Domesticity ...

Saturday started with a run over to the Defender Centre to sort out a minor issue with the heated seats. Initially I was concerned that they did not work but as I was driving over I switched on the passenger seat and noticed that my bum was getting noticeably warmer. It appears that I had been the victim of the "Dual Control Electric Blanket trick*" and we soon had the cables swapped over and shortly after I was on my way back home.

Back at home I discovered that Kathy H-R had popped round and dropped off a pigs head that was going spare. She had obviously just had a kill and the customer didn't fancy the head. Being slightly more open minded I know of the potential of a pig's head and set to with a sharp knife. 30% popped the ears in a roasting tin and cooked them as a treat for T&M while I carefully removed the cheeks from the skull and rubbed them with a dry cure mixture. In five or six days they will be transformed in to Guanciale and, once cubed in to lardons, are very popular here at The Pile.

30% had also been busy and had managed to find a "friend of a friend" that had a clutch of chicks due to hatch in the next couple of days. Our solitary chick will fare much better reared with other chicks and so it was dropped off to await the hatching of it's adoptive siblings.

The day continued in this vein with jobs being removed from lists. I fitted a pair of new door seals to the Defender in the hope** that they will combat the rivulets of water that trickle down the insides of the doors when it rains. I also managed to reassemble the Band Saw in the garage and fit a new blade. This might seem trivial but the degree of dismantling had almost reached the point where the less patient than I*** would be perusing the Screwfix catalogue and the Axminster Tools website.

The evening saw us take a trip out for a combined 50th Birthday and House Warming Party hosted by the parents of one of TP''s friends. I would like to say that we had a lovely time ...

... but being crammed in with three times more guests than the house could hold made crossing any room not dissimilar to an old fashioned Tile Puzzle. It was no fun at all. Then there was the fact that all of the guests EXCEPT US were members of the same Baptist congregation. This meant that they all knew each other and had something in common. Neither 30% nor I are Church goers and the crush and noise made any attempts at getting to know new people impossible ...

...Needless to say we made our excuses and disappeared after judging 90 minutes to be more than enough.

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* This is a fiendish and pure Practical Joke involving a double electric blanket with dual controls. One simply swaps the controls so that each occupant is controlling the other side of the bed. As a result one person ends up freezing and the other ends up roasting.
** Most Land Rover owners will say "vain hope"
*** These are the people that ride around on unicorns