Elizabeth died yesterday.
Hatched by us in 2018, she was one of three we kept that year: Violet, Elizabeth and Bott. Violet died two years ago, Bott is still with us.
She was, like all the Welsh Blacks and their descendants, an absolutely beautiful girl. Her black feathers shimmered with purple and green iridescence. She was, we think, the daughter of Annie, a very particular Welsh Black with a very small pea comb,. Her father was Bertie, the Vorwerk. She didn't have any obvious Vorwerk traits, unlike her sister, Bot, who inherited his flat comb.
She had amazing eyes. One side was completely back, from the Australorp side of the Welsh Back heritage the other eye was orange and black, from the Indian Game part of her Welsh Black heritage.
She was an interesting girl. While living on the allotment (when all our hatches went to the allotment once the boys started crowing), she disappeared. The allotment had Heras fencing all round and was accessed through a locked gate. We had netting over the top. We looked everywhere, under everything, in everything. We couldn't find her. We assumed she must have been left out one evening, and got taken by a fox
She reappeared weeks later, she was just suddenly in the gang again - and we have no idea what happened to her in between.
She had absolutely zero tolerance for being picked up, even if treats were on offergh she did do "jumpy uppy" when she was a baby). She would take treats from our hands, if there was no other option, but that was it. Despite that, she was a mostly good natured girl, and I will miss her very much.
I noticed that her comb was a bit dark yesterday, but it was dark red not purple (purple is an indicator if imminent heart failure). . She was eating fine, and showed no sign of being unwell.
She was up and about first thing, when DH opened the run and let them out. When I went to shut them in at 16.10, she was dead in the middle of the run. The run camera wasn't recording (of course we've only just discovered that). The view from the other two cameras to where she died was obscured, so I've no idea what happened. There's a bit of noise on one of the mid morning recordings from one of the cameras, and I'm guessing that was it. We didn't see anyhing because I was on my way to a routine hospital appointment, and DH had to come and get me as I wasn't allowed to drive afterwards. I wasn't feeling great when I got back, so neither of us had been in the garden until I went out to shut them away.
She was 8 years old, which is a good age, and she had a quick death which I am very grateful for.
Most of the photos of her are as part of a flock, and none show her well. Even this one only shows her "game" eye rather than the gorgeous black "australorp" eye.
I'm down to 6 hens now. 3 of those are golden oldies (who could go at any time), and one is a youngster who doesn't look like she'll be long lived. Mind you, I thought Fleur was going to go at any moment during most of her amost 9 years.
I've got to consider at what point I should wind things up.
My back has been giving me some gyp again, which is a bit disappointing. I'd begun to believe that the relief accidentally provided by the calcium channel blockers was going to be permanent.
Today my brain decided that we were going to clear up the dining room. I put on Now 1973 and got on with it, stopping to do stretches often as the pain bit. I carried on into the adjacent dining room. A simple tidy up became a bit of a marathon, as my brain decided that I was already in pain, so moving the sofa to clean under it and move it a bit wasn't going to make things any worse.
And then I had to have a more in depth clean and sort out. I labelled plugs. I sorted extension leads. I hand swept dark corners. And it went on, and on, and on. 4 hours, with a half hour stop after I'd put the furniture back so I could have breakfast.
I got Raymondo to vacuum the floor, and he did this with only a few stops for complaints.
And as I'd nearly finished, I decided to give the cat tree a brush down. It's been a loooong time since I last did it, probably before Christmas I think. I was using one of those old-fashioned sweep-in-one-direction hand devices (bloody marvellous), which needed shooshing and emptying a lot.
I was standing on steps to reach the top platforms of the tree, so I just dropped the hair on the floor each time I emptied the shoosher, which was every couple of minutes. I got Raymondo to come and sweep up.
The App said "Clean Raymondo's brushes". I flipped him over, and I could see why he was having trouble.
I cleaned him up and then just piled the hair next to him, and carried on piling up the hair as I finished the cat tree.
When I was done - and I had removed the piles of cat hair - I sent him to vacuum again, and I'm just about to mop the floor.
After I've washed it.
Slight detour on my lofting journey, but still related.
I bought a 100cm wide, 3 drawer, sidefiler cabinet from some distance away. DH had to drive me there to collect it as it wouldn't fit in my tiny car. It was a lovely journey, we added in a couple of other bargain pick ups (one for us and one for my brother), and we had lunch on the way home.
The new filing cabinet weighs a ton, has concrete in the bottom. DH took it apart and we enlisted the help of DB to get it up the stairs and back together again.
The reason it's connected to de-lofting is that we removed a 4 drawer standard filing cabinet from the loft the day before. That was fun. My DB came to help,
Two of the drawers were full of CDs, which are now crated and labelled. Two drawers were crammed with paperwork, some of which I'd already organised into box files so the kids would know they could just dispose of it. I decided I'd dispose of it myself, but this required me to go through everything to make sure it had been scanned, and to scan (or rescan) where necessary.
We replaced it with a 2 drawer cabinet from the study, which I'd emptied into crates. The other two drawer cabinet was damaged, so that was emptied into more crates and taken to the tip.
I took the opportunity to pull out old paperwork, and I've been working every day at making sure everything had been scanned, and reorganising the electronic files.
The paperwork to be burned was piling up, a crate full. Two thirds of it came from the fuilking cabinets. The other third came from me emptying my old work related loft boxes. It didn't seem right to just bin some of the paperwork I had, so that all needed burning as well.
I've been waiting for an unsunny day to start burning stuff, and today was the day. I'm not quite through it all, but I should be finished tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the lateral filing cabinet is in place, and I spent Friday and Saturday (and part of today) trying to organise stuff/ The organising of this spilled over so I was trying to go through everything in the study as well.
I've removed a lot of stuff which doesn't belong in there, and now the guest bedroom also needs a sort out. I'll get to that later. Much later.
The study is the box room, and it contains the traditional "big cupboard " over the stairwell. This also needs a bit of a sort out, I'll have to see what enthusiasm I can muster. I'm ignoring it at the moment, I'm focussing on the pile of stuff from the rest of the room.
I've made good progress. I've been ruthless, again, and I've got a pile of stuff to donate and a load of stuff I've binned. A few items are saleable, but I don't have the patience for that right now.
The files that are remaining are back in the loft filing cabinet, and I've only used one drawer.
The four drawer cabinet was advertised and collected the following day, which was great.
My focus for the next few days needs to be getting the study back. However, I've put more (empty) crates in the loft, ready for my next foray up there.
And the new cabinet is in place.
My enthusiasm and stamina for de-lofting is wavering.
It's physically quite hard work, even without the added challenge of the below chest height beams. DH has removed some of the Ikea shelving which had been making access to one area almost impossible. I did my glutes in trying to extract a heavy box, and that box was only at floor level.
The first aisle is now mostly waiting for DH to go through stuff, and I'm happy with that.
The stuff in the middle aisle has mostly been sorted through. Crates are on shelves and stacked on the floor, not necessarily in their final place in the eventually-sorted loft, but out of the way.
The third aisle has extra Ikea racking (even with DH haveing removed stuff), and this still holds quite a lot of stuff that was "I can't think about this yet" stuff as we sorted. INitially it was packed with stuff, but I've dealt drastically with loads of it. It won't take long to sort the remaining bits, once the rest of the loft is done.
There are eaves on one side which need to be gone through, but I've decided to wait until my now-limited enthusiasm returns before I start tackling that.
If I run out of enthusiasm, I want to leave the loft in a way where it will be easy to pick up again later.
My strategy for doing that is I am now doing soimething in the loft every day, but only a (relatively) small something.
I write a list of the small somethings each night for the following day. This has worked out well, although some things turned out to be less small than I expected. Others were fantastic.
I found a few things in there that I didn't remember at all, so they went. And lots of things that brought me much joy.
I shared photos os some of the items with relevant people so they could have that warm memory too.
Another small something was "empty 2 box files of paperwork". The previous couple of weeks I had sorted the paperwork into separate box files. I didn't need it, but I didn't want to throw it away. I also didn't want the kids to have to deal with it, so my plan was to write on the box that it could be destroyed so they didn't have to go through it.
I realised that (for some of the boxes) it wasn't really worth keeping them. As a compromise, I decided I would make sure that everything in the boxes had been scanned, and then I'd destroy the originals. That worked well with one box file, but then it wasn't that easy.
Several of the boxfiles contained booklets of personal information. At the time I'd received them, I'd scanned the most important pages, I'd had to use a flatbed scanner so the quality wasn't great. I decided I'd slice the booklets so I could then use my normal scanner to scan everything. This meant that every booklet had to be taken apart and trimmed, then scanned, then added to the pile of stuff to shred or burn.
It took a while.
Another box file contained pension history. This was a mix of booklets and data. I went through everythin, item by item, to see whether I had a scanned copy. Some bits I hadn't scanned (I presume I scanned them and then didn't file the scan properly). Some items were too big for the scanner so I had to tackle apart, trim and scan. I did keep some of the paperwork for this, but I was so ruthless that I'm happy with what I've done.
It took quite a while.
Some of the small tasks are peripheral. The large filing cabinet in the loft is going to go (that will be fun!). I'm going to put a small filing cabinet up there, one of the two that are in daily use. They are being replaced with a sidefiler. One of the small tasks was "empty filing cabinets into temporary crates". Another task for a different day was "bring fc1 downstairs" (fc1 = filing cabinet1)
As my enthusiasm wanes, some tasks are very small indeed , such as "print labels for record boxes and stick on". "bring wedding china downstairs and stack in crates" (no stressing myself out my making myself do assomething with it, yet)
I've already decided where my likely hiatus point will be, and I'm really just trying to make sure I get to that.
Not long now.