Monday 28 August 2023
It’s not a bank holiday in Scotland today but it’s currently sunny, albeit a mere 9°C. I had a Sunday kind of Sunday yesterday, which is exactly what I’d wanted. Other than a walk, my exercise was digging and setting the last of the nine foundation stones for my cabin. It is now done, though one slab seems to be a little too far out of alignment so I think will need to be moved slightly. It appears not to matter that the stones are at different heights as this will be evened out by the height of the posts. I watched some YouTube videos about using a miter saw yesterday. I don’t yet have a miter saw but I know that the buying of one will commit me to getting on with the cabin. It feels like a ginormous step. I am still weighted down by the fact of not really having anywhere to work when it rains. But then I just looked at this week’s weather forecast and very little rain is currently forecast. In the instructional YouTube video I’m going to be following, they do everything outdoors. I am putting up barriers to doing it as I feel way out of my depth. So much of this build is about overcoming psychological barriers, which is a large part of why it feels massively important to me.
I have become mildly obsessed by the felling of trees nearby and keep taking photographs to kind of monitor their removal. I find it both horrifying and fascinating and it amazes me the extent to which it changes the landscape. It’s obvious, of course, that an area will look different with no trees when once it had forty-year-old trees, hundreds of Sitka spruce, but it’s impossible to picture how it does end up looking. I don’t know how long it’ll take before all the trees along that stretch of river and up over the hills are felled and removed and then how long before new trees will be planted. I suspect a year. Also, there are more trees with what appear to be Sitka spruce of the same age along a particularly striking area of the river and road. I am fairly certain they’ll be next for the chop, meaning there will be no more tree-covered hills along our stretch of the river where the trees are older than between a year or so and ten years old. I know that’s how it goes in commercial forestry areas, I know all that, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it, and overall I don’t.
The week ahead, with the exception of a day in Edinburgh tomorrow, planned around a meet-up with a friend for dinner, is the last uneventful week for a while, a bit of quiet before the storm. September is a complicated month in terms of Chris and my whereabouts and my next more normal week is the last week in September. Hmm, so that probably does actually put paid to my cabin-building before the likely wetness of October.