The future is not bright

It's a windy cool sort of day today and I intend to plant my lettuces and some tomatoes later. There have been a number of people coming into the shop but no sales so far. The sales so far this season have been about a third of what they were last year and there is a noticeable lack of tourists around. Only two bus tours this morning and neither of them the profitable variety.

The future is not looking very bright round here.

DH has only one week of full time work left and then he is back on contracts. This tends to be short term profit but long term too unreliable.

I am going to move all the kitchen stuff out into the rest of the house later so that we can start ripping up the floor in there and get it redone with proper insulation and also to mouse proof it. I have had enough of clearing away mouse poo every morning off all my kitchen surfaces and I suspect that some of the tummy upsets round here are the result of this.

I would love to get the bathroom done too but the money is not there for that. William will have to sleep in the shop on the stretcher for a while longer yet. He is going to use the old bathroom as a bedroom eventually and we cribbed a bit of his brothers room to make it a bit larger.

I read about the size of those McMansions but I can't say I'm really all that jealous even if you could fit our entire house into one room. At least our heating bill is very small. House work is minimal too. Only takes about 30 minutes to do the lot. However I would like the house to be finished!

I hope there is a future left for the boys.

viv in nz

The Shop

We shut the shop a few weeks back so that we could do some renovations. (we means me and my mother mostly). I think we can remain open at least some of the time during the off season because I am mostly home anyhow. So we got into the shelving and built two big shelves on which we have made papier mache models of the local landscape. They haven't dried yet though so we have covered them in fabric for the jaffa race which comes off on monday next.

Last year there were around 8000 people on the street so hopefully we can sell a few knitted items to them. I rather like living on the worlds steepest street. You get to meet so many interesting people and sometimes sell them things (I'm not a pushy salesperson :). We only make things from the local environment and a few christmas items etc and I refuse to sell anything made outside our city. I'd like to have that include all our materials too but this isn't possible at present although quite a lot is made completely locally (I have a friend with sheep who produces her own spun wool). I think the display is definitely an improvement and maybe this year I'll be able to install a second double glazed window and some more insulation. Owning an almost 100 year old house has its down sides but by the time we've finished it should be draught proof at least.

go the jaffas