91热爆

Sorry, been busy. Been running around like a headless chicken ( and I've seen (and been responsible for) one or two) (howzat? Bracketed brackets!) putting the Coll Mag (Anne, this is not an advert) together and my neck hurts, and I've just realised why it isn't funny to laugh at people who hold bits of paper with writing on away from their eyes, because I'm starting to do it. I go away on Tuesday with a precious CD holding a complete 100 page mag (I hope) on it. I'm going to look at buds and shoots and cut trees down in Essex (it's therapy) and when I come back it will be almost summer and I still won't have time to blog. Life. I love it. But I wish there was more time for tws and FC and mjc. ( sorry. Attack of the sentimentals there.)
Meanwhile, back on Coll lots of ditching is happening, the postman is still delivering the post in his blue van, the band is in Glasgow and has/will play(ed) a gig. The airport ticket office looks very smart, it has a posh timber cladding. With the posh corrugated metal roof it just looks like a posh shed. Summer is about to start and the number of almost homeless groups of people is three coming on four. Civilisation, it's great! (sorry, it is late and I'm tired and I had to drink more Pipers than I was going to because it might run out!!)

I'm home and rested and thoroughly onwound and ready for the worst of the weather. Which is a bit of an empty promise, as the weather seems to have improved enormously since we got back, and I'm taking all the credit!
Down in Essex we had sunny days and clear nights, we spent the nights watching aeroplanes (40 minutes from Stanstead) fly across the sky. I reckon there are more planes over Danbury than cars on Coll. The days were T-shirt weather (helped by working quite hard) and during the week the bluebells grew two inches and the wood-ants were rebuilding their piles and the woodpecker woke us up every morning. My only complaint is morning starts an hour earlier down there than it does here, and I wasn't ready for it at six am!
We were doing some thinning of trees along the ride to let more light in, and planking trees we felled at Christmas using a chain saw mill. Noisy but satisfying. A new toy is an ancient dumper (probably almost as old as I am) with a rebuilt gearbox (after it inexplicably stopped working at Christmas). And it is a fact, women are better at dumper driving. The men can keep their chainsaws but the only time I want them near the dumper is when it needs starting. Happiness is a dumper full of logs in third gear (it is quieter in third, nothing to do with the extra speed) leaning round the banked corner, one foot holding the gear lever in (the gear box rebuild wasn't quite foolproof). Seriously, the dumper meant we moved all the logs we felled so they will get used. We had a stack 64 feet long. Someone said that was about 8 tons, which was a bit disappointing, it felt like we'd moved much more, but we had moved it twice; once into the dumper, putting the big logs in first because it is easier, and then taking them out again, and cursing the idiot who put the big logs at the bottom so they had to be lifted out, instead of sliding.