We have had another day off.
That is to say, it was the sort of day off that involved a great deal of dashing about. Mark had some courses to complete for work this morning., so I took the dogs off over the fells whilst he got on with it.
You have got to do these courses every time you move to a new oil rig, so that when you fall off something or cut your hand off they can say it was your fault because they put you through an e-learning course which told you not to do that. They take ages, and you could whizz through them because they are all much the same, except you can’t click on to the next page until you have listened to every single mellifluously spoken word on the last one.
Today’s e-learning course was immensely patronising and also got stuck on one page. I am considerably better at computers than Mark, but it stayed stuck even when I got home, and in the end we sent an email to the oil rig and gave up.
The oil rig emailed back assuring us that the course worked perfectly but it doesn’t.
When I got back we pegged the washing in the garden and went off to the van.
This was splendid.
It has dried out now, which is a relief, and the sun was shining. It was not exactly warm, because a brisk breeze was whipping across the yard, making the plastic sheets on top of the van flap wildly and noisily, which when added to the noise of the generator and the grinder meant that there was no point in trying to talk to one another.
We are a bit limited with what we can do at the moment, because we are waiting for the arrival of some new lenses for the laser welder, and for some more box section aluminium with which to build the new window holes. Mark has brought his mig welder across, but it will not weld the aluminium. Today he used it to weld the stainless steel in place around the door.
This is really thrilling. He welded the sticking-out bits into place and then cut out the bit that is going to be the new door.
I know that is a really rubbish explanation and hence have added a picture which is easier than trying to be concise and comprehensible. The new doorway is the bit on the left.
There is now an enormous hole in the side of the van, because he has not blocked the old hole up yet. This is a bit troubling, because almost half of one side of the van is hole, but of course I have faith in Mark, and I know that sooner or later he will put a very large patch there and everything will be all right again.
Whilst he was doing that I got on with making the frames for the new windows. I can’t glue them all together yet, because of not having a welder, and I couldn’t make all of them because of not having enough aluminium, but I used some of the bits we have cut out of other places, and mostly I think probably the frames will fit together without too much trouble.
I was trying hard to pretend that I was the modern sort of woman who takes welding and aluminium cutting in her stride, and that I could have been an engineer if only I had been born forty years later, but actually I am really shockingly incompetent and have only not cut my fingers off by great good fortune. Indeed, I have got two colossal blisters on my fingers where I got some boiling glue stuck to them and it would not come off.
I did not say anything about these because of not wishing to look like a clumsy muppet, but between you and me they are really enormous, the blisters, not my fingers, obviously, and I keep poking at them, in the interested way you do when you know that you are not supposed to burst them but that you probably will in the end anyway.
I expect the cat will burst them in the morning when she creeps up on my hands to kill them whilst we are having coffee.
In the end the doorway was ready, and we lugged the new steps into place.
They did not fit. Either they have got fatter in the intervening weeks or the hole has shrunk, like an expensive jumper of Number One Daughter’s once that she never forgave me for.
Mark had to bash them into place with a hammer. Then he had to grind out a bit of the stainless steel and bash them again.
In the end they ground slowly into place and fitted perfectly.
They look splendid.
Better still, we can go in and out of the van up the steps now. We don’t have to stand next to it considering the painful knees that will come with the scramble and wishing that we had thought to bring the jiggly tool out with us the first time.
We can simply stroll in and out in restful ease.
I have added a picture of that as well.
PS. I did pop the blisters. They are really sore now.
