Our favored way of telling whether it was cold was watching the flowers on the jasmine bush outside the window. When it freezes the flowers go brown and drop off. However as Manuel pulled the jasmine up last week, we’ll just have to look for ice on the water bowls to see if it is freezing.
We’re glad the jasmine has gone and already it makes the patio look lighter. It also used to contribute to the flooding as a surprising amount of debris would get washed out in heavy rain and block the drain.
Talking of the jasmine, seeing that I was recently bemoaning our inability to grown nice looking plants, I was rather surprised to see that Manuel had to resort to using a crane to pull the the jasmine up. Although in fairness, I guess that it has been there for many years and the best we can say is that we didn’t kill it. So are good at growing prickly pears and not killing jasmine.
Saying all that, however, I do wonder if they were looking for things to pick up with the crane, rather than actually needing it to pull up the jasmine. They had a small remote controlled crane that they were using to pick up beams, and I think that it was a ‘boys with their toys’ moment. I was a little surprised that Ian wasn’t more excited, even I got the urge to have a go, however I did manage to keep this under control.
So, so far the roofs are off the barns and new beams are coming next week. It is surprising how big they are. We will get some sky lights put in like we have in the workshop to get some extra light in there. Manuel hopes to have the roof back on next week, but I think rain is forecast, so we’ll see…
It’s been busy on the class front, I have one more young one, two 16 year old girls and one more girl who wants an hour a day for a month as she wants to apply for a job using English. I’m not going to be able to continue with all these, so I’ll see how the coming weeks pan out. I did think that I might swap an hour of English for an hour of Spanish with the girl who is coming for a month.
Wilbur and Rosie continue to get on well. They are bonding and continue to exhaust each other. We wonder what Wilbur’s background is, as he is very well behaved and appears house trained, he hasn’t once gone to the toilet in the house – unlike Rosie who appears to be a constant, quite literal, stream of puddles (but she is getting better). He is also very good at doing what he is told – and he is very gentle and friendly. It does look like he used to live in a family. The one thing that we haven’t tried yet is leaving him on his own. Hopefully he is getting settled in the house with the other animals and won’t get distressed if we are not here. Our plan is to hide to see how he gets on before we go out for real.
We got a new website ready last week – from start to finish which is a record. Having written our Pullen Plan we decided to change the order in which we do things and launched the stock photo site first, instead of the craft one. This is the one that is a little different to the others, so it will be interesting to see how it goes.