It's beginning to dawn on us that the standard pattern for our lives seems to be that every good day is followed by one not so good. Thursday - gorge day - was an awesome day. If we'd done the maths beforehand, we'd have realised that Friday was never going to be a great day after that.
We woke up to more heavy rain pounding on the skylight - but this time at around 6.30am. This gave me the ideal excuse not to go outside and run around, so instead I padded downstairs to update the blog before starting my day.
I felt tired, and while I was relieved to have an excuse not to go an exercise, my crazy mind also made me feel guilty for not doing it (seems I can't win either way!).
When I'd finished updating the blog and had a shower and some breakfast, I settled down to some work, while Stuart starting trying to have a look at one of Sue's laptops that he had offered to try to fix - all while the rain continued to splatter down.
By lunchtime, though, the weather had done a full 360 turnaround and the sun was shining, so we sat on the patio with our bread and cheese. I was feeling tired and irritable - I was annoyed with myself for not having exercised (see, crazy mind), I was annoyed by the work I was attempting to do, my computer kept giving me its frustrating memory/RAM warnings so I had to keep fire fighting by closing down programs that I really wanted to keep running, and all the urgent things around the house/land that we still haven't got around to doing were weighing on my mind. In comparison, Stuart seemed in quite good spirits and suggested that I aimed for an early finish to my office work and then go out and help him outside with the fencing for Goose Island.
I stomped back off to the office to do some more work, before I had my weekly catch-up phone call from Allison. That put me in much better spirits. It's always lovely to spend an hour chatting away, and these last couple of weeks we've actually covered work-related topics as well!
I returned to my desk in a better frame of mind, only for Stuart to stomp into the house - during the hour in which I had been on the phone to Allison, his mood seemed to have done a complete 360 turnaround, just like the weather. It turned out that he'd been unable to make any progress with the fencing (putting up the last few tricky pieces is now a job that needs two people), had run out of fencing nails, the strimmer (the top-of-the-range dream machine) had stopped working, and I think the tiredness had hit him too.
He stomped off to the car to go to Obi to try and get more fencing nails, some wood for building a goose house, some more fence posts, and to refuel the car with methane, while I sat and wondered what on earth had happened to the day.
I decided after a while more staring at my computer to attempt another work-related task: dying a pair of old work trousers black. The 'uniform' for the crew at the conference is black shoes, black trousers, and a crew shirt. In all previous years I've been the one of the team 'on-show' - the one standing on stage to give the opening address (I thank my lucky stars every time I think about the fact that I never have to do that again!), the one being the official 'host' of the event - and therefore have worn smart clothes, but not the 'uniform'. It dawned on me a little while ago that I don't actually own a pair of black trousers and, not wanting to spend money on an item that I won't get much other wear out of, I decided to have a go at dying my old work trousers.
To cut a long story short, I had to do the dying in a bucket rather than in the washing machine (which is the recommended/intended method of dying) because our washing machine still drains into our septic tank (a situation we intend to change - but that is just one of the many tasks on the long list of things we need to do...) and we weren't sure that putting dye into the septic tank would do it a whole lot of good. Anyway, I put the dye and the salt into the bucket, added a kettle full of hot water and some cold water from the hosepipe. And... stuck my hand in the water to test the temperature. What an idiot! Of course, my hand and nails came out an attractive shade of black. I rushed to the bathroom to wash it off. It didn't wash off. I scrubbed my hand and nails. It didn't scrub off. I used some of Stuart's Swarfega hand scrub. It still didn't scrub off.
Stuart came back a couple of hours later with a full tank of methane and another Sandokan anti-mosquito glowing ball of magic. But no fencing nails, no fence posts, and no goose-house wood. Which clearly hadn't done much to lift his spirits. I eventually owned up to the fact that I had managed to dye one hand black, and we both decided to call time on the day - have a glass of beer and chill out on the patio in the evening sunshine.
We are hoping that the weekend will bring a 360 turnaround in moods and productivity.
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