Carsten

Carsten is quickly adopted by Towser indoors
and our turkey 'tom' Excelsis out of doors.

Welcome aboard, then, latest Help-X student, Carsten. Carsten hails from SW Germany and the town of Dudenhofen which is, by all accounts, quite similar to our local market towns of Castlerea and Ballaghaderreen. It is in the Rhineland "Palatinate"; Mrs C loves that this expression is still in use. Plenty of her most recent history 'pods' have involved the Palatinate but she had thought that this was an old name, no longer in use. She is delighted that "they still have the Palatinate". Dudenhofen is also in the main asparagus growing area of Germany.

Adopted by the male turkey out of doors

Carsten, in his early 20s, is studying teaching of English and Sport and as part of the language chunk of this, he has to go and live in an English speaking area for 3 continuous months. He has chosen Help-X as his method of getting accommodation and Ireland as his destination. We have him for the first week of this 'tour', round till the middle of next week.

He is an excellent guest - all the good things you can say about Help-X volunteers - fit and strong, willing to work hard and try his hand at all manner of jobs, happy, friendly, relaxed, easy to talk to and thoroughly enjoys any food The Woman of the House puts in front of him.

By his own admission he is very new to this travelling thing and this is his first adventure alone, so he gets a bit wary around trying to connect up legs of the journey, changes of train and so on. He managed to mess up the journey here from Frankfurt airport (Ryan Air) and, in Dublin, managed to get on a bus which missed its train connection at Athlone.

Instead of him pitching up at Castlerea at 8pm for me to do a 15 minute taxi run to collect him, we got a series of phone messages ending up with him stranded in Athlone and needing us to drive the 2 hour round trip to rescue him. Never mind. No harm done and Carsten was safely under the roof by 10 pm where Elizabeth could feed him soup and pizza. Poor lad had not eaten since breakfast at the parents' house that morning.

All looking a bit Spring-like. Love those hot orange tulips.

After that late night, we took pity on him and decided we'd not start any work that next morning, taking the day, instead for us to get to know each other, for him to get a look round here and meet the livestock, plus we could go for a little drive around in the car shopping etc if he needed wellies or gloves.

Now, four days later, we are properly in the groove and have done some good, productive work. The weather has been dry and warm, so we have been able to get 'out there' and get long overdue garden tasks done. We have emptied two big compost bins and top-dressed three railway sleeper beds and one of the long beds in the polytunnel with a good 6-8" thick layer of the lovely rich stuff. We have cleared up all the wind-blown branches in the East Field onto a fire-pile for burning.

Food for baby ducklings. Chick-crumb (slightly wetted), finely
mashed hard-boiled egg (incl shell) and finely chopped lettuce
(which they will completely ignore, of course!)

We have chopped up quite a bit of the Storm Eleanor larch and spruce which had been seasoning in its round 'cakes' sliced out of the trunks. Then we crowned all that yesterday by mucking out a bullock barn for a friend. This latter involved me getting a 'fix' of tractor driving - I was hauling the mucked loads down to the dumping pile. Nearly an 'oops' for me there to match Carsten's Athlone mess-up.

It survived the winter!

That's only a 2 wheel drive tractor and with the link box full of muck it's so back heavy that the front is almost rearing up off the ground. In the destination field there was (unbeknownst to me) a very soft patch and I started to sink my left rear tyre in. I was sweating a bit, wallowing around there praying that I didn't need to make the embarrassing rescue phone call to get myself extracted. That would have taken some living down!

Plenty of bee activity in this warm weather.

That was a full day. We were already tired from the compost barrowing and the log splitting, so when we went down to clear "just a couple of boxes" and then fell in with the mission-creep to "the whole barn" (5 boxes), my aul' bones were definitely starting to creak.

A beautifully hearty neck-of-lamb stew. Our own lamb of course.

This morning, I am as stiff as a board and very glad it's the weekend. I was joking with Carsten that I love working with the Help-X lads and I get much more than twice as much done as I would on my own, 2-handed. This mainly because I get lazy and I don't actually do anything in between the Help-X-ers. I need them to motivate me of a morning. May not be 100% true but certainly seems that way sometimes. I find myself 'saving jobs up' for the next Help-X-er, which translates as "avoiding those jobs till I get help" :-) (smiley face)

I started doing these ten-packs with "all the colours" through
the honesty box. They sell very well.

All we have planned for today is a nice breakfast and bit of driving around. I am taking Carsten over to friends Sue and Rob for him to meet them and see their place. Also to look at some new baby kittens from which two may be of interest to 'Sparks' and his lady. We were going to select the two as Sparks was thinking that the lady would find them all equally cute and it did not matter much which they were given. However, I understand that she has now seen the pictures and chosen her kittens, so we are just going to say 'Hello' and admire them, presumably.

Pears coming into blossom.

I am on strict instructions not to slip up and fall in love with the other two. WE HAVE ENOUGH ANIMALS was how it was phrased. No arguing with that.

There's snout to see here. Move along.

I think that is probably enough for this one. More on Carsten and our adventures in Help-X-ing in the next post. Good luck now. Get out and enjoy that sunshine.

The Old Familiar Road

This Christmas has been organised to within an inch of its life. Anyone who knows Liz will know that she loves a good 'list', so the laptop has been humming to the clicketty click of keyboard as lists of ingredients, shopping lists, menus, thawing and cooking schedules are laid down. She's making a list; she's checking it twice?

Unlike Liz, who often wakes up during dreams and is able to recall them and talk about them, I very rarely remember any of mine. One, a couple of months ago, had me waking up in a cold sweat and able to remember vividly, because in it I'd been doing the weekly shop in Lidl and had somehow managed to spend €185.89 so was trying to explain the amount away to Liz (panic!). I'd long forgotten this dream but today, when we put the hard-pressed Laser card to work doing the Big Christmas Shop it started to look like it might come true, and Liz said she'd have "laughed and laughed" had the total hit that magic figure.

Tuesday the 18th sees us driving down to Silverwoods on that old familiar road - Castlerea, Roscommon, Athlone, Tullamore. We did that every day for that first week in Ireland, a year ago this week, and then every weekend through January, Feb, March and April, driving down on the Fridays grimy and exhausted from a week's buildering, and then back up again on the Monday all clean, fed, dried out and with the car loaded with cleaned laundry. We still thank the Silverwoods mightily for their hospitality, hot water and food, keeping us going through the caravan-living, renovation phase. We'd intended to come down to see at least one of the 'smalls' in their Nativity Plays, but we managed to miss M's (14th Dec) before we even planned the trip, and R's was early morning Monday (17th) before we could realistically get there.

We settled for a visit and catch up instead on a day when Mr Silverwood was working from Home (so we'd see him) and by coincidence, the two older girls were off sick from school with flu or Winter-Vomiting bug. We left the house at 09:15 with the dogs loaded up. The dogs love it down there, especially the pups who love to see their birth-Mum and Dad and their first human 'Mum and Dad' plus the kids. They charge about trying to meet everyone all at once and get completely exhausted in the process, so that they sleep soundly all evening. It also meant we could sneak a load of parcels into the car for the journey home which certain small children do not need to know about but may expect to appear in their bedrooms on a certain day coming up soon. Nuff said.

There was very little spare space in the Fiat for the return journey, and even less when we shipped the two 5-gallon fermentation bins which are part of a wine-making "starter kit", part of our Christmas present from the Silverwoods. My family will know that I was mad into wine-making when a boy and at one stage had 36 demi-johns arrayed around the shelves in my bedroom and brewed an amazing range of non-grape flavours from barley wine, apple and elderberry, citrus, birch-sap, blackberry, pear etc - anything we could get hold of the fruit for and pretty much do for the price of the sugar and yeast. Happy days!

Some of you out there listen to me, and bless Pud Lady who takes note of my comment about increasing our number of tree decorations year by year and includes in our Christmas Card, three lovely 'angels' for the tree. Thanks, Mum!

For now, our cold snap seems to be well and truly over and the mild weather with rain is back. This has been the wettest year anyone locally can remember so we are all hoping for no repeat of it in 2013. The warmth, though, has encouraged some first daffs to break the surface of the ground - these being the bulbs from the huge net which Steak Lady gave us way back along with numerous cuttings from rampaging plants in her own garden. We love 'rampage' - we have the space so little prissy things get lost in our big spaces, but these various bits have gone into the Steak-Lady bed with the hundred or so mixed narcissus and daff bulbs planted beneath them. It should look nice down in there between the tractor-tyre planters and the hay barn roses.