Wednesday 14 December 2022
This morning, as you’d hope with central heating, the house is warm. Even outdoors is a good eight degrees warmer than yesterday (a mere -2 at the moment, according to various weather apps). The original date for the plumber to change our heating system to electric was tomorrow. I honestly don’t know how we’d have got through the past week or so with the ineffective back boiler.
Yesterday, I had my daily walk around the garden then out the back of the garden up to the edge of the forest and down a loggers’ track and back round the road. It’s only about two thousand steps but I’m enjoying seeing the changes every day. It also fascinates me how many different animal tracks there are. We have some wildlife-cams on order and the tracks in the snow mean I know where we can best place them. The only definitive footprint is from hares and there appear to be either a lot of hares or an extremely active hare. With help from a friend, another set of tracks look like a pine marten. I know they’re in the area but that seems far too exciting in our garden.
Shortly before 11:00, I drove to the tip (more packaging) and the auction house (to collect and pay for the three items we bought) in Peebles, then on to Galashiels (B&Q, TK Maxx and a butcher) and finally on to Selkirk for a restorative coffee and to buy more coffee beans. I didn’t get home until 16:30. No shopping trips are short. It was -10 when I got in the car. Over the day, sunshine all day, though too low for some valleys, it got up to -5. By the time I got home when it was almost dark, it had gone back down to -10 again.
We have a four-wheel-drive car with winter tyres. The main roads were fine but the B-road we live on and have to drive twenty miles on to get to an A-road was patchy. I had one slewy skid when I had to pull slightly off the road while braking (white van driver coming fast in the opposite direction) and a few small skids but ultimately it was ok. I would never have even entertained the idea of driving in these temperatures/road conditions anywhere but here and with a car equipped to deal with it, better if not perfectly. The scenery was stunning. Thick frost on pretty much everything, a real winter wonderland. I stopped a couple of times to take photographs near our house but didn’t get to stop in any of the areas with breathtaking views across tree-covered hills. The sky was a dramatic blue; really magical.
The too-high office chair is now back in my study with an old, wooden, Victorian reading table. It’s kind of like a hospital table, the table top of which you can angle. In theory, I can work at that today. Still no update on the desk and delivery of the other two pieces of furniture.
The house needs a lot of work before it will feel homely. We need more furniture and colour, the latter mainly from pictures. To put up pictures, we’re waiting for one of those bippy devices to arrive, the ones that identify areas behind the wall that shouldn’t have nails hammered into them.
Today, other than writing, I’d like to start painting the spare/day bed frame and go for a walk. It would also be good to do something somewhere in the house that resembles making it more homely. In all likelihood, this will entail clearing a surface of piles of miscellaneous stuff. I can’t not put things on clear surfaces. Very annoying habit of mine.