Feathers flying

The final day of contractors doing the fibre internet cable connection to our house.

Thought it would all be nice clean work. Started with the team arriving with a boss wearing headphones & microphone (extra photo) to be in contact with his colleagues about 1km away who were ready to "blow" the cable all that distance into our cellar. As the mobile network at our place is poor and indeed in the cellar non-existent, he had to stand in the hallway & communicate by shouting with the others in the cellar who had their ears to the empty outer cable listening for the sound of the approaching cable. In turn, they shouted progress to boss & he told the blowers to go faster/slower as required.

All went well & we now have 15m of cable rolled up in the cellar. Sometime next year, they will return to fix "the box of tricks" somewhere above ground level in the house. No idea when we can expect the new service.

The contractors were expecting to finish all their cable laying work in the village today but at one intersection discovered a previously laid empty pipe hadn't been properly connected. They could have dug up the road & fixed it easily but the asphalt suppliers have closed for Christmas & so the had to leave it unfinished. All the mass of vehicles, diggers, traffic lights, barriers etc have now gone but will have to return next year for the 10m that needs to be done.

Today's crew were different from the one that had done the 70m+ of cable laying on the property crew. After we had said goodbye, merry Christmas etc, they returned without us seeing them, with a digger & started to do some cosmetic improvement on now the filled-in trench area looked. We had told the previous crew to leave it as each movement on the now very slimy, sticky soil was making things worse.

As we noticed it, Angie ran out to get them to stop just as one of our pesky chickens got buried under a shovel full of earth. She was convinced it was dead, dug it out with her hand and luckily the hen was alive and well!

The first crew were amazingly patient with the chickens getting in the way. However, we lost two a few days after this event but to a fox! Video on Facebook but only for Friends!