Last few days with digger

After having the digger for about a month we’re giving it back on Friday. Queue crazy last minute efforts to make the most out of it while we can. 

There’s so much to do here, it’s often completely overwhelming. I’ll start on something, turn away see something else that needs doing, I’ll then start doing that, then the next thing and the next thing. In the end I end up with a hundreds of started projects, none of which are near getting finished. I make lists and sub list and secondary lists to try and keep myself on track and while sometimes I get the pleasure of crossing a couple of things off, often after a heavy day of working I realise I’ve not even started anything on my list!

This week thankfully has been a little different, we really focused on things that were only manageable with the digger and tried to leave other things for another day. 

The big destruction effort was clearing the old orchard and chicken coop.  what it originally looked like:

After day 1 the chicken coop is now visible

After a bit more work:

After two days: 

With all the debris we’ve been making some cool bonfires. This one’s about 10feet high,

and burnt very nicely.

It was so hot it was still smouldering two days later.  

Continuing on the wood front, we had several trees down and a few rotten ones as well, so we brought in a man with a chainsaw to do some work, which then nessessitatted building somewhere for all the wood to go. My first effort:

​and my new and improved version:

I already have plans for a third version.

Away from land/house work we’re adjusting to life with two dogs. With lunatic Luluaround as comparison Golly has suddenly turned into the worlds greatest dog! Calm, relatively obedient and gentle with the kids. Clearly the perfect dog crown sat uncomfortably with him so one day at the beach he decided to roll himself in dead fish:

He stank! The kids walked home 20yards behind us to avoid the smell.

So in a futile effort to sort the smell out Ali shampooed fish face. 

The dogs are getting on well, Golly occasionally asserts his dominance agressively, but they also chase each other around the garden having fun (we all scarper out of the way in those situations taking any unwary children with us since Golly and LuLu running at full speed is like mini titanics playing dodgums with icebergs).

Newfoundland’s are bred to save people from water by grabbing them with their jaws (carefully) and dragging. At this age though she’s already practising by grabing any convenient limb left dangling around, due to her height it’s the kids that take the brunt of it, particularly D. When you first see it happening it’s a little unnerving seeing a dog double the size of your child bitting her arm until you realise she really doesn’t bite down (except by accident), all the same there have been a few tears. 

I don’t bite, I just slobber, really: