40. Ready to say goodbye to winter.

After months of high winds, hail and rain, it finally seems a bit brighter. Whether this will continue or not remains to be seen. There's a snow warning for the next couple of days but it usually misses us. I think we've had the highest wind speeds this winter since moving here. The door in our room has been rattling very noisily, one particularly blustery night I awoke to it wide open. We've also had thunder and lightening, the framework for the solar panels took a hit which meant there was a high voltage surge which damaged the wind controller and cut off the solar controller so we were without electricity. We went up the hill the following day to put the brake on the wind turbine as we didn't want any more power getting into the batteries as the voltage was so high and we'd no way to lower it as the dump and inverters weren't working. This was all remedied a few days later by our wonderful wind power expert neighbour who fitted a new controller for us.  Our wind turbine is now famous as it was on the television a few nights ago, Paul Murton (Scottish grand tours) helped to do a service on it.

I don't think I've mentioned it for sometime but work on our one room cabin continues. We worked hard to put the rubber membrane on the roof during the last of the good weather, we didn't finish it as the wood needed wasn't sufficiently dry so the edges were quite loosely battened down. This worked fine until the high winds hit and the wind managed to get under the roof and start lifting it. This was just after my back had started to recover which was good because very early one morning I found myself lying on the roof in gale force winds trying to stop it from being blown away while Rich ran down to the house to collect wood and nails to fasten it down. As I lay there on the roof, the rain lashing down and the wind almost blowing me away I did wonder if this life really suits me. Rich returned though with hammer, nails and wood and we secured the roof. There was a bit more excitement when the ladder blew away so Rich had to shimmy down a tree to get down off the roof. Unfortunately it has damaged the rubber which was very expensive but it's only a small tear which Rich hopes to remedy by buying a piece to glue over it.

We've got the new polytunnel frame up in the croft, we haven't risked putting the plastic over yet in case it gets blown away.
Everywhere desperately needs weeding but it's so boggy and cold we haven't managed to make much of a start yet.

But today is a good day, it's bright and the sun is out. There's lots of electricity so I've changed the bedding and managed to get it washed. The Rayburn is heating up nicely ready for a bath tonight and I've a vegetable casserole cooking. I've just been out to take some photos of the mountains which look wondrous covered in snow. As difficult as it feels here sometimes, I can't imagine being anywhere else.