Six Chix

4 more chicks hatch among the duck eggs.

I left you with a bit of a spoiler in the last post. We had just saved the life of the first chick from the broody hen whom we had named "Cat Basket Lady" having found the little mite hypothermic and revived her with the warmth cradled in my hands. She had been returned to Mum and went on to survive the night. We had sat back happy with our one chick. Elizabeth even made the conciliatory comment that she had "always wanted to find out whether that cliché about being 'as fussy as a hen with one chick' really worked". However, the story did not end there - there was plenty more drama to come and a plot twist or two.

Feeding the new babies indoors before reintroducing them to
Mum

On that first day, Mum decided to come off the nest, which is usually a sign that she is done, has hatched all the good eggs and now has to rear those babies and leave the duff eggs behind. Ready or not, those eggs get chilled and die. When you clear the nest they usually prove to be infertile, or part-developed and dead-in-shell, so you find out that she is a good Mum and knows what she is about. This lass, though, is a first time broody, so she came off the nest with her one (we thought) then went back on, and off and on and so on. We just had to wait and watch.

Mid morning, the hen came off properly, fed the one, and went for a sit down elsewhere, so I knew I could clear the nest but wait, another hen had nipped in to lay today's egg, so at least the abandoned eggs would be kept warm. Meanwhile a fully dry, mobile black chick appeared with Mum. It must have been with her all along, but staying hidden under her skirts, perhaps carried between Mum's wing and body. Then there were 2. Eventually, the laying hen finished her task and hopped off the nest, so I was able to clear the old nest. Another surprise was in store.

Mum with 4 of the babies.

When I looked into the nest I could see a fully hatched but still wet baby chick in there and at least 2 more eggs 'pipping' (starting to break open with the baby pecking inside). I decided to gather up all 8 eggs and bring them into the incubator where there was just enough space between the nearly 'cooked' duck eggs. By evening, 2 more had hatched and overnight another bird emerged.

Mum with all 6

We were fairly confident we could introduce these to Mum, giving her a total of 6. Hens do not, in our experience, reject 'foreign' babies in these early days. You would normally sneak them in when it gets dark at roosting time so that Mum would wake up and just take on board that there were a few more mouths at breakfast.

Upside of being woken early by the dogs. This lovely 05:30
sunrise over the East Field.

We went with a slightly earlier (braver?) method. We fed them all indoors that afternoon and found them all to be very quick learners, all happily copying our chop-stick 'pecking' mime at the food. So we went out to the Mum+2, put a plate of food in front of her and our 4 'foreigners' beside her. Like magic, the 4 merged with the 2 and Mum accepted them all seamlessly. We now have a hen-and-six wandering round the yard in the sunshine, and she is mothering them like a pro. Happy days.

Short back and sides? Anything for the weekend, Madam?

On Wednesday, we were back at the sheep shearing, this time, over at Sue and Rob's where Rob was actually in the UK (Mum's 90th!). I knew that if I took my Help-X volunteer, Laura, along we'd be able to give her some real work, not just standing watching the "experts" (ha!) at play. That was exactly what she got - she was as exhausted as the rest of us. There were 4 ewes to shear, those same 4 to be given liver-fluke meds and 6 lambs to ear-tag.

First up was the tagging. I showed Laura how to do the first one but after that I was the only one nimble enough to catch them. I was grabbing them, holding them up for Laura, and she was banging in the ear tags. One for the CV - "I have ear tagged 5 lambs". The shearing went well, too. Laura wound up as chief 'holder', hanging onto the collar and lead that kept each sheep fairly still, whispering 'sweet nothings' into their ears to keep them calm, while I sheared.

I am delighted with this ewe - my 'personal best' ever shearing
job.

I was delighted with one ewe in particular, a 2nd-time sheared Suffolk cross Galway. For some reason her fleece was beautifully clean right down through and she was a big calm lady who stood for the cut as good as gold. The sides came off almost in one piece each and I never needed the trimming 'scissors' (Jakoti hand shears) or nicked her by mistake, even once. I'm calling it a 'personal best'. By comparison the other ewes just got 'normal' treatment and I should confess I made one bleed a little (oops).

Next.....

Sue introduced a bit of mischief into the job by spotting one of the girls with so many squirts of the blue anti-septic spray, she looked like a Dalmatian. Anyone passing their place is going to think I have cut the ewe to ribbons. Sue has told me since, that it was foot-rot spray she was using, so it all washed off or faded in the night, to save my blushes.

Can we go back out now?

What else have we been at? Actually some good honest, Help-X partnered 'garden' tidying. We have cleared through some big nettle patches up what we call the 'Primrose Path', the 'Keet Run' and into the East Field. Sitting here by the Dining Room window I can actually see through into the sheep. Before we did the job, the new nettles almost reached up to the lowest branches of the hawthorn bushes.

Dressed to kill. Laura and the brush cutter

Today we broke out the brush-cutter and did battle with the tall weeds (docks, goat-willow(!), rushes and creeping buttercup) in the area briefly known as my veg' patch. Friends of the Blog will know that I literally "lost the plot" 2 years ago, and then brush cut part of the wilderness and covered it with black plastic last year. This year I am re-attacking the paths and the beds that did not get sheeted over. One of these days I may even plant something in there.

Somewhere out in that wilderness....

The only other 'landmark' worthy of note is that today was the day for the vote on the all-important Constitutional Referendum on the '8th Amendment'; that thorny abortion issue. These referendum votes are only allowed for Irish citizens, so I had to sit this one out, but Elizabeth, of course, went down to tick the box.

Laura joins the ranks of #PigWimmin 

We now have to try to get a night's sleep with only the data from an exit poll at 11:30 pm, as the real count does not start till 09:00 tomorrow morning. The Woman of the House will be glued to that news feed; of that you can be sure. By the time I next write we will all know the result.

Au Revoir to AB

AB rocking the mesh visor. 

Farewell then, Augustin (AB), our Help-X volunteer of the last 4 weeks, who I dropped to the railway station this morning for his journey onward to Dublin. It nearly didn't work; as is commonly the case, Castlerea station was all locked up and gone away, unmanned and the ticket machine out on the platform was crashed and inoperable.

Nailing the docks (Rumex)

He and 2 other passengers decided to get on the train anyway and throw money at the first railway official they saw. A text later told me that they had all arrived safely in Dublin and had not been arrested for 'hobo-ing'. AB had done a month in Belfast prior to his month here and is now planning a month in the capital and one in Galway before, apparently, heading for Sweden. Yes. Sweden. It's a French thing, he tells me. They all want to see Ireland and Sweden. Works for me.

The pig paddock has never been so clear

Regular readers will know we've had a great time with the lad and we have done LOADS of work, mainly around Autumn-tidying, clearing nettle patches and pulling out of them, big heaps of old prunings and tree branches (incl. the Christmas tree from 2016!). If this was me doing the volunteer side, my mission would be to leave every place in a far better state than when I arrived. If that is also theirs, then AB should be very proud of himself. We are transformed.

Heavy rain stops play on what was to be
our last task.

His last working day was going to be yesterday and we were going to strip away all the grass growing from cracks in the concrete on the back "terrace" and then mix some cement and fill the cracks. Well, lashing rain in advance of the next named storm (Brian) put a stop to that and we both took a day off after having got up at the crack of dawn to nip down and help a friend move some cattle. AB's last job was on Wednesday, then, when he had a good session at bashing docks with the brush-cutter. We'd translated the stinging nettles as "ortie" but could find no such common name for French docks, so we called them 'Rumex' which amused AB ("It sounds like it should be an insurance company!").

My current favourite evening snack. Goat's cheese and strips of
our bullace-plum "fruit-cheese". 

All good things must come to an end, though, and although we loved having AB, we are home birds, a bit set in our ways and enjoying of our own company, so we were both looking forward to un-shipping the 'help' and getting our house and our routines back. No offence, we hope, in either direction.

One of the cats supervises the wine racking.
(pic by Liz)

One amusing side-line to this is that although AB was the easiest bloke in the world to feed (he ate everything we cooked for him and came back for seconds every time. Liz jokes that her worries were only about whether she'd "manage to fill him". He has a bullet-proof appetite) there were 2 minor mis-matches to his preferences. He does not like fish (he's OK with shellfish and prawns) or cooked cheese, so out of solidarity we avoided fish and cheese for 4 weeks. No pizza, then, and certainly no cheesy fish-pie. We are so going to make up for this, now that AB has gone!

I'll leave the last word to our friend and Archery Coach, 'Con'. We were over to his on Wednesday to help whacking in some tree stakes, to clear the shooting field of its 3D target "animals" (into dry store) and to fold Con's 2 enormous cone-shaped tent canvases. Con obviously likes AB and loved teaching him to shoot for those 4 weeks so in my little 'farewell' to AB on Facebook, Con replied,

"(He is) a big man with a big smile and willing hands - may he enjoy every step of his Path."

A dog on your lap is no protection
when this cat wants to come aboard.
Not NOW Kato!

Meanwhile, as we wait through the gap between Ex-Hurricane Ophelia and Storm Brian (how can you take those two names seriously in the same sentence?), our only other entertainment seems to have been racking off the wine. This was meant to be a 3 week kit but has taken us more like 2 months, possibly because we'd let the kit get old and maybe the temperature. yeast or the stabilizer were not up to much. We thought it had nearly done so we "killed" it with the stabilizer and it just took on a new lease of life, fermenting madly for 5-6 weeks before it finally calmed down enough to be 'racked' (bottled). It is surprisingly good and we find we prefer it to the shop-bought Ozzie Shiraz we had been drinking on the non-gin and non-beer evenings. Bottoms up!

Get me to the Ship on Time

Dan and Dan last November. Happy Wedding, guys!

We trust that by now, our good friends and frequent guests, Dan and Dan(ielle) are now Mr and Mrs Dan, married late this morning on a cruise ship somewhere (I think) in the Med. We all wished them well early this morning via Facebook and text messages when they said that they were scheduled to do the job at around 11 on board. As expected and for a load of good reasons, we have not heard anything since (They were kinda busy, we guess!) so we just hope it all went off without a hitch and they are now 'done'. Happy Wedding Day, you guys. See you soon-ish I expect.

We were, of course, involved in this set up in a small way as it was on one of their visits over here that Dan proposed. They were heading from here to Galway at the end of a stay and Dan secretly asked us for a suggested route which would include suitably beautiful scenery where he might stop the car and leap out to go down on one knee. People who know Danielle, know that she is such a bubbly, talkative soul, that he might have expected trouble getting her to go quiet so he could slide the big question in edge-ways. We had suggested driving via Cong and Connemara; plenty of scenic lakes and lovely views that way.

The ducks support the cause.

Dan headed off and found a suitably beautiful lake-side spot, stopped the car and got them both out. Ring-box hidden in his hand, he lunged down on one knee but just at that split second Danielle turned away and, overcome by the gorgeous lake-scene, scampered off down the beach towards the water bubbling over with plans to come back with canoes. Dan was left there on his knees while his intended got further away, wondering whether to shuffle forward on his knees or get up and walk (Take 2?) and Danielle only stopped gabbling when she realised it had gone a bit quite behind her and where was Dan? All sorted out in the end, Dan proposed, Danielle said 'Yes' and the rest is history.

Pedro at the whittlin'. 

Other than that, not much happening. We have the Help-X lads, Manu and Pedro with us till Saturday and we are continuing to be delighted and impressed by the whole deal. This place has never looked so tidy all at once; they have worked so hard bashing the nettles, docks and rushes, mowing as well as occasionally helping us move sheep about or rounding up cattle which have escaped into the lane.

Pedro and Manu 'relaxing'. 

They have finally caught some fish - 3 roach in the River Lung by Feigh Bridge. That was a relief. They'd been trying and trying at various "never fail" , popular sites and not even seen a fish never mind hooked one or landed one. They are off down there to try again even as I type this. They expressed an interest in wood carving so I supplied them with a big old spare fence post, chisels and an orbital sander, with which they intend to create a totem pole with face(s) on. They are struggling a bit with this as the wood proved to be very hard and dried out but we live in hope.

Hand made bamboo ball-point pens. 

They made a little diversion into hand-made biros made in green-bamboo tubes. These are very clever, with their ends at the joints in the bamboo and with the lids made in tube just big enough to telescope over the smaller pen-tube. Very clever. They have cooked for us once already but, when they decided to ask to extend their stay to Saturday, they offered to cook again. We are promised some kind of Spanish beef dish tonight. We are looking forward to it.

2 Hubbards jointed for the freezer.

Meanwhile, the Hubbard birds are so big now, that even though they are only 64 days old they are looking harvest-able. We have therefore 'offed' a couple, which came in at live weights of 3.38 and 3.58 kg respectively and the 'dressed' (oven ready) as 2.66 and 2.70 kg respectively. 5 lb birds at 64 days from a genuine free-range system with no growth promoters or excessive "pushing". Amazing.

Yellow and Blue

A sports fan? Well, maybe not.....

Go the Rossie Boys! When we upped sticks and moved from our old jobs to the 'Wesht' of Ireland, I seem to have come from one sport mad environment (the DHL/Sainsbury warehouse) to another (this whole country!). The local area is knee deep in fans of soccer and of the 2 GAA sports ('football' and hurling, use the 'football' word round here and everyone will assume you are talking about Gaelic-rules footie. The UK 'permiereship, Man-U and all that jazz is always specified as soccer).

A 365 pic from my "yellow and blue" period. 

All my friends and rels will know that we 3 brothers managed to get born without the 'football' gene strand in our DNA. We have had no interest in the game for our whole lives and what we know about it you could write in capitals on the back of a postage stamp. I have happily carried that on into Ireland and the GAA game but you'd have to be blind here to not know there was something going on.

The strawberry season is upon us.

The whole county is a-flutter with the yellow and blue Roscommon flags; cars, flag poles in front gardens, sheep sprayed in those colours. Roscommon has not, up till now been known for its sporting prowess but while all sporty eyes were turned towards an exciting run in the soccer 'Euro's' which took the national team to the final 16 for the first time ever, The (GAA) Rossie boys have been sneaking up on the final of the Connacht (province) championship. The 'Big Game' was to be against the heroic Galway team and 'we' were definitely underdogs.

Peas and beans from the polytunnel.

Liz had bought me the top for Christmas and had been talking to her boss (John, who is a genuine fan) about my hopelessness as a fan - all in good part, I have to say, and in fun. They had decided that I should wear the shirt for the main games in the run up as it seemed to be having a good and talismanic effect - they kept winning! With tongue in cheek, she also gave me some 'authentic' lines to say should I get asked any tricky questions (like "did you see the match?" for example). I am (allegedly) very happy with the season so far and also delighted that 'they' are finally doing up the (Douglas) Hyde ground because the surface has been unplayable all through the winter when ever it rains.

Summer fruiting raspberries

Well, underdogs or not, I wore the shirt as advised at the weekend and Roscommon drew with Galway, so there is a replay game on Saturday evening. My only other involvement has been that I thought it would be fun to do a series of '365' pics for the project during the intervening week, based on the Rossie colours blue and yellow, so I have been wandering about looking for anything to shoot where blue and yellow are in conjunction and are the main colours.

Coo. There's a whole exciting world out there!

Meanwhile, back in real life my dozen Marans eggs have now 'cooked' in the incubator and have started hatching but in an unusual way. Normally 12 eggs set on the same day in an incubator will almost synchronise their hatching - the theory is that they all feel each other moving within their respective shells, rocking about and hear each other cheeping, so they all get encouraged to greater efforts. You get a great surge of pipping and hatching and so few in the 'tail' end that it is not really worth keeping the incubator going in case of stragglers. Well, not for us this time, it seems.

Early Bird

We got 2 really early birds on day 17 (should be 21), followed by a pause, then a burst of 3 more on day 20 and only one today (Day 21). 6 chicks now, then, and the remaining 6 eggs all quiet with no signs of even any pipping. We are guessing that the strange spread is due to how the eggs were stored before we got them - they have managed to sneak in 4 days of early development before they ever went into our incubator so possibly they were kept warm.

A first try at mould-pressed, matured, harder goats cheese

I will give the final 6 eggs till tomorrow (Day 22) evening before I take them out and carefully open them (one at once, obviously) out at the compost heap. They may be sterile, addled or 'dead in shell', ones which failed to make it out of the egg. If any turn out to be alive (oops) I will put the rest back in and give them a few more days but I would be amazed if this is the case.

Blue the floofy cat in one of his more classy sleeping poses.

That's it for this one. I am afraid I have a cold and I am bunged up, fed up and not able for happy creative writing. Forgive me.

If the Weather's Middlin'......

"If the weather's middlin'...", says John Deere Bob over the weekend, "I'd like you to cut down a couple of ash trees for me...." meaning on Tuesday (21st); he knew we were doing all the pig transport stuff on the Monday. Well, the weather was nowhere near "middling" as the tail end skirts of Hurricane Gonzalo roared through lashing us with a Sou'westerly gale and massive rain, which then veered to the North West and kept whacking us with squalls. The North West is our least favourite direction for winds, and the one which scares us most with its worrying rippling of our old out-building roofs. It has me racing around trying to think of new ways to shore up the weaknesses and lash down any potential flappy bits with wire and concrete blocks.

SW winds come at us all across Galway and finally come up against our massive black spruce trees in our 'woods' out front. The house itself is (we sincerely hope!) sound and the roof itself looked to us like one of the strong points in the property as purchased. At 2 storeys high it does a good job of shielding the outbuildings from the SW. It is the NW winds, thankfully not that frequent, which roar at us out of Clew Bay and in across Mayo, Kilmovee and the fields on that side of us, that have us having these conniptions. They hit the big concrete and rock gable end of the goose/chicken house and are pushed up and over like the wind on the leading edge of an aircraft wing. This puts all kind of lift on the dodgy corrugated iron and corrugated perspex sheets that make the South-facing roof slope, if not tied down, ripple along like (as Liz described it) like the keys on a cartoon piano.

I have shored them up to a degree but it is real bodgery, and if we ever win the lotto, we will be replacing that roof with new. Failing that I need to buy and install about 12 feet of some nice strong two by one and a half, which I can screw all the panels in that area to as a kind of 'not-fixed-down' top plate. That will replace what is there, in bits, mostly rotted out. You can not, of course insure these out buildings without the man from FBD wants to come and inspect them; I am sure any sensible insurance risk-assessor would take one look at ours and laugh like a drain. I wouldn't blame him! Anyway, Hurricane Gonzalo, as I write this, seems to have largely passed through leaving us with our roof panels shaken but not stirred. We appear to have gotten away with it this time.

Meanwhile, the Longford Bee Keepers group hold another of their monthly meetings, where a speaker will talk to us about swarm control but also about the training and exam for the next stage of our 'Bee School'. Coincidentally, they will also be able to give us our smart certificates for the last stage, our "Preliminary" certs. Most of 'us' got them last month but we missed that meeting, it being the day I flew home from the UK. Apparently there was an official photographer an' all, but we won't be in that one!

Extreme gardening - trimming brambles around the bee hive

Liz has already decided not to proceed on to the intermediate stage, which comprises three exams in a lot more depth than the first step, a written bee-science 'paper', a written method/process paper and a practical exam taken at your own apiary. She is happy, she says to stay on the nursery slopes. I am in two minds. I like the idea of going on, climbing through the official levels of 'expertise' up to the grand sounding "Bee Master" but some of these beekeepers get way more involved in their hives, more interfering, more 'control freak' and more fussing than we like to be with our own hive.

Liz gets to grips with our first
'pork' output.

We listen to our 'Two Marys' advising us to stop fussing, to leave the hive alone and let the bees get on with it. A lot of the fussing, the weekly (or even more frequent) cracking open of the hive to inspect it, is all about trying to squeeze every drop of honey out of the task. We are not that fussed about honey or maximising production, squeezing the assets as it were. We are more focused on the 'green' gardening, ecosystem, healthy population of pollinators aspect. I worry that to pass these exams and certainly to show sufficient experience with hive manipulation to convince the examiners that I am skilled enough to get the ticket, I will be forced to 'fuss' more than I am comfortable with. There's a conundrum for you.

Pig liver and heart. 

We dropped by the butcher today to collect our livers and hearts. The kidneys, apparently, one is still in each the carcass, the other gets cut about extracting samples for the trichinosis tests (which we have apparently 'passed' (i.e. negatives). The meat hangs in his fridge till Friday afternoon. Not having seen this before we were both amazed by how big an entire pig's liver is. They weighed about 1.75 kg each! They have now been cut up and bagged up as 9 sensible portions.

Finally, I am delighted to see that 'our' Whooper Swans are back, the first half a dozen have arrived at our local lough for their winter stay. I can now hear their fluting calls drifting up the ridge as I supervise the dogs in their off-the-lead session in the orchard. They must have flown in last night, so they have presumably had their own fun and games with Hurricane Gonzalo's skirt-train. Unless they were over on the Mayo coast, which would have given them quite a tail-wind, they would have been either skirting or battling into the storm. Autumn is definitely here.

Trailing Home (Tail Between her Legs)

There she comes, then, trailing home with her tail between her legs, poor old Clara Bow, 2 weeks overdue for her NCT re-test and her owner's wallet €280 lighter. We called by the garage today having heard nothing, to see if she was finished, to find that they had just finished putting her back together and cleaning her up before they phoned me. Not brilliant service this time but I do sympathise. They had taken her in to do some easy tweaks on the carburettor which weren't going to cost much and would be done by garage owner Keiran who'd taken over the task from son Aaron. They knew I wanted the car back for the 14th and knew not to spend too much on her.

2CV carburettor (pale grey, centre of picture)

In the event both K and A jazzed off to the USA to mechanic on a Kart race (in which their other son, Andy, was driving for Ireland) having first posted the carb off (without asking me) to a specialist in Dublin. At this point it all went a bit astray. The carb needed €280 worth of work and was no way going to be back for the 14th. Hey ho, I asked them to just re-assemble the car and I'd either drive or have it towed home, end of job, end of hobby, car officially booked off road on a SORN notice. Unbeknownst to me, the specialist guy had already fixed the carb.

I wasn't happy, but these are old, unfamiliar cars and the guys left on site were doing their honest best. They were very apologetic and offered to charge me only what the carb guy had charged them, no labour on their part and no VAT. It would have been unfair to hurt the Dublin guy so I bit the bullet and paid up thinking, philosophically, that at least it will be the final spend on the car. I drove home enjoying the feel of the repaired mixture and smiling a wry smile - I was probably driving a perfectly good car which might well breeze an NCT but, No, we have made our decision and this baby gets to sit in the car port, SORN'd and getting used only within the 'farm'. Maybe the law will change and the statutory age for 'classics' exempt from NCTs will hop forward from its current 1980 date; cars have to be 33 years old here to be exempt, mine is only a youngster at 27 years old.

Christmas Pud

But enough of 2CVs for the moment. We have progress on the sheep front at last! Sheep Mentor Kenny is almost fixed from his broken collar bone and is able to drive his enormous 4 x 4 if he takes it carefully. He texts me out of the blue to say he is coming to see if our lambs are ready. I round them up using food bait and he gets a chance to grab some thighs and press down on some spines checking for the chunky muscle blocks of Beltex sired lambs and the right amount of fat along the spine, covering the tops of the ribs. He pronounces himself happy; They are 'Finished' he declares and can go to slaughter. He will be OK doing the haulage, he assures us. Book them in.

Hollyhocks still in flower on 27th November

Our job now is to contact the small slaughterhouse -stroke-butcher who we use, Ignatius G in Castlerea. This proves easier said than done, as he is either engaged on the phone all afternoon, or he is so busy he has taken the thing off the hook. We are in town tomorrow, though, so we can drop in and make arrangements face to face. Kenny quickly threw another couple of complications my way, but that's Kenny. "See if you can get carcass weights," he asked "by breed and sex" This is just for his own interest, but it should be easy enough. We have, in the group of 5, 2 rams and 3 ewes. All are sired by his Beltex ram, but there are 3 breeds of 'Mum', one out of a Texel, 2 out of Suffolk Down ewes and 2 out of Galway ewes. I had to note down breed and sex against their ear tag numbers, so when I fed them tonight and their noses were safely in the trough, I was sneaking around tickling ears till I could see the ear tag codes and then looking under the tail of each for dangly bits. They all carried on eating but they were a bit fidgetty at all this weird invasion of their supper time! Kenny's other 'complication' was that he has a hospital appointment in Galway at 13:00 on the Monday, so we need to be in, sheep delivered nice and early.

And finally, Andy and the Kart race? Apparently they were doing OK and enjoying themselves but in the big final race "some Mexican guy" punted Andy up the back end on a corner and knocked him off the track. Andy's OK, but the kart was wrecked, so no trophies this year.

Air-borne Corrugated Iron and more

My brother, Mark, took his family to Galway and Connemara in the summer of 2011 and, among the rest of his always beautiful and scenic holiday snaps was a picture of a porta-cabin type caravan on a rocky hilltop near the coast. The cabin had attracted his attention because it was lashed to the ground by two massive guy ropes, one long-ways and one side to side. The ropes looked as thick at ship hawsers and they were fixed to the ground by massive ground anchors of the sort used by the telecoms people to anchor the guys on telegraph poles. How we laughed (as they say) and commented on whether they might be expecting a bit of wind. If I can borrow the pic from Mark, I will post it here.

We are a bit inland from Galway here so we don't see the full brunt of Atlantic gales but we do get some fierce winds and we try to make sure everything is well fixed down. Yesterday as the snow melted and the temperature rose, the wind swung round through westerly to the NNW and suddenly increased in strength. Coming from that direction is the only time it hits the house and outbuildings WITHOUT being first filtered through our stands of huge black spruce, blasting in from Sligo and Clew Bay. We knew it was getting up when it started to move my 2CV Trailer, pushing it along our cattle race till I put it back and chocked the wheels.

We were indoors, fed and watered and watching a bit of TV when we heard a thump and the dogs all went ballistic. The stack of old cut-up floor boards I use for kindling, stacked against one of the cattle race walls, had been kept dry by 2 curved sheets of corrugated iron about 7 feet long (part of the roof of our former Dutch barn), held down by a 6 inch concrete block which I struggle to lift. The whole structure is now inside the big rabbit run and has been adopted by the rabbits who burrow around under and through it and actually like to climb up the slope of the sheeting to give them a high viewpoint.

A gust of wind must have managed to get under this sheeting and hoyed it up and over the wall with the concrete block still on it. The thump was the block landing in the cattle race. One sheet landed in the race and stayed there to leeward of the wall but the other went completely air-borne, passing through the kitchen garden and out onto the front lawn (about 50 metres we estimate) where it landed convex side up and dug in, making an impressive slash in the grass. Luckily no-one got in the way - that could have given someone a nasty cut or other injury. The rabbit hutch roof was also flipped up by the wind, so the poor bunnies were homeless.

Well, we were out there in coats and hats with torches for a good half hour rounding up the sheets and creating a temporary shelter, handling the sheeting very carefully and wedging everything down more securely to give the rabbits somewhere to take cover from the wind. All the loose stuff we stowed to leeward of the house where we could sort it out in the morning.

The only other wind related damage we can see is that a branch on one of our big trees had now sagged and is twanging off the telephone/broadband cable. Now if there's a service to this house that we would hate to lose (we'd almost trade electric lighting, water and a few trees blocking the drive rather than lose broadband!) it is that. It is too high for us to reach it and Telecom Éireann will not touch it if is our tree on our property, so we had to get on the phone to our old chum Aerial Keith (he of 3rd Jan last year, who took down our old saggy TV aerial and cleared the gutters) who will come out and do tree surgery for us.

Finally, I was delighted to get my 2CV club magazine this month as it contains my own article about the adventures of moving the 2CV from Kent to here, exporting it and re-registering it as Irish. Liz is now calling me "the acclaimed author and journalist, Matt C". Fame at last!

Our Turn for a Modest Dusting

We had listened slightly enviously to the reports from UK and from the east coast of Ireland last week as the snow came down and the population slithered about, schools were closed and kids had a chance to go tabogganing. This bit of Ireland does not tend to get much snow. We miss out when the forecast says "on NW coastal areas" as we are not very coastal. Galway is the coastal county; we are next inland. We miss out too when you hear "falling as snow or sleet on high ground". Although we are up a ridge at 75m, 'high ground' in these parts means the towering Cliffs of Moher, the mountains of Connemara and the 700m Maumturks. By the time the air has flowed across those and been pushed uphill, there's no snow left for us 'down' here.

We are, though, very careful what we wish for - 2 years ago the locals tell us, there was a memorable exception to this rule, when Feigh was covered with 15 inches and they were effectively snowed in for 2 weeks, only able to get about because most people have tractors. We naturally keep in good supplies of dry goods like rice and pasta, tins and jars and bags of coal.

Liz first spotted our snow yesterday evening when giving the dogs a 'last out' but neither of us really thought it would 'stick'. I have had too many dashed hopes as a lad when you'd be sent off to bed watching the snow come down but by morning it would be all gone and you'd wake up to green grass and wet, black roads. Mind you, I cannot recall any of these school closures affecting us in the 60's and 70's like they do now, but Pud Lady may remember this differently. I am sure we just had to plod to school through the snow and if the heating was off, sit there with our coats on clock-watching till each 'play time' or the finish-bell.

So it was the child in me who woke up, saw the whiteness outside and sprang into action, racing out with the dogs for an explore and to take a few pictures at 07:45. The early hour and the dawn-break light explains the dark blue colouring on the first pictures in this post - I wanted to 'get' those, consolidated if you like, before the snow melted away. I also brought Liz her tea at that early hour so that she wouldn't miss it. We needn't have worried - the snow stayed around for most of the morning and gave us a chance to enjoy it.

Other than Deefer (6) Ginny and Padfoot (3?) all our animals are too young to have seen winter before, never mind snow. The chickens were amusingly un-impressed and stayed in their coop till way past 10:00 eventually emerging to tread carefully only those bits where the snow had melted, up against buildings and under the car port. The geese were happier and took to charging about in it. They pad-pad around but then seem to get bursts of enthusiasm. open their wings, lift their heads and CHARGE across the snow and grass for 30-40 yards flapping and honking. They don't particularly go anywhere or end up anywhere. It just seems to be for the sheer joy or 'dashing through the snow' like in the song. They are pure white, of course, certainly compared to the Westies, so they can be fairly invisible.

The dogs are generally on leads these days due to the incidents with the rooster and going AWOL and because even Deefer has not yet been 'trained on' the new geese. We decided it would be nice for them to have a proper, off lead chase about in the snow, so we hooshed the geese out of their orchard field, took the dogs in and unleashed them. They had a whale of a time charging about romping and battling with each other and running in big circles round the trees. They rapidly accumulated big 'klingons' of frozen snow in the fur on their feet and bellies and would then sit down in the snow and try to bite these off.

The geese, we noticed, evicted from their field during the dogs' games, went for an explore on their own, disappearing for a while and then reappearing on the front lawn, a place they had not visited till that point. We want them to get used to the front lawn for their mowing and burglar-alarm abilities, so it was nice to see them there. Their tracks in the snow told us they'd taken the long way round, through the yard and up the 'primrose path' drive. All good exploring for them.

While we're on 'tracks in the snow' it was good to see first thing this morning that there were no fox tracks anywhere so it may be that we do not have that particular problem just now.

The cats also enjoyed them selves and stayed out a long time, never seeming to accumulate the 'klingons'. Perhaps they tread more delicately and stick to the frozen, dry stuff or they might be more insulated and they do not melt the snow which comes into contact with their fur.

That was that, really. We enjoyed what there was for a few hours but by mid morning the rain started and the temperature came up through 4 degrees towards 8 and we were quickly washed back to green grass, dark paths, brown mud and a few slushy patches. Whether that's it for the winter remains to be seen, but I hope you enjoy my pictures from your (I hope) nice warm computer desks or armchairs.

We fed extra rations to the rabbits, whose grass was buried under snow for the morning and the chooks and geese have had extra sprouted grain today. The dogs were brought back in, cleaned of their 'klingons' and toweled dry. We have all been enjoying the warmth of the range and listening to the wind outside, well hunkered down indoors.