Sophie and Rowan in Canada

The Zembers have gone away for the weekend, leaving us to look after the animals, the house and, unexpectedly, the shop. The soap retail shop (which is in the building with the production area) is only open at weekends at the moment as it’s outside the main tourist season, and they have an employee who comes in at weekends. We had a few things to do on the production side yesterday and it turned out we also had to see to the customers, as the employee was off sick. There weren’t that many customers (most of the soap is sold through other shops) and we made a few sales without making any big mistakes. We're in charge again today. No customers yet.
The soap is very nice and creamy – we have got a blackberry one in our bathroom. See www.redisland.com/greatcanadiansoap/home.html - all the claims seem to be true!

We cooked ourselves dinner last night for the first time in a month - probably the longest either of us have gone without cooking since university.

We think we’d like having a small business making something. It would be interesting working out the best methods of doing things and trying out new products. There would probably be a lot of difficult logistics and sales stuff too though. Sophie quite fancies cheesemaking but Rowan (who doesn't eat dairy products) pointed out that there would be a lot of food hygiene regulations to make that harder.

The two dogs (both border collies) are funny: they are very obedient but at the same time full of energy and character. They don't wag their tails so much as their whole bodies, to the extent that if they are happy they run in zigzags. One of them is fascinated by the goats – she gets very excited when you are unlocking the barn, then just sits there and watches them eat. When you call her out to leave, she obeys straight away but shows that she’s not happy by chewing on your shoes and ankles. We like border collies and think if we had a working dog it would be nice if it could be one. They have far too much energy to be confined to a house though (here they have a big garden to run around in).