Today has been almost as exciting as yesterday.
It has been a day of creativity.
Mark has put a windmill up in the garden. He has been going on about this for ages, and has had the windmill in bits in his shed for as long as I can remember. Obviously since our current government have been messing about with the state of the economy and we have reached a worrying state of not being at war in the Ukraine, or indeed anywhere else to the best of my knowledge, electricity prices have now become very high indeed and so this particular task has been catapulted up to the top of the To Do list.
Hence today was the big Windmill Erection Day, and he has now done it.
I realised that he was up to something when I looked out of my office window and realised that he was careering about on the roof of the shed, staggering around under the weight of a colossal scaffolding pole. He poked this down through a purpose-built hole in the roof and into a hole in the yard, then he filled the hole in with cement.
We have been having Windmill Discussions for some time, and I had explained that it must not interfere with my washing or I will be cross. Hence it is on top of the shed, where it will catch whatever wind there might be, and not disturb the washing lines.
We keep rushing out to look at it but there is no wind, and so disappointingly, it is not going round.
Any power that it might generate, in the event of us ever having any wind again, will be dispatched along a handy wire which runs into Lucy’s bedroom, and into an immersion heater in the water tank. Thus we will have some bonus wind-powered central heating and hot water. The fire is already heating our hot water, which is pumping around the house at a heart-and-toe-warming pace, and occasionally coming out of the taps. Also it heats the water in the dishwasher, the washing machine and the showers.
The house is splendidly warm, and so is the water. Number One Daughter says that we are expecting a very cold snap in a few weeks, maybe they keep you informed about this sort of thing when you are in the Army, and so I am jolly glad that we are prepared. All he needs to do now is put the tubes in the divorce solar panel and fit the rest of the roof solar panels that he got out of the skip at the Marina Village, and we will be well on the way to energy efficiency. I have told him that he has got to leave his nuclear reactor alone until he has finished with that lot and also his special hydraulic powered log-splitter. I made him take the last one back to the farm until he was going to get round to it because it weighed nearly half a ton and took up most of the back yard, and my sheets kept getting rusty smears from it.
He has also been fixing my dust extractor, which broke when we had the leaky pipe misfortune at the bottom of the stairs, and about which I have been really cross. It is Chinese and full of peculiar bits, and so he wasn’t very optimistic about getting it going again. He said he would try a wiring bypass, and it would either go Whirr, and work, or Bang, and not work. In the event it went Bang, so we will have to get another one I suppose, although he said he still might be able to get it to work at least a bit in the meantime.
I have also been experimenting today. Ages and ages ago my mother gave me a slow cooker, because she said she doesn’t use it. I haven’t used it either, because it has been summer practically ever since, but it isn’t now. I have also been hampered by it taking eight hours to cook things, because it is slow, and there are a lot of days which don’t have eight hours in between our getting up and going to bed again.
We got up early this morning, so I rushed downstairs and cut up lots of onions and carrots and other wintery foods, and packed it all into the cooker with a chunk of dead sheep. It has still got an hour to go, because we are not quite at work yet, but it is smelling pretty good and so I am optimistic.
I will let you know if it has worked or not, although probably not tomorrow because it is Saturday and I am hoping not to have the time to write anything at all.
I will see you on Sunday, or possibly Monday if I am feeling idle.
