I didn't get much ...

... done on the wall today either. This deadline of next weekend is looking less and less likely.

The effects of all these early mornings proved too much for me today. I vaguely heard the alarm clock go off, but it was 09:10 when I set foot out of bed and if it hadn't been for the fact that I needed to go for a ride on the porcelain horse (or what passes for a porcelain horse around here) I would probably still be in bed right now.

A good few hours on the website and then outside at 12:30 and I managed to bung two really good bucket-loads into the wall. Even better - after lunch, even with rearranging some of the stones, I still heaved a couple of bucket loads in by 16:30. However, such is the condition of the wall that all of that chalk mortar isn't advancing me very much.

16:30 though saw me come to a shuddering stop. According to my weather reporting, weather comes in five grades - namely
1) overcast
2) cloudy
3) clouds
4) scattered clouds
5) cloudless
We started to day with scattered clouds but by 16:30 we had progressed to a cloudless day. The water temperature in the dump load was 63°C, the batteries in the barn were fully-charged and there was a good wind blowing. There was also a big pile of washing up here and the bedding needed changing and so I stopped work on the wall and dealt with the washing. Put all of that out of the way.

While this was going on, I did a few odd jobs around here, like changing plugs on appliances and so on. As you know, I don't use Continental plugs and sockets here but British ones, for the simple reason that the plugs themselves are fused and so any issues with my system won't damage the appliances.

I've also wired in the new media trolley that I assembled on Sunday. It now has a 4-way 230-volt socket that plugs into the wall - I can plug all of the external drives and so on into it, and it also has 3 x 12-volt DC sockets for things like the DVD player, the video player and so on.

Finally, even though the water in the solar shower was quite cold, I bunged 5 litres of hot water out of the dump load into it and had a shower myself - clean myself up.

And so there's clean sheets, clean pillowcases, a clean quilt cover, and a clean me now. I'm quite looking forward to that and it won't be long before I'm in it either. And then tomorrow I really must get cracking and no mistake.