Felt

We’ve had an interesting weekend, largely due to spending saturday helping Kate to felt a banoose. Apparently it’s a north african cape type thing. North africans must be huge as the piece measured 18′ x 9′, and as such covered the floor of both the kitchen and the lounge. Kate had expected the job to take a full day and had laid the felt on wednesday.

So it was with a little surprise to find I had to climb over furniture on thursday motning in order to get out of the house. Well no doubt it’d be clear by the time I got home that night.

Oops, oh no.

Perhaps friday.

Oops, oh no.

So it was that we rose on saturday with a day of felting ahead of us. The night before I’d bought Kate an orbital sander to help the felting process, and that morning I found myself on the quite bizarre position of having my wife suggest I go out and buy my second orbital sander in less than 14 hours. My wife wants me to go out and buy more power tools. My wife is perfect!

So I didn’t have to worry about justifying an extra £8 for an extra 100w and the advantage of a half sheet base rather than the rather paltry 1/3 sheet sander that I had bought her.

We were actually amongst the first back into Wickes’, having been flooded in january the shop had only reopened for trade 30 minutes earlier. Oddly we weren’t the only shoppers who were impressed by their floor paint; very glossy, yet with the feel and appearance of a being rather grippy. We must find out what it was. It’s likely that our next place will have lots of hard floors and we’ll need something to cover them when Kate isn’t felting banoose’s.

After the sander, we popped to the animal feed place for sheep feed. Whilst we’re weaning the ewes off nuts, we’re having to up the feed for the tups who we have homed in the barn. One of the sheep collapsed last week and has been segregated to a stable along with tiny. He’s desparately thin and veers between looking pathetic and like a fighter, so we don’t know what will happen.

Farmer mike thinks it may be liver fluke and has given him an injection this evening, though he did stress that this was a kill or cure injection at this stage. Considering that yesterday I considered ending the poor tup’s life myself, I won’t be overly worried by this, though Mike was rather worried that we might think he had come down and killed our sheep.

We’ll see what happens in the morning, but it’d be nice if he we could get him recovered, though we may try and find slightly more amiable housing for them rather than taking them to the slaughter market.

On the subject of taking sheep to market, this morning I thought I ought to double check which of our tups still had their full armoury. Of the 4 tups still in the barn, we have a a fantastic looking ram who could only ever produce the finest offspring. Such a shame we took his balls off.
So as it is, he’ll be a fine looking piece of mutton. Still if that makes him sellable, we shouldn’t complain.

Getting on to the house position, we have now had an offer close to what we could accept, and as Bridge End is now on the market and our agent’s are quite positive, we’re more inclined to accept a lower offer than we might have previously considered. This is all the easier to accept when we think back to the fact that last september we marketed the house on a small holding site for £15k below the latest offer and had been prepared to accept less. We’d also had a viewing as a result of that so could have sold for considerably less our current offer.

Still, we’ll take it as it comes and won’t be counting hens, hatched or otherwise for the time being, and will just continue to hope and plan. I’ve been advancing my web design skills and moving into application development, with a view to producing some web based products for a few industries. This has come about from offering to update an estate agent’s website and then thinking I could do a bit more than just that. Having worked as an estate agent, I’ve experience of such software, though was a little surpised at how many such applications are already available. However many are marketed with little professionalism and flair, and I can undercut them by a considerable margin, potentially by thousands of pounds a year, which may be an attractive reason for estate agents to make the change.

Once I’ve got this one out of the way, I’ve further plans for some more market sectors so hopefully this will become a bit of a revenue stream from Spain. With luck, we may even be able to get them translated into Spanish and increase the potential market.

Got to go now as we’re off to Lindisfarne today. We’ve been saying we’d pay a visit there for some time now and thought we perhaps ought to do it before we move.