Weather Bomb?

A nice seasonal ale from Wychwood, the
makers of Hobgoblin.

We had our forecast first big storm of the winter, with strong winds  from Tuesday afternoon, through Wednesday and into Thursday morning. There were some impressive weather maps on line, particularly one of wave energy or 'swell energy' which is a factor beloved of the surfers who try to ride the big Atlantic waves up on our NW coasts. This had a dramatic black patch in our corner of the Ocean (black being for wave energies of over 25,000 KJ per metre of wave height per wave) surrounded by vivid red rings fading through orange to the calmer colours. There were, too, some impressive graphs of wave height, with double deck buses on for comparison; they got 21 metre waves off Donegal. Possibly for these dramatic reasons, the media seemed to adopt this storm system keenly and christened it a "Weather Bomb!" and naming the bad day Black Wednesday to allow for eye catching dramatic headlines. I wonder what me aul' Dad, a lifelong teacher of geography and lover of meteorology would have made of all that. What's wrong with 'significant anticyclone' or 'deep depression' I can hear him asking, or even big storm or gale force winds.

We may only have a small kitchen but Liz
was always going to find room for one of
these bad boys - the new dish washer.

Anyway, we got our 'Yellow Warning' from Met Éireann so we battened down the hatches and listened nervously to the wind roaring through our big trees and the rain splattering against the windows, watching nervously in case the out-building roof(s) might move about but we survived both nights and I could report back to Liz after my first-thing patrol and dog-walk that everyone and everything were still where they should be. We had survived the 'Weather Bomb(!)' and Black Wednesday. Windswept and interesting. These systems then tend to move off across the Scotland, or nip round Ireland's SE coast and hit Wales and England and we feel sorry for our friends in those places who are reporting their own storm damage a day after we've been in the thick of it.

A light freeze after the 'Weather Bomb', proper ice on the
 pond for the first time this winter and some rime on the
grass.

Temporary disappointment in the sheep department; I must preserve my soul in patience a while longer. I was hoping to collect the girls this weekend and therefore be able to report some sheep on site in this year's census. But these things do not always go to plan, and my friend Mayo-Liz has been called to do some extra shifts and 'the boys' who need to help separate my ewes from the flock and move them up from the lower fields are not available either, so the ewes get to spend a few more days in Mayo. They are reported in good health, though and almost certainly 'with child' plus they have been given their Heptavac P jabs ( "For the active immunisation of sheep as an aid in the control of lamb dysentery, pulpy kidney, struck, tetanus, braxy, blackleg, black disease and clostridial metritis caused by (assorted Clostridia types)". So says MSD Health, the maker of this widely used sheep medicine. When Mayo-Liz gets a chance she will do the separation and bring my ewes up to her barn, then phone me to come and get them. These things can't be helped especially around Christmas and with livestock

The bees have not been seen outside the hive since December began, so we hope they are nice and safe in their football sized winter cluster. There was white rime on the hive roof this morning but deep inside they will be maintaining the temperature of the small amount of live brood which they keep going through the winter, buzzing their flight muscles to generate heat, or fanning their wings to get more air flow. They may still fly on warm days (over about ten degrees)  but one of the adaptations of the local subspecies to the local conditions is a higher than average ability to retain 'poo' in the gut. They need to fly to get rid of this to keep the hive hygienic and so that they do not suffer from dysentery, so they do better if Met Éireann give them a warmer day every couple of weeks so that they can do a few "cleansing" flights, but they can go months without if need be.

The electricity pole is finally swapped over
and the old one felled.

In the poultry department we may have some light at the end of the egg-less tunnel. Last week was our worst ever with just one egg from 9 hens, but today I got 2 eggs AND the Guinea Hen has re-started her annoying and incessant 'buck-wheat buck-wheat' mating calls. This is a relief - we have been buying eggs and Lidl's Connell Farm Organic eggs may be "freshly laid by hens with freedom to roam freely on organic pastures" but they are, to us, spoiled as we are by our own eggs, insipid and pale yolked things.

ESB (the Electricity Supply Board) finally showed up to swap our power lines across to the new pole and to delicately drop the old pole into our garden, neatly missing all my young trees. I enjoyed watching them - they do not use ladders, it seems, to shinny up these poles, but strap-on leg irons which hook round the pole and grip it, but then give each foot a cantilevered platform to stand on. The man then has a strap round his waist and round the pole and by shuffling his weight from foot to foot to waist he was up and down and round and round the pole doing up all his cables and iron work with the ease and grace of a monkey up a tree, with both hands free to use the tools hooked to his belt. He takes up with him a block and tackle to  so that his man on the ground can hoist bigger tools up and down to him without him having to come down for them. Very efficient. Power was only off for 2 hours and we slotted our shopping into that gap so that we now have our Christmas tree and a batch of white wine ready for our house guest, plus the almonds for the marzipan for the cake.

A Good Job Jobbed

New 'telegraph' pole slotted in between
the existing cables.

We were impressed this week by another example of the local engineers getting stuck in and completing a job in double quick time. Yesterday lunchtime saw us visited by two guys in hi-viz jackets with a clip board asking if it was OK to locate a pole they needed to replace. I call these 'telegraph poles' (old habits die hard) though I guess they've not held telegraph cables for ages; they are probably just 'electricity poles' now as they carry the mains wires. We were pleased to be able to steer them in the direction of the pole we knew to have been condemned (see also my July 11th post on

http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2014/07/wheel-tappers-and-shunters.html )

and also to steer them towards accessing it via the big open 5 acre field to our west, rather than having to mash their big digger all across our garden, poly tunnel, pond and orchard fencing. I was delighted when they saw how much easier it would be from the west. "Sound!" they said. I also asked them for the old pole and they were more than happy to leave it. "We certainly don't want it" they said. So off they trundled in their van and I guessed we'd not see them again that day, they'd just be surveyors or the foremen, maybe. I relaxed and went off for a 30 minute kip in the chair.

Christmas cake mix under construction. We now have
the food mixer!

I woke to make a coffee and could hear the noise of a tracked digger out in the likely field. "Coo!" I said to Liz, "We have a digger - they must be going to do the pole" (Like a school boy I still get excited about watching 'diggers' and, in this case, I wanted to see the corkscrew auger, with which they dig the hole, in action). I rushed outside and could straightway see that the new pole was already erected and the digger 'noise' was the sound of the machine being driven back out of the field and loaded onto the low loader, job done. They'd done the whole thing in 30 minutes while I snoozed. Fair play to them. A neat job they have made of it too. Now we await the notice from the ESB of a disconnection "for maintenance work" which will be them rigging the cables across from the old pole to the new.

More cake making.

I am not sure why I wanted the old pole; maybe it is the magpie in me. It's a big impressive baulk of timber which we might be able to use for some kind of garden feature or raised bed or maybe fence posts. It has me reminded of the huge wooden spars which went into the rebuild of the Sailing Barge Cambria (the bow sprit is 38 feet long, the topmast a good 43, and the mizzen mast (45') and the mizzen boom are up there too). Assuming they can drop it somewhere sensible in our 'garden' it will probably sit there untouched for ages while the weeds grow up around it. You are not advised to log them up and burn them because they were soaked and treated in some pretty obnoxious creosote-y mixtures back in the day so that they'd last 50 years or so, and the smell and smoke in your house is not that clever, apparently.

The puddles are joining up!

We have been heavily rained upon over the last couple of nights, with torrential rain in the wee small hours, so we are Puddle-Central at present. I am not complaining - I am not trying to align myself with the poor souls who have had real flooding, inundated houses and flooded out cars. We are on top of a rise here, so we just get inconvenient puddles and some days when it is good to stay off the land; you'd smear the grass to brown mush, poach up the tilled soil and wreck the drainage. I am pleased that we do not currently have sheep or pigs. We retreat indoors; hence all the cake making and, today, a mountain of ironing beaten into submission.

'Philae' comet lander descending (mock up pic from
the internet)

We have also been gripped and enthralled by the stuff coming in on the news, the internet, Twitter, Facebook and the European Space Agency website about the Rosetta / Philae landing onto comet 67P. We both love all this stuff and we are in awe of the technology. The comet is so far away (500 million km, I think) and moving so fast, that the precision and the maths involved by the 'flight dynamics' team has been likened to trying to hit a bullet fired from one gun with another bullet fired from a 2nd gun.

More puddles. Sunny today though
so they are draining fast.

The 'flight' was launched ten years ago (I only vaguely remember hearing of it) but they got their man, getting the orbiter (Rosetta) into position back in August this year close by the comet and then 'firing' the lander (Philae) down to the surface this week. It is 'sort of' going OK but the lander apparently bounced twice on impact (the first 'bounce' was actually a 1 km hop taking 1 hour 50 minutes as the comet is only 4 km long and does not have much gravity) and is now a km off 'target' and may be in the shade of a low cliff. This is not much use for the solar arrays which need to 'see' the sun. Ah well, we are impressed anyway by the amount they have achieved and we would say that was another 'good job jobbed'.

Home made dog treats. Some of the 2013 pig bits get roasted
and broken up. These are tails (the dogs have already had
the tips!) 

Meanwhile we are still frantically trying to clear some space in the freezer(s) ready to take our lamb meat which we collect from the butcher on Monday. We have, though, the offer of some space from a knitting chum of Liz, so we do not think we will have to buy the 5th freezer. Phew.

Apropos of Nothing

A small variety of photo's just for a catch up. On the Thursday morning we woke up to a small amount of snow. We took a few pictures but this was about as Christmas Card as it gets. The picture of a 'pond' is actually a mistake. Having given us mains water on Friday but with curiously low pressure (about half the pressure we'd seen out at the road), we turned up on Monday to this expanding pond outside our wall but running into our run-off channel. It turns out there may have been a cattle drinking trough at that position which had been removed, and the water pipe cut though and buried. Sensible? Dad phoned the water boys on Monday and they showed up very fast, promising to return and fix us in days.

The fix was fast if a little rough and ready - expose the pipe with a mini digger, plug the end and secure the plug with a dodgy bit of wire you found in a handy fence. Re-bury the pipe. Ta daaaa! Full pressure at the house.

The big yellow lorries are the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) coming to turn on the mains power which involved running some new cable from the road and replacing the 'head', the fuse-box in the house and the meter. The kit was 15 years old and "we've moved on a bit since then".

Finally, this is what "shopping" looks like these days. On one day we bought woodworm treatment, a knapsack sprayer and masks for same, bitumen primer and a burner for torch-down felt, buckets and a plaster stirring weapon, yellow 'speed-line' spray-paint, a trowel, float, expanding foam, gloves and PVA (Unibond), steel mesh reinforcing, a tonne of sand and 24 sheets of 4 by 2 polystyrene sheeting.

Proper Man Shopping
Deefs