Jean loves stones - really really loves them.
Unfortunatly this is cuasing a problem as the most readily avialible source of pebbles and stones is the gravelly stuff Barabara has around her door and in the turning area.
Jeany has so far thrown stones into the Mill through the front door, put pebbles into the flower beds though she did then help me pick them all out again, put stones in the green house and in plant pots. She has even managed to put a stone in a coffee mug!
She is determined to relocate ever stone here I think!
Sigh.
The house is very damp, unsurprisingly as there is a river running under bits of the structure, all be it the garage! And apparently the only way to get rid of this damp is to open windows, unfortunatly the window frames have swollen and it has been freezing so I did not want to open a window we may not be able to shut, in fact as we are still getting frosts here I didnt really want the windows open at all - its hard enough to keep the place warm as it is.
But the weather was nice it was almost a summers day outside so we opend the bedroom window, having switched all the heating off, and yes it got rid of a lot of the damp but then it started getting dark and we tried to close the windows.
The frame was so swollen that we had had to bash at the frames to open them, the same technique did not work to close them. And a frost had started settling so we did not want to leave it ajar. Our solution?
A bit drastic but something we thought wouldnt be too bad - we sanded the frames but alas there was just too much of an over hang of window and window frame so off Al went to get the plain. We plained it and got it shut.
This was a few days ago and the damp was gone - for a while - this morning I noticed the condensation on the windows again and told Al to open them whilst I was out at meetings.
This he did and it all appeared fine until he came to shut them up again to get me and Jean. The window frame at the bottom turned out to be rotten so when he attempted to 'slam' the window shut the bottom which for some reason is more swollen hit the window frame and sheared a bit off - yes it was that rotten and twisted the whole frame so that the glass in the bottom panel cracked 🙁
This is going to be a bit of a pain. Al wants to put a metal bracket on the wood to hold the frame together but this of course relys on us being able to find descent non rotten root to screw into - something that may well be impossible. Also this is a very short term fix and it looks like we will have to be replacing at least one window frame and one panel of glass 🙁
Now I do not believe that the frame has become that rotten in just the 1.5 yrs we have lived here - grrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!
Minni has been stealing Tiger Lilly my little kitten toy - you know one of the pound puppy variety, she licks it and curls around it all the time.
These pictures are obviously posed but she did then clean the toy kitten, we find this toy in the most bizar of places including under the fire place in the ash - wondering if Minni was trying to litter train it!
This is just a cute picture of Minni in one of her favourite sleeping spots - Jeans blue bouncy chair.
Thursday morning i.e. a week ago Al notices when he bends down to do some of the parking area that the front wheel of the van is bald on the inside. In fact it is more than buld it is down to the fibres - in the words of our one and a half year old uh-oh and oh dear!
The next day it is supposed to drive nearly to Wales!
So Friday morning sees us at the tyre place after dropping Jean off at Nursery on route. No problem they say - but then the wheel won't come off!
We had assumed that we had been bad and not noticed the wheel and it had been like it since the tracking was changed but we thought Uncle David would have told us or just changed the tyres! We really could not work out how we had missed it for so long.
The answer?
We probably hadn't missed it because the wheel was on really tightly at one bolt - who ever had last done the wheels had used the little gun thing they have with the torque setting too high and had cross threaded all the bolts - one of them had snapped off in the nut when they tried to take the wheel!
It was all a bit mangled - so we ended up spending over seventy quid when we'd been expected 10/20 🙁 Not happy. This of course also eat into the time we needed to get ready for going camping!
So now we are trying to track down the last time the wheels were changed/taken off - sigh.
Well it's finially happened - Jean has taken it upon herself to start the interior decoration of the Bakery!
We have been doing drawing and colouring after breakfast each morning with much emthasis on 'only on the paper Jean,' however she got hold of a biro up in our bedroom and though Alaric saw her with it he noted that it was one with a retractable nib and the point was inside so he didnt worry. My policy is that reguardless she is given paper and told only to draw on that.
Poor Alaric didnt realise that the nib doesn't retract properlly and only discovered this fact when Jean drew on my lovely iridescent note book!
We then discovered that she had 'decorated' the sheet adn duvet cover 🙁 Oh well at least it wasnt the walls (yet!).
We showed her sheet and said, 'no bad bobble you only draw on paper,' then just to make me feel really guilty, her little smiling face disolved into tears :'(
Still she was really good with her drawing this morning and only got upset when a crayon broke - she gave it to me saying 'oh dea, oh dea,' and didnt belive me when I said I couldnt fix it!
Jean | sarah | 
Sat 17th Mar 2007 1:48 pm | 
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