When I woke up this morning ...

... der der der der der ...
but doesn't that have all the makings of a really good blues song? However, to coin a phrase, since I've been on the Prozac I haven't had the blues for years. Anyway, when I woke up this morning the temperature in here was a massive 15.4°C. And it's been a long time since it's been that warm in here without a fire. It just goes to show, firstly, how much things have warmed up outside, and secondly, the benefits of heaping a pile of scrap wood on the fire just as you go to sleep.

It was warm outside as well - 2°C - and it's been a long time since it's been that warm as well. 4mm of rain we had through the night and while it hasn't washed away the snow, it's now a messy sticky quagmire outside. 

First job was to look at this solar spotlight thing that I bought a few weeks ago and didn't want to work. Once I'd worked out how to dismantle ... "dispersontle" - ed ... it, the rest was easy. The battery wasn't fitted correctly. It was only a 600mAh battery though, and so I charged up a spare 2500mAh battery and fitted that. This evening it lit up at last. It's not very bright but from where I've installed it, it lights up the pathway from where I park Caliburn down to the side of the house. And that was what I wanted it to do.

Next job was to fix the anenometer that didn't want to record its data. A flat battery (that's the third it's had since I bought it in the autumn!) and a badly-seated mounting sorted that out, but each time the battery is relmoved, you need to recalibrate the computer, and I can see that being a pain with three batteries in five months.

The rest of the day, in between the phone calls, I spent on the roof of the bedroom. I cracked on as well and I reckon that there's about 3 hours' work to do there. Once that's done, I need to deal with the sealing of the joints in the plasterboard - and now I have the water to do that. I also have to seal the window so that I can build up around it.

Tonight I had a gorgeous tea. Baked potatoes of course, but I put a baking tray in there, lightly oiled, and cut up an onion and some garlic to fry on it. Then, a small tin of mushrooms and a ladle of tinned vegetables. All finished off by some curry and gravy powder into the resultant liquid. It really was nice.

But a downside of this warm weather is that with having to heat up the oven sufficiently to cook the food, the temperature soared to an astonishing 24°C. It's now 5 hours since I last put any fuel on the fire, I'm sitting here in shirt sleeves (not even a pullover) and it's still over 20°C.

And in other news, I was chatting on the phone to this Canadian guy whom I'm working with. We were talking about fires and I was saying that I was looking for a woodstove that has an oven and also a water boiler, to fit in the cabin that I'm going to build on my plot of land in Canada. "Ohh - I have an old one of those that I took out of here a few years ago. It's in my shed - I'll sort it out for you"

Blimey!