Running out of excuses.

The big black dogs went home today and the cats returned to roost. The partridge lives over at Mels in the East, as it took a fancy to her hens and moved in with them.

I don't really know where the days of the week went. Work mostly, and certainly no running OR painting. Also no housework, which has put Meg into a frenzy of cleaning as I write this. She has cleaned upstairs and downstairs bathrooms, the kitchen, the kitchen cupboards, fridge and has now moved onto the washing pile and the living room. It didn't help that the crate also came home to roost after several weeks stuck in port. Now there is the contents of our house in Wanaka added to overflowing contents of home here. There was great excitement when Spook brought it up from Glasgow and they reclaimed snowboard gear, bikes and loads of books and nick nacks. The house was also full of boys for the weekend, who had spent a lot of time burning rubbish outside and had been dragged around the croft on a sledge on the back of the tractor which Spook managed to get working. The horse poo made extra slidy patchs and the stench in the house was quite strong at times. I have worked all weekend, which turns out to be a good thing.

Spook ran up to the CIC hut on Ben Nevis after dark tonight. There is a documentary being made for the Fort William Mountain Film Festival and they require the memory stick to be brought down each night. They were also hungry and needed some food brought up. Spook ran up with John and set a target of 40mins to run in (from the top of the climbers road), so with absolutely no need for any kind of competition, they will be watching closely to see how Amanda and Kieth get on tomorrow night. The climbers sent down a shopping list, so that might slow them down. Spook and John will be back on the Wednesday night shift. I think the filming goes on for about 6 days.

The most artistic attempt I made this week was to buy 3 sketch books. The most athletic thing was to park 3 mins away from work instead of right outside the door. We have building work going on and there is very little parking space. The most organised thing was to remember to leave home 3 minutes earlier. I overdid that on Saturday by mis-reading my rota and arriving 2.5hrs early - 8am instead of 10.30am, so that was a big loss in the long lie stakes.

There are 4 more days of work and one day off before we go to Skye this week, and lot's of opportunities for avoiding things.