December already...

It must be getting towards Christmas – the girls have broken up from school already and now have the best part of two months off.

For a few weeks Lana especially has been complaining that there shower here is really weak, so at the weekend I looked into the problem……. All of our water here is collected from our roof gutters and stored in a 25,000 litre tank that sits in the garden. It is then pumped through a very fine filter (1/1000 of 1 mm) and fed to the household taps. I found two problems, firstly the water filter desperately needed changing – instead of being off-white it was dark brown and really badly clogged – this explained the low water pressure and low flow. Fortunately the water filter man lives in Cambridge and dropped me off a couple of new filters on Sunday. Worse still were the gutters which were oozing with grime and dirt………. I spent a very satisfying Saturday afternoon up my new ladder with my pressure washer blasting these gutters clean. I’ve left them disconnected from the water tank for a couple of days to let the inevitable rain flush out all the bits the pressure washer loosened and tonight we’ve had an almighty downpour which is great news (for a change). I also installed out trusty Zimbabwean rain gauge so that probably means it won't rain again until April - fat chance.

Lana came home with another collection of rosettes – despite falling off Holly whilst practising on Saturday. Kirsty as finally been persuaded to forego her crutches and start using her four week old ‘horse-kicked’ foot. I admit this miraculous recovery may have been hastened by me offering to let her drive the tractor to ferry empty boxes to the storage container. From this we turned to clearing the vegetable patch and Kirsty ferried and the triffid sized celery, spinach, parsley, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli and most bizarrely looking brocoflower (luminous green cauliflower) plants to the compost heap.

Whilst I was distracted up the ladder Chris put in a record beating 19 mins 25 second lap time on the 'reasonable priced lawn tractor' and has snuck to the top of the leader board - having said that she has missed some bits.

Another blitz on boxes today with a further 10 emptied. It is now definite that we have 'lost' part of Kirsty's Ikea desk - it may well be that by now some Somali pirate is trying to assemble his newly acquired ikea desk and realises that whilst he has the brackets he is missing the legs and table........

More in a bit .....