Big scary rooster....

Big scary rooster; poor defenceless sheep?

These days we let the sheep out for an hour morning and afternoon from their run (where the grass is almost grazed off) to the front lawn, woods and hedgerows for a graze and browse; where there's still plenty of grass etc. At the same time the chooks are out free ranging, wandering about as a group. Each hen takes her turn to peel away from the group to nip back to the coop to lay her egg and, when she's done wanders back to find the gang and William (The rooster). William is delighted to see them back and charges towards them making his throaty growly noise, racing up to the returning female and doing his little stompy dance, which seems to translate as "Yay hay! Can we make lurve now?"

This morning the 'gang' were in the woods and the 3 sheep grazing away just outside the woods, all with their heads down so that they'd not have been able to see the hens over the long grass and brambles at the wood's edge. Returning hen appears on lawn from far side, so sheep are between hen and gang. William spots her and charges through the undergrowth, 'exploding' out into the open just by the sheep, who freak and shy, stampeding away! Dad nearly splurged his coffee laughing. Not sure if sheep can look embarrassed, but ours came pretty close.

It occurs to me that we have not reported a visit yet by Steak Lady, Mr SL and Auntie Mary, the Nun (85). 29th September was the date, to nearly coincide with Mary's Birthday but they were mainly here to show Mary around. We have always been close friends with Auntie Mary, who has called Mum her "Little Princess" since a very young age, but who spent most of her life Missionary-ing in Africa. For a tiny, petite, soft spoken 'little ol' lady' she has probably seen more of horrific real life than any of us are likely to see and can quietly relate stories which make your hair stand on end - whole African villages wiped out by AIDS, persecution of Christian villagers, war, turmoil and strife, starvation and hardship. She is a fascinating person to talk to. The picture is left to right, Mum, Steak Lady, The Nun and Mr SL, with Towser sneaking in at SL's feet and Poppy just getting her nose in shot bottom right. The visit went well and they all love the place. They piled into Mum's food, loved what we'd done with Steak Lady's garden cuttings and admired the sheep.


We have also been on a visit down to the Silverwoods, birthplace of Towser and Poppy (and their 5 brothers and sisters). This was to have been so that Dad could see and get photo's of the children's new activity, horse riding lessons, which happens on Sundays with the two eldest and the two youngsters alternating weekends. In the event it got moved to the Friday so that we could babysit little R (4) while Mr and Mrs S took M (6) off to Dublin for an appointment. We could collect R from school and hand her over to Aoife the Social Worker who was to take her on a visit to her natural family, and we could also collect J-M from school in the rain. We took the pups along so that they could experience their first proper car ride and re-acquaint with Silverwood and the S's. So it was a good fun visit with lots of coming and going but never really got going as a whole family event or a meal because everybody was there in snatches in between zooming off on 'things' - even J-M was on a French lesson as soon as she got back from school and Em-J now does homework / study after school till gone 6 p.m, so we never saw her at all. 

Dad's 2CV is now being readied for her NCT test (=MOT). We have finally got the windscreen we needed and she is now in the garage where they are sorting out her ignition and mixture. She's lost the ability to idle, which meant a quick pull on the choke to keep the engine going at every T junction. The garage have tried changing points and capacitor in case it was an ignition problem but have then found the car is leaking air round the carburettor. We are waiting for Monday when the garage will let us know what we need to do about this - is it a new 'carb' or just the gaskets around it. Luckily we have 2CV Llew to call on at the other end of the phone, with a stack of old carbs stripped off dead 2CVs, so we won't have to spend £££s either way. We just need to get Llew to actually put one in the post, which has been, in the past, not anything you can hurry! We love Llew madly but he's nobody's version of 'urgent'. We'll see.


That's about for this one. 

Deefer