Walk-Home Wendy (2)

Lucky hen walked home from the fox's clutches.

My previous post had reports of a "minor miracle" where a grey hen had escaped the clutches of our fox part way (to his) home and amazed me by coming into view, walking (to her) home from 50 yards out in the fields. My report had the hen going from out in that field to "back with the rooster", with no detail. I now need to bring you a Part 2 as it was not quite as simple as that made it all sound.

Wendy back with the rooster and now sporting a pink leg-ring
to ease finding her again. 

I had seen her come as far as the fields 'below' our boundary-bank, but then saw her walk right past the obvious track home. I took Deefer and went out through a convenient hole in the hedge to look for the other 2 dogs but also to see if I could find the hen and help her home. None of the above were anywhere to be seen so I guessed that the hen had out-manouvred me and nipped home. I gave up the search and then found, with the rooster, a suitably bedraggled grey hen. 2 and 2 makes 5. Problem solved. Write up the blog post. Move on.

Bad sign. A slew of Gloria (turkey)
feathers. Another lucky escape.

That night (Thurs 5th) was very, very wet - lashing rain that turned us back into puddle central but the next night was warm and dry and on Saturday it was so warm that I went down to see how many bees I had flying. Lots, of course, but more notable was to find, standing in a daze in the veg patch, a bedraggled grey hen with a damaged, droopy right wing. My 'walk-home' girl, of course who had obviously been delayed in her walk home by 48 hours lost in the bramble patches or under the bank, struggling to navigate. Huge apology to the hen who will not have enjoyed the wet night.

I am happy to report that the (correct) hen is now returned to the flock via a quiet night's observation, the cutting off of the long primary feathers which were drooping down to her foot and getting kicked every time she took a step (must have hurt if her 'hand' was mashed by the fox), and by the addition of a pink leg ring to help us find her among the other grey hens into the future. She has been named "Walk-Home Wendy" at least for now.

Gloria after the fox attack. 

One more fox story, at risk of driving all my readers off by becoming boring on the subject. Trust me; I would be more relieved than the average person to off the fox and stop reporting him/her. This was today at 2 pm-ish and, once more, I am off site and miss all the action. We think now that Foxy pounced on Gloria the turkey hen as she was trying to lay an egg back under that bank which I have photo'd for you before. She presumably screamed and jumped up, setting off the Guinea fowl, and then Elizabeth, and then the dogs. The fox scarpered at that point leaving Gloria but with a mouth full of feathers. We found the feathers but by then Gloria was round in the yard (along with everybody else). It seems we have had another FAILED fox strike. It's all very nerve wracking but better this than successful hunts. Our big concern now is that once the neighbouring farmers' cattle are back out on the grass we will no longer have the option to let slip the dogs of war.

Blue Hyacinths.

It's not all foxes, though, so what else is new? THE PLAY had its final 2 nights on that Friday and Saturday and went off superbly. The Friday audience were especially appreciative and noisy, laughing readily out loud, cheering enthusiastically and 'ooh'-ing and 'ah'-ing when they spotted a cast member they knew or sussed a plot twist. Performers love this and all of them seemed to rise to new levels of sparkle and effervescence. It was lovely to watch. Praise is widespread and the Players have had some lovely feed back face to face and via Social Media.

Sarah and the pigs.

Our visitor from last weekend, Sarah M, had been off down south to her friends wedding and made it back, via Galway, to be here in time to come to the Last Night. She also got to meet the stock again. She loves our pigs and the sheep, especially bottle feeding the lamb. She left us for the 2nd time, heading back to Knock Airport after a goose egg breakfast to give back the hire car and fly home.

Not an easy picture to get - pigs sleeping contented in the sun.
Usually they spot you, jump up and scamper over.

This feels like the welcome end to a very enjoyable but very exhausting month or two of fierce activity with the play, especially, building to an ever-busier climax as the rehearsals accelerated to almost daily.

We are left delighted to be able to relax and take some days off to catch up with house stuff, but both of us could not resist wandering down to the Hall to see the stage and set all dismantled and being carried away in bits to a waiting van. It all gets stored in a container on the farm of one of the Players. Elizabeth had to get in there quick to retrieve all 'our stuff' (several play 'props' were ours) before they were buried for the summer in the storage.

Larch "roses"

I think that's about it, so I'll just post a few pictures which I have not had a chance to "use up".

Pulmonaria now in good flower

A man out standing in his field.

Fox Watch

Just for a laugh, our biggest snow-drift of the recent cold snap.
It formed in a eddy in our yard and must have been... oooh...
6 cm deep at least! The turkey-hen stepped in for scale. 

Yes, Fox-Watch. This is the new buzz-word name given to our newest and most time-thirsty 'hobby'. It is, exactly as described, time spent watching out for our persistent and so-far uncatchable furry friend. Brer Fox. I might sound upbeat and light hearted about this but inside, both of us are starting to get very annoyed and increasingly ground down and frustrated.

Our cat, 'Soldier' looking very 'Miss
Haversham' in his cobweb fascinator.
Presumably sticking his head into some
dusty rat-hole. 

Previous foxes have come and done their terrible stuff, but then turned stupidly predictable in their raiding or their routes to and from. We have been able to trap and shoot them within days so that we can then relax and forget about foxes for periods of 15 months+. This guy (or gal) nips in at random times in the afternoon (or 11 a.m. once) to just snatch a single bird from the orchard or the bit of land behind the goose-house. These are the places you cannot see from the house and cannot hear very well.

We have an excellent alarm system involving the 4 Guinea Fowl who scream blue murder at the sight of him, which works when they are out in that bit too and we now know to drop everything and race out there at the first shout. We also have the 3 dogs who are now expert at zooming out there, down through the veg garden and out through the hawthorn hedge in hot pursuit. They know by now to ignore all the 'not-prey' species (poultry, lambing sheds etc) and they know what Brer Fox looks and smells like. We let them go when we dare and they vanish for 20 minutes or so. We don't know whether they even get close to the fox, but the fright seems to make him rethink his tactics for at least a few days.

The 'beastly' winds turned the knitter's thoughts to hat and gloves

The trap is now permanently baited with tinned sardines or kippers but has so far caught only a 'foreign' cat, a manky looking grey and white yoke who was very fed up at being caged all night, lucky he didn't get rained on but presumably happy to have a belly full of my tinned fish. My heart missed a beat when I looked across and saw that the trap had been sprung. When I let the cat out he shot off like the proverbial scalded one and I have not seen him since. I was worried that he'd get trap-happy and come back for more fish, safe in the knowledge that he'd come to no harm, which would have made setting the trap for our fox a bit of an issue. I do not even know that the fox has smelled the fish or found the trap, never mind cunningly decided not to go in it. Patience is, as ever, the thing.

Apologies for this terrible (heavily cropped) shot of our
male reed bunting. 

We are left, then, with the need to stand 'Fox Watch' in person out there for all the at risk hours and indoors for all the less risky hours that the birds are out free ranging - about 8 a.m. till 5 p.m. currently. I do the outdoor stint from about 3 pm to lock-up. I am well bundled up and brought cups of coffee periodically by Elizabeth. I take my binoculars out there too, partly to help me scan the far horizons for russetty red, bushy-tailed varmints, but also so I can indulge in a bit of bird watching. When 'The Beast' is not blowing through this is actually quite a pleasant way to spend the 2nd half of the afternoon. I sometimes relieve the boredom by taking the dogs out with me, the better to keep a visible fox-deterring presence out there and scent-marking the boundaries. I just hope I can soon report the capture and despatch of this red bastard and put an end (for a while) to the need for all this nerve-twanging, tense, vigilance.

What else is new? As suggested above, we finally saw the end of our brutal cold-snap, "The Beast From The East" and in fairness we got away with it very lightly compared to some parts of the island and, of course, the UK and other countries. Over in the East and SE friends were reporting being snowed in by 7 foot drifts and I've seen today, pictures of Chinook (helicopter) supply-drops to cut off farms in Cumbria for solid fuel and food. There have been all the usual footage of hard pressed farmers digging out their sheep, alive if they were luckily but frozen to death if not found in time. Even so, the first thing I noticed when I went outside on Monday (5th) was NO WIND. Bliss. By afternoon the smoke from our chimney was pouring away into the NE, no longer at the beck and call of that horrible NE wind. Today we've had proper wet rain. A few chunks of broken ice float on some of the stock drinkers, but mostly we are 100% thawed.

You'd not fit any more sheep pens in that
 shed. Lady in Waiting, Rosie here is
next door to Polly and her twins. 

The ewe, 'Rosie' continues to keep us waiting and makes me feel like a proper beginner "panicking" and dragging her indoors a week early (OK, it's only 4 days so far). We joke that she is conning us to get some nights in the warm, 'bagging up' a little bit (yeah, yeah, show a man a flash of pink booby and he's putty in your hands!) and then holding out for the arrival of our next house-guests. We have the baby-animal-mad Danielle and Cousin Cathy arriving Friday, so Rosie will be able to do her thing to an audience. Ta daaaa! Look what I did!

Sun 3rd saw me at the end of the 13 week Garden Bird Survey
for Birdwatch Ireland. 

The ewes are in the small concrete/stone building we call the Tígín (wee housey) which is a proper man-shed with man-junk and tools stacked and shelved to roof height and some bits hanging from beams that run across the room from wall to wall. I was joking on Twitter that I couldn't tell whether she was really "star-gazing" or just looking up at the dusty, cobwebby, man-shed mess; the former is a sign of labour and imminent parturition, the latter just a natural female horror-reaction to the man-shed scene. Ah well. She'll make up her mind soon enough. Mother Nature knows best. Patience is the thing. 

Brer Fox Comes Back for a Goose

Not a clean death - she was covered in puncture bite marks
and badly bruised. We think the neck wound was inflicted
when the fox tried to pull the carcass through the sheep wire. 

Our fox left us 10 days after taking the duck, in which to relax, start thinking he was a one-off and maybe drop our guard a little. Then he sneaked back at 4 pm on a Saturday. Luckily for him (or her, of course, foxes are almost impossible to sex on a fleeting glimpse) he chose a time when I was off site and Elizabeth was hoovering, so that she did not hear the Guinea Fowl alarm-call cacophony until it was too late.

A good old fashion (goose) stew with
dumplings. 

I was out at a gentle, afternoon, drinkless, family and friends gathering for the 60th birthday of my archery coach, Con, and heading home at half past 4. At roughly the same time, Elizabeth finished the hoovering, killed the noise and heard the Guinea Fowl clamour. She raced outside and found one GF high up a tree, giving out all manner of dog's abuse, which is never a good sign. Casting around she could find no cause for the racket but we know and trust these birds, so we keep looking for as long as it takes, or they stop the screaming.

Goosey Gumbo? This lovely soup (over rice) made a fitting
end to the fox's abandoned prize. 

Then she saw the sad white shape right at the bottom of the orchard against the fence. It was straight away obvious what had happened - the fox had got into the orchard, killed the goose and then dragged her to the fence. Unluckily for the fox, this was a big, 5-6 kg bird he had chosen, so he could not jump back out of the orchard with his prize.

The day after losing her 'sister', one of the
survivors gives us the first goose egg of
2018. 

He'd put it down by the fence, jumped the fence unladen, then tried to pull the goose through the fence. It was too big a goose to fit through, so he'd presumably spotted Elizabeth bearing down on it and fled the scene. She never actually saw the fox. She'd just about time to carry the body back to the shed and hang it up to bleed out a bit, and shepherd the survivors to safety, when I pulled in to the drive way and heard the sorry tale. We didn't know at that point, whether the victim was one of those females I'd been waiting to start laying eggs, or our belovéd gander, Gorgeous George. It was the former.

Still spoiled rotten and sleeping indoors at this stage, Lily and
the month old lamb, Tigger. 

The plucking took place that evening, when the bird proved to be so full of puncture holes and bite marks, that Liz decided to skin the bird instead, half way through plucking. This goose was going down the 'stew' route. At the gutting stage it turned out that the bird also had half a dozen part-formed eggs up her 'pipework', the largest of which was almost laying-size and could only have been a day away from our long awaited "First Egg of 2018".

Outdoors now - breakfast with Mum and Aunts on
Monday morning.

Long story short, the goose became a superb stew and dumplings, the gribbly bits went in the wheelie bin and a great pile of white feathers went on the compost heap. The latter fact is the most significant because our furry, bushy-tailed friend came back for his lost prize the next day (Sunday) at about half past eleven. This time we were both up and about when the Guineas kicked off, we raced outside, each via a different route and caught the lad in the act of sniffing the pile of feathers on the compost heap, right up by our cattle race. He scarpered, of course, when our 2 heads appeared round either end of his covering wall, galloping off and clearing the 3-4' sheep wire into the pig-pen without breaking stride. He paused briefly to see how serious we were and then shot off down the pig-pen and cleared to bottom fence the same way, vanishing off down the bog field below us.

A 2018 first, the new kitchen windows are
thrown open to let some warm air through
as the sun shines brightly outside. Spring
is here. 

In a surprising parallel to Sue and Rob's garden-fox mentioned in a previous post (10th Feb), to get to the compost, the fox must have come in over the fences again but through the gangs of surviving geese and ducks, ignoring them. My guess is that he came first to the piece of fence where he'd left the goose in such a hurry, and once there, could either see or smell the "dead one" (he wouldn't have know it was only a pile of feathers) 40 yards away on the compost. I assume that had we not disturbed him, he'd have quickly worked out that he needed to kill another bird and done that (or more) on the way out.

Naturally we are back on high alert, Fox-Watch for all the hours that the birds are out of their sheds and free ranging. We have also abandoned all our optimistic foolish ideas that this might be a one-off, fox, a 2017 youngster turfed out of the home earth and roaming around looking for a territory to call his own. He came on the 2nd Jan, took the duck on 8th Feb, and has now come back on the 17th and 18th. He is now a local and regular visitor, though he didn't come back on Monday or today. While he is all unpredictable and careful, there is little we can do about this except keep watch and listen to what those Guinea Fowl tell us. However, if he starts to get regular, predictable and a bit complacent, then we have some options. Wish us luck.

Briefly chaotic Living Room scene, books
everywhere. 

It is never ALL bad news though. The next day, one of the other geese laid her first egg of 2018 so we are back in that 'game' and the waiting is over. The ewe Lily refused to come 'home' that evening to her indoor pen in the Tígín as we've done happily for 4 weeks now and seemed to want to go, instead, into the East Field where her 'sisters' have been all along. I let her in and closed the gate on her happy re-union. It was a warm evening, so I decided that she was all done on the 'Intensive Care', indoor housed thing. Tigger is a big, bouncing, plump, chunky lad at this stage and no more likely to die of his sister's hypothermia that is his fully-fleeced Mum. They have slept out ever since (all be it they actually sleep in the shelter with the other girls) and I have been able to muck out the pen ready for the next mum+lamb. This looks like it might be first-timer Rosie, from the 'bagging up' evidence, or Polly, from the 'I want to be alone' sleeping behaviour.

One of the book walls!

Finally, Elizabeth finally made it to IKEA in Dublin to buy 2 more of their excellent, full height, 80 cm wide, flat packed "Billy" book cases. There are, obviously, a gazillion books here and the cases we have have been double stacked and overflowing for too many months. Liz finally cracked, girded her loins and went to do battle with IKEA. The boxes, although almost 7 feet long, fit neatly into our little Fiat Panda with all the doors shut; you just post them in the back hatch and slide them down into the passenger side foot-well. Brilliant. Well, now they are assembled (by the Flat-pack Queen) and full of books after a massive, day-long sort-out. We are so tidy, we won't know ourselves.

In with the New, (Not) Out with the Old

Roscommon has the eye of Storm Eleanor
pass overhead at around 6 pm.

Fox! My one word text brings Liz running to join me in the garden but we can hardly hear each other over the cacophony of Guinea Fowl alarm calls. We've not seen one on the property all year, since the November 2016 attack but now, two days into the New Year we are back in the firing line.

A new gin for Liz to try. Blackwater.

It was fairly calm (though we were expecting the latest named storm, Storm Eleanor by evening) but lashing down with rain. I was just wandering about looking for eggs, and had come round the corner of the barn, headed for the orchard when all hell broke loose 30 yards away at the top of the 'allotment'. Guinea fowl were exploding into vertical flight and shouting blue murder about foxes.

...and a weird new beer for me. Loved the
goat logo. Very quaffable. 

I saw the fella straight away, with a bunch of feathers in his mouth (but no bird). He was a fine big adult looking first a bit put out that he'd near-missed the Guinea but then a bit concerned that I was running towards him, flapping my arms and roaring swear words at him like some lunatic. He took off smartly through the hedge and was gone. That's when I got a chance to text Liz.

The Guineas having a fox-free dust bath in the tunnel.

The Fox-Success Gods were on our side this time. The pouring rain had most of the birds hiding in the sheds anyway and it was an easy job for 2 of us to shepherd the rest home - geese and ducks. The Guineas now settling down and chuntering and scolding loudly (as they do) could not wait to go 'home' either, so by 15:15, still broad daylight, we had everybody locked up for the night, safe in case Brer Fox should try again.

A baffled turkey?

Well. For a given value of 'safe'. Eleanor is now roaring around noisier, if anything, than the 'Orange warning' one, Dylan. I fear, as ever, for the tarpaulin roof of the chicken house. (We have just been out for a check round at half past six and so far all seems OK. It's just very very noisy. We mainly feel helpless and powerless.)

Meanwhile, away from Storm Eleanor and her kind, all is chugging along nicely as we chug gently through New Year and welcome 2018 in. The remaining turkey hen seems somewhat baffled but that might just be us anthropomorphising like we shouldn't. We were amused to ponder whether she is thinking that she has nothing in her folk-memory or hard wired into her DNA to tell her what to do with the 25th, 26th, 27th, the New Year and so on.

Baffled Turkey Hen

She is also a bit lost-looking now the Guinea cock-birds have  dropped her like a hot potato when they received their new 'women'. Up to then the boys viewed it as their duty to shepherd all three turkeys around and mind them. Now she wanders about wondering where her 'brothers' and her 'minders' have gone.

New Year's Eve supper.

New Year's Eve went very well for us, and nice and quiet. We ate the celebratory haggis supper and sipped Scotch Whisky (no 'E' because this was Famous Grouse, a gift from Santa). We watched a nice Irish-flavoured 'rom-com' movie ("PS I Love You", based on the Celia Ahern book) to fill the long evening and then did the 'First Footing' thing. We have both decided to try our hand at 'Dry January' - no booze till the 31st EXCEPT that we are taking the Scottish Amendment which allows for a dram of whisky on Burns Night (25th). We are not alone, by all accounts. Cousin 'Win'  and  her Peter are doing the same and bro' Mark is taking a gin-drinkers version in Swindon. There is a pre-booked gin tasting on 15th Jan which it would (obviously) be churlish to refuse, though he's not too bothered about Burns Night and Haggis. I'll keep you all posted on how we all do.

One off design handbag by Con and Santa

I can now, at last, post pics of this Santa delivery which I have been dying to show you but unable to do so lest I spoil the surprise. Friends of the Blog may recall that my good friend and archery coach, Con, is also a fine leather worker. He is the national go-to expert on Medieval footwear, frequently called upon to create repro shoes for museums and 'interactive' exhibitions (i.e. where the museum visitors get to try on the items) and asked to try to make a shoe using the archaeologists/historians' suggested techniques. "Nope, they WOULDN'T have been able to do it that way!"

Con also makes items for sale through the website - archery gear as well as shoes, 'jewelry', bangles and (ta-daaaa!) one-off design hand bags. With Santa's help we conspired to get Liz involved in the design without being allowed to know what the final result might be. She'd 'chosen' a cocktail glass for her 'logo' and Con was able to sneak off and contrive a cocktail-glass-based design for our bag. Liz is over the moon and the new bag is now the bag of choice, filled with all the usual 'clutter' of notebooks, spare tissues, lotions and potions and 'stuff' that keeps herself on the road.

My old favourite billhook may be 100+ years old.

Finally, that line in my title about "Not out with the old". I have in my 'man-shed' a treasured favourite farm implement, my bill hook, bought over 30 years ago 2nd hand in Surrey. It has a forged blade marked with the forger's stamp. "I.H.   J Harrison   Warranted" I was chatting away about favourite tools on the Internet and got talking to a lad who is a bit of an expert on old English toolery.

The stamp on mine told him that it was made by the company 'I Harrison', long since absorbed into Spear and Jackson, and forged by the son of the firm, John Harrison. The chap has all the pattern books from these firms and was able to identify my billhook as being originally from 1916, over a hundred years old! I loved it in an obsessive way before. It was my most precious piece of kit. There will be no stopping me now!

Silvergirl. 

And there you have it. In the time it has taken me to type these last 8 paragraphs the roaring wind of Eleanor has quite died away... unless she is just teasing us as we sit right under that eye. More on all this soon. Happy New Year to all our readers and don't throw away those old tools. They might be historically important!

Possibly taking the love of Prosecco a bit far? Now you can
emerge from the bathroom smelling of it!

Just a couple more pics because I have them.

Final loaf of 2017.

Two New Girls for our Lads

A dusting on the ground and light snow still falling this morning.

A minor dusting of snow was our lot in the shirt-tails of Storm Caroline; very merciful compared to the dumps of snow experienced by 'The North'  and then down through Wales and the UK midlands. We are definitely not complaining. Neither are we complacent, as some Met Éireann Yellow Warning snow is forecast for Saturday into Sunday.

Snow on the new kitchen roof, as seen from
the back bedroom window.

I am here on my Jack at the moment as Liz is off 'minding' Mum (Liz Senior) down in Silverwood-land (County Laois). Mum has just had a hip replacement operation up in Swords (Dublin), so Liz (jnr) was off down to Laois on the train last night, where she will take temporary ownership of Mum's car, driving it off up to Swords to gather up Mum in the snow and bring her home. Liz will then stay there round to next Tuesday on this "tour of duty", when The Village Play (and other stuff) will call her home, at least for a couple days.

Not nice in the local village. 

I had my own little "necessary journey" in the snow this morning as I was off to Sue and Rob's to collect a couple of new Guinea Hens as possible mates to our lonely cock-birds, Apollo and Belvedere.

Might not want to park that one there mate - the Guards will
be at you..... Hope the driver was not badly hurt.

I also got a quick peek at the not-yet-hatched duck eggs in the incubator over there where, using Sue's candling lamp, I could see little feet kicking about. In my head, these eggs were due on Wednesday (Day 28) but Sue tells me ducks can easily go 28-35 days, so she was not expecting any hatches till after this weekend. Patience is the thing.

Easiest way to move Guinea Fowl is the kitten-box. 

The Guinea ladies were landed safely into one of our rabbit runs with the 'bedroom' compartment at one end. I gave them food and water and left them to settle in, as I always do. That way, they are able to see our sights and sounds but are safe from being beaten up by other poultry seeing them as intruders.

These are quite young birds - probably not yet sexually mature.
Their 'horns' (top of head) are not fully developed and the little
"chilli-pepper" wattles are pale pink, not yet bright red. 

I suspected that Apollo and Belvedere would find them fairly quickly. I wasn't wrong. I barely had time to take the 'landed' photo and the boys rocked up and were all over them from that moment on. They were walking all over the top of the pen looking down at the girls or running round the outside trying to make beak-contact through the wire, as the girls, in their turn, raced around the inside of the pen trying to get out and at the boys. The poor turkeys, up to now the Guinea cocks' bestest, inseparable chums, were just abandoned like last week's fashion. Fickle things, Guineas, obviously.

I was tempted to fore-go the usual 24 hours "probationary" period and let the 4 at each other but there are two things I know about introducing new birds to the flock, and Guineas in particular. First, if the new birds do come under attack it can be vicious, fast and deadly. Second, once a Guinea Fowl is out, you will probably never catch it again - they are fast and nimble as well as flighty and nervous. They explode into flight like a pheasant. Yes, if they go off to roost in your barn like good birds, and you have a ladder, you can probably nab them at night but these ladies had only just arrived and had never seen the barn, never mind the inside of it. They'd as likely find a tall tree for the night. Patience, again, is the thing. (It quite often is.)

The boys are all over the new arrivals. 

I let them be but put an inverted wheel barrow over the cage to keep the light snow and wet off. Come evening and everyone takes them-self off to roost in the barn, the new girls got left at the barn end of the temporary pen, calling hopefully after their new friends. It was quite a job to persuade them that the pen had its own warm, dry, bedroom and if they would only go in there they'd have a comfy night round till I could let them all out free-ranging on Saturday. They could be dry, preened and spruced up ready for their blokes. I hope they stayed in there for the night, otherwise they'll be stiff as boards from hypothermia by morning.

Blue looks comfortable.

With the return of winter, my long break away from the buildering came to an end. K-Dub has been too busy up in the City to be doing very much to his own place, and my last task was to help pouring that huge shed base in July, 30' by 40' and taking 3 big 8-wheeler mixer lorries. ( http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2017/07/three-8-wheelers-of-concrete-for-k-dub.html )

Deefer.

Well, last weekend he was going to build the block-walls for the shed in company with a gang of 4 of us. 3 were professional block-layers, 2 from the 'Smoke' one a near-neighbour of his. K-Dub's and my job were to support these guys with a constant flow of barrows of cement 'thrown' up onto their mortar boards with a shovel, and of the heavy concrete "cavity" blocks. Ideally, your block layer needs to be standing at his task and able to lay a block, then turn round and scoop more cement from the board behind him, or grab a block the right way up, stacked at waist height(+) also just behind him. Him, obviously whizzing along the length of the wall doing his course of blocks, so needing to pass a stack or a mortar board about every 6 feet along the base or planks-on-trestles.

Ah well. Only bought it to 'feed' the cake. It was never going to
see Christmas. Sláinte.

It is busy, heavy, unremitting work seasoned by happy banter among the blokes but, d'you know what, I love it! We got on well and in 4 hours, got loads done. I had to come away at that point, but we'd the wall up right round the building to around 6' in places and 8' at corners. The 4 other lads carried on into the p.m. (they all a good 25 years younger than me and they've been doing it all their lives!) but I've not been back to see how much got completed.

The Irish Government decided to not proceed with getting the
population to pay water-rates after all, and gave us back all
the money we had paid since the troubled start last year. 

My other 'builder-ish' job was at a friend's (no names, no pack drill) over beyond Castlerea where a 'new' generator was arriving to replace the old dead one. The 'new' one is an ex Military (British Army, I think) which needed a serious trailer to get it back from the seller's and a big 4WD Tractor with a front-loader to lift it and wiggle it into position. The tractor was being 'lent' by a young farmer's son, who was also going to be driving it - we had to wait for him to get out of school and then have his tea (God forbid an Irish Mammy would allow the lad to go out in the dark and rain without a belly full of grub!). He rocked up at about 5 pm, by which time it was dark and lashing down with rain. The dead generator also meant the house/yard was without power, so we were splodging around with torches, but at least the lights on modern tractors are like football ground floodlights. My job was to clear a pile of rocks and rubble to allow the tractor to swing about, then help the 'genny' to land, connect it up and test-fire it. This to give the batteries a quick blip which would allow the friend to re-start the tripped out wind turbine and (ha ha) solar array. It's all very well being 'off grid' and all green and low impact as long as your genny doesn't fry its crank on a near-windless fortnight such as we have just had, prior to Storm Caroline.

By the end of this post, then, we have 4 walls round a shed, 2 new Guinea Fowl sleeping in the comfort of their bedroom (I hope), my friends have a house with working electricity and the Ma-in-Law is being well looked after at home by her oldest daughter. By the next post we all might be under a foot of snow, but we'll worry about that when it comes. Hope you are also all warm, safe and dry... and lit.