Bluehook's Diary

I started doing this diary in June. If you haven't been following have a look at the Cast of Characters which gives a quick low down on the essential day to day characters who are mentioned here...it will make more sense if you do.

The cold is here, no doubt about it. It was warm enough upstairs where the radiators put out some heat from the gravity feed as long as the fire keeps in even when the heating pump is switched off, but then I went downstairs. An icy chill hit me half way down the stairs, I couldn't quite believe it until I realised that the back door was open. How it got open I don't actually know, but it had let a lot of frosty cold air in. Luckily the fire was still well in and roared up very quickly.

Before I really had time to plan what I was going to be doing Lisa was on the phone requesting that I help her move some beams. I had to print off some stuff to get into the post and then we met up in town and had lunch in the college. We both had a bit of shopping to do as well so we agreed to meet back at my place and go get the beams from there. Lisa arrived just as Lorna and I had got the trailer hitched up and we went to get the beams. Seems that these were (at least) 200 years old and Lisa had bought them several years ago because they seemed like a bargain, only she'd never got around to collecting them. The reason we were going today was that she had just been told that the roof of the building they were in had collapsed sometime in the summer. There was nowhere near enough space to turn the trailer around and I churned up huge wheeltracks in the mud just trying but we had to unhitch it in the end and wheel it around. The roof of the shed was bizarrely intact, although the shed wasn't entirely weatherproof, being only three side, maybe they meant that the wall had fallen in. The beams were real old beams, if it wasn't for the notches and pegs in them you would have thought they were just stripped branches and they were pretty big and heavy and buried under quite a lot of other stuff. We had Lisa's 11 year old son with us and he did not bad at helping out for a boy who was off school with a cold. The couple who lived at the place arrived as we were loading up, Mrs had just had her hair done and said she really didn't feel like helping, Mr went to get his wellies on but did it very slowly and we only had two to load on by the time he came out again. It wasn't far to come home and we decided that I'd try and just back the trailer into the barn with the beams on it and leave it there until Lisa could move it next week. I actually managed to do it, despite the fact that the beams were sticking several feet out the back of the trailer, all except for the last few feet because there was too much other stuff in the way. It shouldn't have been too much of a job to roll it back in then. Well, it shouldn't have, but........ As soon as the trailer was unhitched it was obvious that it just wanted to tip backwards because of the extra weight at the back, I had to stand on the struts to stop it tipping. Then somehow, the jacking wheel came off. This caused big problems. I had to stay standing on the struts while Lisa and Evan unloaded the trailer, then we had Evan sit in it to tip it back a bit and attempted to fix the wheel. The shaft that the thread was on was not fixed, it was impossible to get the thread to locate and this wasn't helped by having to keep it up in the air. Evan's weight was not enough to keep it there. After a while Lauren got home from school and Jake had come on the bus with her so we had them sit in the trailer as well and the combined weight of an eleven year old, a nine year old and a six year old managed to keep it there so we had more hands free to work on it. We tried to undo the bracket which the shaft sits in but the bolt wouldn't budge, this turned out to be because the underneath nut had been welded on. We gave up in the end but did manage to have several ideas about how to fix it while we sat and had tea. One involves an angle grinder, another involves a small disc of cardboard. Maybe I'll sort it out tomorrow.

Lorna had gone out by then to collect her car and as it got dark and cold we were deluged by children until Lorna arrived back with chips. I'm so glad I never had children, I couldn't handle that level of disruption all the time. Lisa and the boys left soon after that and peace was restored. I went to play on my computer, where I'm designing this years Christmas card made from things I have found in the garden and scanned. I can get lost when I use Photoshop, hours pass by, I don't know where they are going but they just pass on by. It's full moon tonight, maybe that's part of it. I went out to look at the moon earlier, it was very bright outside even though there was a lot of cloud and I looked up at the moon and the clouds were passing across the front of it and they were moving very fast. But that's not what it looked like, it looked like the moon was speeding through the sky, I was expecting that if I kept watching it, I'd very soon have to change the angle of my head to keep up with it. Full moon madness.


This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page