This was the sight ...

... that greeted me this morning. Yes, we had a real pasting through the night. So first job was to brush the snow off the solar panels by reaching out through the roof windows with a large brush, seeing as I don;t have the scaffolding up any more. It was something of a contortion to do it but I managed all the same.

It reminded me of a film that I saw when I was a small child and which left quite an impression on me. There were some pioneers living in a log cabin with straw thatch, somewhere along the edge of the settled USA in the late 18th Century and to drive them out the native Americans set fire to the cabins (with the occupants inside) by firing the thatch with flaming arrows. One scene that always sticks in my mind was a pioneer opening up a hatch in the roof and sticking a broom or something out to try to dislodge the flaming arrows. I just wish I knew what film it was.

So I made a lid for the compost bin, took off the segment with the opening lid and then closed it with the new bit, and used the leftover segments to make a second bin. I've lined the base of it with brushwood for drainage and I'll be starting on using that. I've also been tidying up in the barn, sorting out the wood and identifying which bits to cut up, and I've started making the wardrobe in my bedroom.

A couple of little repair jobs in the barn took me up to knocking-off time at 18:00 and then up here to find a temperature of just 7.2 degrees. But a huge blazing fire in my little stove has brought the temperature up to 20 degrees and it's nice and comfortable in here. But outside, when I went down to make my tea, it was MINUS 4.4 degrees and that's just ridiculous for November. And of course it's only nigh on 6 and a half months since it stopped snowing - 5th May in fact. This year is crazy.