After months of dithering everything came together: the sun was out; the correct TEK screws were ready and I was actually up in Drumbuidhe. In a flurry of construction activity I got the fank chimney back up (a great view but metal roofs are killers on your knees) and the most crucial gable flashing back up. The sunshine makes even the grim tasks more pleasant and I wandered happily round the garden picking up all the prunings left from January which I'd been hoping the garden pixies would magic away.
Although the sun is out we're still in the broken down machinery phase of the year so the water turbine will have to get cleared out again (twigs, leaves and frogspawn) and the series 1 landrover LHS 94 is still fairly poorly. It was stuck about a mile away on the track since November: it has a recurring fault where it stops after 45 minutes and won't start again for an hour. The fitting of a fuel filter by an eager landrover enthusiast last year seems to have made it worse. Having fitted the filter the landrover enthusiast developed pneumonia and died unexpectedly so I can't really grumble about his intervention. Last week I jumpstarted LHS 94 on my way out of Drumbuidhe but it conked out again just when the track comes down to the shore, completely blocking the track. I didn't have an hour spare so I left it and ran away to Glasgow. Thankfully when I got back it started again (a wee bit of accelerator cable fondling was required) so I could get it off the track. I've still got to get it the 300m back here to the house but it will give C a project over Easter. He's coming back up to Drumbuidhe this week and my heart sinks a little at the "improvements" he'll start, especially since the gaps in his memory are now really obvious. Hopefully he will spend his time working out what all the bits of his wind turbine control system do: it took ages over winter but I finally managed to switch off all the gadgets which he has hard-wired into the battery system and electricity consumption fell dramatically as a result.
I'm really pleased with the etching I produced (my first!) over the New Year when the generator wasn't working and I was ekeing out every last drip of electricity and I'm now the proud owner of a faded sepia print of Balivanich's concrete water tower: definitely not the chocolate box market.
