks like it won’t immediately fall on our heads after all. Result!

I finally conquered my fear of dealing with the ceiling, so I tried putting rock wool up between the rafters (which turns out to be every bit as unpleasant as they say) and cutting complicated angles and chunks out of plasterboard to make it fit awkward places (which I suck at and had to get Elmo and his endless, patient meticulousness to do.) The result is pretty good, though, makes it feel less like a barn and more like a house already.

Oh, also, I decided to “weave” a hammock. I say “weave” because although that’s what all the websites say I’m doing, my mother would explode if I didn’t point out that it’s not weaving at all, it’s more like knitting. Anyway, it went ok, for a first go, but I had to do a lot of adjusting tension in it. Below is a picture of it quite a long while into the tension-moving exercise. After that I still did a fair amount more moving all that open space from the middle out toward the edges.

Which is tedious work. And today I went and bought some hardwood dowel and rigged a post opposite the porch and tried to put it up, just temporarily, just briefly, just enough to get a picture of me in it, but it all went wrong in a number of comedy ways that ended me up with my butt on the ground. Well, I’m going back to Barnsley tomorrow, where I have proper materials so I can make it it work next week with any luck.