New Year Spring Clean

Me Man has been on about tidying up the laft for a while now and thought we would get it done last Saturday, but having only got up at lunchtime and then being invited to big Sister's house for food and gossip (copious quantities of both I might add), I only arrived home at 6pm (with a Chinese takeaway), and well anyone with a life knows that on Saturday night you certainly wouldn't be tidying up the laft!

So Sunday, it was! We started, and the usual things went through my head, 'what the hell was I thinking', 'why did I keep that', 'did I really think that would ever come in useful again'. Around 4 hours later, I ended up with an ultra organised laft (well you have to keep some crap on the laft, isn't it the law!!!), a car full for the Charity Shop, another car full for Harry Hay's auction room (I'm sure he'll be delighted to see me again), and about 6 black bags full of rubbish for the Essy Kert (we did try to burn the paper stuff, but with only a small barbeque and a force 9 gale blowing we decided it wasn't very practical).

Monday arrived, and Rob went back to school, me Man went to work and I thought I'd better do some sense! so I went out to the shed, thinking I would start work, but instead, spent the whole day tidying up the post Christmas mess! and in between all this the phone rang, with a very nice lady from Channel 4 TV, who wanted to know if I would be interested in taking part in Wife Swop!, my exact words were (after I picked myself up off the floor), 'god no!'.

So, all in all, it was a funny old day, I wonder what delights await me in the shed for the rest of the week!

New Year

I found Reestit Mutton at the fabulous Globe Butchers (www.globebutchers.co.uk) in Lerwick, still haven't actually done anything with it yet, but will try Soup soon.

New Years Eve saw us on a whistlestop tour of the West Side, but first we had a lovely beef/pork roast dinner at the in-laws (it's a Shetland thing, you can't just have one meat!). So after a lovely dinner (alcohol free for me as I was driving), we set off to Semblister to see Peerie Sister and family (she was most disappointed that me Man didn't have his kilt on for the occasion), then back to Whiteness just in time to see the New Year in with Rachey & Billy, we then made our way back to Burra to the in-laws, who were still up and with a few bottles of rather nice Bubbly chilling in the fridge, so I made up for the drink free evening and at around 3.30am, tottered down the road to our house with the remains of the last bottle of Pop, by now I was actually wide awake, so sat back and watched Still Game and ended up going to bed around 4.30am.

New Years day began in the late afternoon with the aroma of Honey Roast Duck wafting through the house (I told me Man I was off duty and he would have to make the dinner), and at around teatime we sat down to a beautiful dinner of Duck, roast parsnips, carrots, tatties, creamy mashed tatties (you can never have enough tatties), stuffing and chipolatas (yes I know they don't really go with Duck, but they were from the Globe and they were soooooo good).

Monday came around and I decided that I would have an alcohol free night, but we had to have a bottle of wine with the leftovers from Sunday, and then thought the bottle of Taittinger champagne I got from me Man might go down rather well (but that would be it), so we put on American Pie (the first one, hadn't seen it in a while), and at 3am after another 2 bottles of bubbly and another 2 American Pie films I fell into bed and vowed that there would be no more alcohol, well at least till the weekend!