Back again

Well, here we are again back from another trip to Cambridge for my husband's business meetings. It was the first longer journey in the new car and it did fine. On the last day, I had to leave the hotel room by noon. All our possessions were on view in the car so I didn't want to leave it and go somewhere warmer. I couldn't cope with the thought of them somebody breaking in just in case anything was valuable. Nothing was but I don't want to have to cope with any insurance company again for a VERY long time, if ever. I had several sheets of puzzles to do to keep me occupied but I was absolutely stiff with cold by the time my husband appeared. I really missed the blanket that I kept in the car that was stolen last month. My friend has a load of samples that she has done of patchwork patterns from the class she goes to. She says that she has far too many of them so will join some together into a quilt with a fleece backing that I can keep in the car so that I won't freeze in future. How lovely!

This rain has not let up for very long at any one time. I wish we could have a little rest from it. My cream coloured hens and my white hens are unbelievably brown with mud. The brown hens are muddy too but it is just a little less obvious. The runs are just liquid mud that they are wading through because the heavy clay soil just cannot drain because the water table is so high. We have used up all the leaves that we gathered up in the autumn to put in their runs to keep their poor little feet a bit more out of the mud.  I am playing Grabbyword (fun word game) with a lady in Australia who is not very far from the bush fires. She was so pleased last week because they actually had 15 minutes of rain...…..

Hens

I haven't posted about my feathered friends recently. I have lost one and gained four so I have 19 at the moment. My youngest are the 6 Amberlinks and they took forever to start laying but are now laying reliably although there is rarely one from each of them in a day. I got them at the end of September 2019 at supposedly 16 weeks old but they did not start laying until Christmas. These type of hens start laying at 18 - 23 weeks...  Usually they take it in turns to have a day off. The next oldest are 2 1/2 years old and white. There were five of them but I lost some and was down to two. My farmer friend was about to despatch his remaining four white ones but gave them to me because they were still laying some in the winter and I was having trouble supplying my couple of regular customers. His white hens and mine were raised by him from day old chicks so I was happy that they decided that they could all live together in one house and run again. That makes my life easier because I didn't want another hen house in the garden. Of course, when they came to live with us, that was the impetus needed for the young Amberlinks to start laying so the extra white ones were not really needed... And then there are the 3 1/2 year old brown Warren types that have come back into laying after moulting late so I have gone from hardly any eggs to loads very quickly as they all decided that spring started at the end of January due to the mild winter.

I have two more hens, both old girls now. One is the remaining survivor of the previous Warren type flock and must be about five now. As she thinks it is spring, she is laying an egg every day but I don't suppose there will be many at all laid after Easter. And then there is chicken Nugget who was hatched in school in our very first hatching in June 2011. She laid two eggs a week all through last summer but has not laid any this year yet. She is a Buff Orpington so lays fewer eggs in a year than the other types of hen that I have but is expected to live longer. She is my pet and will follow me around the garden and I am very fond of her. I will be sad when she goes.

New beginnings

So this week is the start of the rest of our lives post car trauma. Thank goodness! I have even slept the last two nights. Mind you, the can't-eat-my-dinner thing was good for my waistline.

So my oldest granddaughter, now 22, is trying to work out how she can get herself on the property ladder. She reckons that if she can get a toe on the ladder now, then that will be of benefit later. She has been saving hard and has some deposit ready. She can't afford a regular estate agent listing but wondered if she could buy something at auction. I am worried that she is looking at the guide price rather than thinking about how much the house might actually go for. Also, nobody in the family has any experience of buying at auction and it seems quite a complicated process to me, being completely uninitiated. I checked that she realises the whole long list of bills that she would have to pay as a homeowner - community charge, water rates, gas, electricity, insurance. She has everything on a spreadsheet and reckons she can cover everything as well as eat and clothe herself, run her car and have a bit over for herself. She is very determined!

I can well remember us buying our first house. We were very green! She is far more with it than we were. We will have to see what happens.

Further update

So the recovery firm told us that the car was not obviously damaged and we started the process of trying to buy it back. We liked the car and it was exactly what we wanted and we had spent a lot of time researching different cars to find it. However the insurance company had sold the car to a salvage company. After many attempts, we got the phone number of the salvage company and phoned them as we were hoping to go and have a look at the car. They told us the car was badly damaged on one side so we gave up and yesterday bought the car we had put the deposit on. No idea who was telling the truth. The man from the insurance company was going to inspect the car and tell us a buy-back price last Tuesday, then Wednesday, then Friday, then next Monday. We have had to give back the courtesy car so we no longer had a vehicle to use to go and inspect our old car. And we need a vehicle to use next Tuesday for something we are doing. So we gave up and bought the other car. It is similar to our old one but older and more expensive and definitely more than the insurance company gave us for our old one.

I have left out the daily hassles of phone calls and/or letters with the insurance company, the sleepless nights, the evenings when I was too fraught to eat my dinner etc etc. Remind me why we have insurance please!