An easy day - well of course....

Thursdays are of course our easy days

Pay lands in the bank with a splat and off we gambol to blow it all on luxuries at the place where every little helps or so they would have us believe.

Yesterday was going to be a quiet easy uneventful day.....

Or so we thought, the morning started with a phone call that had me straight back on the phone looking for a social work manager to report a child protection issue. Having spent a couple of hours on that it was off to clear the local woodyard of 10 tons of slabwood using his big trailer.

2 trips down there in the morning looking for him, he had been called away so we had now wasted a bit of the day.

Off we went to pay the long overdue garage bill and half way up the drive a tyre was flat.

Back and pump that up before we went over there. If there was a problem the garage was the place but everything with the tyre seemed Ok so home we came.

Time to get down to the wood yard again and sure enough there he was so it was race home and get the Discovery.

Hitch up his trailer and 2 tons of wood dropped on the yard - back to the wood yard for another 2.

Now, our house is up a tiny little lane. Not much used by traffic, but, if say a discovery with 2 tons of timber on a trailer was to break down on it, the result would be a blockage.

So when the disco broke down.......

Management was of course coming the other way on school run bent and several more cars than normally use our little road in a day appeared as if from nowhere. Naturally some were coming up the road from behind the trailer and some coming down the hill behind the management.

Now, you might think that pushing a Discovery (which now had a flat battery too)with a big tipping trailer full of wood back into a gateway so people can get past would be a bit of a struggle and you would be right.

But we did it eventually. Then of course the bus, the one bus that comes past the house a week, came up the lane.

What we really did not need to complete the ensemble was the Old Bill, the next car along was white and decorated with carnival lights.....

This was really turning into one of my days.

But salvation was at hand, along came one of the neighbours with his Land rover.

It was a matter of a few minutes and we had the discovery back at the house parked smack in the middle of our parking area like a giant roundabout exactly where you do not want one.

The trailer had to be unloaded right where it was so things were a bit crowded in there, a good time for Phil to arrive in his van to measure up the windows, errrr maybe not.

But of course he did not arrive alone, no sir, right behind him came a guy in a big van to deliver another load of scaffolding. I know, I know, I am just a soft old romantic, I have just bought her more scaffolding. We just threw that on the floor before the huge truck tried to turn round in what was now a seriously confined space but of course that van had to be rear wheel drive and unable to find traction in the damp that prevails everywhere round here at the moment.

My, this was fun I thought to myself noting the flat tyre on the Xantia.

The woodmans trailer is a tipper powered by it's own battery so we set to and unloaded that, dropping the load right in the middle of the car park as the battery on the discovery charged up so we could try and move that later.

Using the digger I managed to get the wood sort of clear of the trailer. Which allowed us to unhitch that and note: it was very heavy and the jockey wheel was flat.

A dictionery full of swearing and 5 of us heaving was enough to pull the trailer round so I could squeeze the 806 past and shunt backwards and forwards enough get the trailer out.

Back to the woodyard and another two tons of wood on the trailer.

Back to the house and move the discovery so I could get the digger in to move the firewood that was on the floor to somewhere slightly less in the way.

Move the canoes on their trailer round the other side of the Green Goddess so that I could use that space for wood.

Then pull the 806 in to drop another 2 tons of wood in the woodpile before retiring for the night.

This morning it was pump up the tyre on the Xantia so management could take Branwen for the bus then off to school with the trailer on the 806 so I could collect even more wood on the way home, dash home, drop it off, back for the last 2 tons, drop off, return the trailer, race home.

Wave management off to the auction in the 806, pump up the tyre on the xantia, off to the garage (turns out the tyre that was about 1 month old had a chunk of wood through the sidewall and therefore a write off) before catching up with the management before she got completely carried away and bought everything the auctioneer had on offer..

She was surprisingly restrained and the back of the 806 wasn't that full coming home. There are time I am glad I sold the IVECO.

In the midst of all the excitement yesterday we didn't actually get round to shopping so tonight the kids dine regally on whatever it is we can cobble together from the deepest recesses of the freezer and tomorrow morning bright and early we set off for the weekly shop. We should really go tonight but neither of us seems keen.

I do like it when things are relaxing, easy and going to plan.


R