Snow!

Nearly every morning we wake up to a fresh blanket of snow, but it has melted by lunchtime! It stays snowy on the tops of the mountains, so if we want to play snowballs we just climb up one. Alfie is crazy about snowballs. He jumps up and catches them in his mouth and eats them. It was really hard to get a picture of him doing this though. In one of these pictures all 4 feet are off the ground. Can you spot it?

Our Warm and Cosy Home

Daryll has finished building the outside of the house, and he has fitted a woodturner to keep us cosy. This means we can now sleep inside, and the van is just used as a kitchen, and for getting about. 

Our new mission now is to find wood! There are hardly any trees on Harris, so we are constantly hauling up driftwood from our lovely beaches. The best wood always seems to be on beaches far from a road, so we have used the canoe to collect some really good bits and float them back to our little sea loch at Miabhag.

Our little sea loch is quite a good place to find driftwood, but an even better place to find mussels, cockles and oysters TO EAT!

Questions: Do you know what I mean by driftwood? What are mussels, cycles and oysters?

Alfie loves helping find driftwood, but he likes to chew it into little bits. As you can see by the photo, he is also very interested in shellfish. He can actually crunch them up with his sharp teeth! Do you know any other dog that can do that? I don't!

The Working Week

For the last two weeks, Alfie has put up with an awful lot of banging as Daryll and I have bashed and screwed the roof onto our little house. This is making it more and more watertight, which means we can put the floor down inside without worrying about it getting wet when it rains hard sideways, which it does a lot here. Now that we have a floor inside, I have moved Alfie's basket and water bowl indoors, but the poor dog finds that wherever I put him he is in the way, and we keep coming inside to cut wood with the noisy power saw. When you think how good a dog's hearing is, her really does put up with a lot. 
Here is a picture of him catching some rays in the van, which is our toolshed and tea making area during the day, and our bedroom at night. I have also included some pictures of our roof going on...noisily!

One of the best things that happened this week was our neighbour gave us some beautiful fresh herrings that her son in law caught. Daryll cooked them on a little BBQ for us outside the van so that we wouldn't be stinking of fish forever after. Alfie enjoyed all the heads and bones as usual! They are so good for him.

Free Time

When the weather is too windy for us to be building and too scary for sleeping in the van on the edge of the mountains, we go to Northton to stay with our friend John. Alfie loves this because he gets proper walks, a lovely warm stove to sit by, and quite a lot of snacks and treats from John that we would never normally allow. 
Here are some pictures taken at Northton. You can see Alfie loves playing with Daryll on the beach, but he doesn't really 'get' birdwatching. Why do we keep stopping and holding these black things up to our eyes for ages? He would also quite like to play with the cows, but when he gets up close they seem rather big....and hairy...with sharp horns....so he pretends he never saw them after all.

A busy first week at our new home.

Weather like this is unusual in Harris, or so they told me. I really enjoyed it even though it was below freezing for most of the week. It was lovely seeing the sugar frosted mountains getting whiter and whiter each day, and walking over frozen bog is much easier than squishy bog! The only real down side was my phone stopped working, and I had taken all these lovely photos to show you. Only now I have managed to get them off the broken phone and put them up here for you to see.
We were warm as long as we were busy, and Alfie was happy as long as he had his coat on. We are too busy to take him for walks while it is light, we need to use all the daylight for building, so we take him for walks in the dark, just like I used to last Winter at Lanhydrock. It has been very starry and the moon has been getting bigger each night. Last time we went we didn't even need a torch because the moonlight was so bright. He always thinks he can see deer, and rushes about the sides of the mountains feeling very important 'hunting'.

Reports from the journey up to Harris

We got the canoe off the roof of the car and went for a very smooth paddle on a very glassy loch.

We stayed the night in the van at the bottom of the mountain bike skills area at Glen Nevis. These are the rocky drop offs for people fly off on their bikes. It was too slippery for us. There was a hard frost and at night it was -8. Poor Alfie's water froze in his water bowl but he still managed to sleep well wrapped in his blanket and curled up into a tight spotty ball.

Just testing my blog

Alfie and I are moving to the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides with my partner Daryll.

This is Alfie looking rather embarrassed about a fish Daryll caught when we were there in the summer. It was pretty tasty and Alfie enjoyed crunching up the head when it was all cooked.