Wet.

It has been mild and very wet though with occasional moments of nearly dry. It looked to be even wetter inland with clouds plonked right down on the hill tops.

The builder was due in today and he'd asked Peter to order a skip. Peter phoned for one and was told it either needed to be filled ready for collection before 3.00 or it could stay here until January 4th. So I abandoned my plans to go shopping and instead got on with filling the skip and other building jobs. The trusty flat bed trolley was very useful as I shifted all the bags of garden waste from the front garden into the skip. Meanwhile Peter broke up the remaining kitchen units that were in the garage and cleared out any other rubbish from there. Then I prised up all the lino tiles in the utility room, two layers and threw them into the skip. That revealed the next problem. The utility room was originally a poorly constructed lean-to built on a garden patio/concrete base. They'd painted a waterproof barrier on the concrete before laying the first set of tiles but this had now come up with the tiles. Our builder isn't sure if the adhesive for the new tiles (which I've now declined to lay) would be sufficient to act as a waterproof layer or if we need to paint on a barrier first. He's going to find out as sealing that floor has got to be a priority. On the plus side the plasterer came round with the gritty glass paint and he and his team will be here on Monday to get all the plastering done in a day. That's really an extra bonus as it seems that most tradesmen here are stopping work today for the Christmas break. In Barnstaple we have Factory Friday, here it's Mad Friday.

Clearing everything into the skip gave me the chance to sweep out my study after which I removed wallpaper from the last corner and swept up again. There had been a lot of mold on those walls and while I suspect that the work would normally be done over all the black spore colonies still showing on the plaster I like to remove as much as I can first. I still had that fantastic W5 spray which shifts all the visible spores so I sprayed, wiped and sprayed again. The more spores removed the better as far as I'm concerned. Our final job was to shift the packs of laminate flooring from the study to the sitting room to keep them safe while the plasterers are working.

What a day's work! When I went to have a shower I found the blackest, most enormous blood blister over the top of one of my big toes from wearing wellies for most of the day. I must get some thick socks to protect the skin on my toes which these days is very delicate not to mention takes forever to heal.

Didn't take many photos today though I did manage to capture some morning haze over the sea.

Speedy is behaving oddly today. He went out after his breakfast as normal after which he retired to sleep on our bed also normal. What isn't normal is the fact that he is still sleeping at 8.30. Usually he wakes around 2-3 and begins begging for his supper which he gets anytime from 4.00 to 5.00 depending when he had his breakfast and how long I can last against the pleading eyes and little croaks (he doesn't miaow). At first I wondered if having the builder and then the plasterer in the house might have unsettled him but the builder left in the afternoon. There are no signs of injury or illness and he wakes up if I talk to him or stroke him so I'm wondering if he found something to eat while he was out and gorged himself. Maybe with all the strong winds a bin had blown over or else he got into another cat's dinner. - I've just been and checked his legs, all fine and his gums are a normal pink (no internal bleeding) and all I'm getting from him is 'Leave me alone I'm having a sleep.'

Two deliveries today, the wooden upstands to go on the kitchen worktops and a present from Vytas of a box of Spanish cheeses. Can't wait to try those.