A Busy Day.

It was an early start for us as Peter was back to work. School doesn't start until tomorrow but I still got up fairly early so that I could get on with my painting. I had a good session and painted the door, door frame, skirting board, wardrobe tops and a second coat on the cupboards. I would never be able to make a career as a decorator but it will do for us. All day I have been really careful going through our doorway but I still managed to brush against the frame and get gloss paint on my second favourite fluffy fleece. I cleaned it up with some white spirits and then I discovered that 2 sections of the door frame had fringes of brown fibres from the fleece. I've cleaned those all off, it was a good thing I noticed them before the paint had dried. It was sunny in the morning, clouding over more in the afternoon but as far as I'm concerned any day it doesn't rain is a good day. Many farmers in the country wouldn't agree with me as at least half the country has now been officially declared as having a drought. Apparently we have had significantly low rainfall for the last 2 years and rivers & reservoirs are low. Can't say that I've noticed. They keep telling us we will have a lot of rain this week so before I settled down to read a book outside I did some nettle clearing in the chickens' run and burnt up the many twigs and small bits of wood that had accumulated in there.
Apart from the constant birdsong I am sometimes entertained by listening to Jack as he roams the fields next door. This morning he was laughing merrily, in the way that only young children do and from his shouts I gathered that Neville had decided to go for a swim in the lake and then was refusing to come back from the tiny island in the middle of the lake. I have noticed that since the arrival of the crocodile there is only 1 Canada goose in residence. Perhaps the others have left due to an ancestral memory of crocs/alligators as predators.
The rayburn is currently holding its own. The temperature is not as high as we would expect but Peter is going to leave it for the time being and he has found out where to get a certified rayburn engineer if we do need someone. The last man we had in bent one of the pipes by forcing it into position which Peter is still very cross about but of course he didn't discover this until the next time he had to service it.