A Genuinely Short Post (Honest)

A welcome cold snap

OK, I know I have many times recently started a post with comments along the lines of "not much to say, so this is going to only be a few paragraphs" and then gone on at normal length. Well, this time, I genuinely have little to say, so I might be for real here. Added to that, one major 'thread' of narrative is under that embargo to which I have already alluded; the main characters in those episodes do not like to be spoken of 'on here' and there is no arguing with that.

Frosty East Field

Main event for this post was the 'Little Christmas' or 'Ladies' Christmas', (Nollaig na mBan or, if you prefer, simply Epiphany) when the men take over the reins of the household and try to treat their women-folk to a complete day of rest.

When you can only find 4 ducks it is a sure sign that #5 is off
hidden up somewhere laying a surreptitious late egg. When
she returns it is then a race against the magpies to find the egg
before they do. 

It is nothing that heroic, so does not generate me much Blog text but it is fun to do and much appreciated by Lizzie. I have to do all the kitchen and dish-washer duties, provide tea on demand and cook the main meals. Also, on this occasion, carve a good snack's worth of thin slices off the 'Parma'-style whole leg of ham mid afternoon and pass in the gorgeous chocolates we were gifted by our French visitors at Christmas (Thank you, Marion, Clara and Augustin). It all went very well.

Frosty early morning view from the new kitchen windows

I have also tried to progress from knowing that we have "around 30 chickens" to doing some kind of census to get an exact list. This is mainly so that we can report egg production, health and progress more accurately and to identify whether we have any 'passengers' who are contributing nothing and need weeding out. Tough old, cut-throat world?

We both wish the cats would not catch these cuties and we are
always amazed how tiny they are in the hand. A goldcrest, of
course. 

Obviously, with the birds free-ranging this is not that easy - you walk one way round the site with your notepad and pencil and try to record who is where but by the time you have nearly finished, are you double counting hens who have gone widdershins round the house and come to meet you again? I scratched down a list of 28 hens by name if they have names, and by a rough description if not. I now have a list that says such arcane things as "Stumpy", "Big Red", "Grey / Dark cape" and "Flat black / big crest" and is peppered with codes like 'A-head' and 'A cheeks'.

Poor little mite. At least we have a strong population of goldcrests
here, so this one will not really be missed.

The 'A' thing stands for Araucana, which is a weird 'fancy fowl' beloved of show folk which has tufts of feathers sticking out of the top of its head and sideways from its cheeks. The latter give it a strange hamster-like look from the front. Pure bred A's lay blue eggs which are quite nice, but we only have crosses between A's and other types, so we only get white eggs and we get hens which are mainly hen-shaped but have some bizarre A-tufts on their heads.

I now need to take my list into the coop at lock-up and double check. I better not bore you with a complete list of all the birds as a fancy tabular addendum. You might think I was trying to flesh out a slow news day. As if.

The half moon goes down into that big patch
of new morning sky where Storm Eleanor
decapitated our larch. 

Finally, we are now at Day 9 of the two major New Year's resolutions. First that #DryJanuary - we are both sticking to this as per the agreed rules; one 'day off' allowed. Mine is going to be Burns Night, Liz went for Nollaig na mBan and brother Mark has a gin tasting he has booked in on 15th. So far so good.

Knitting project gets finishing touches.

Second, Liz was determined to get out all the unfinished major knitting projects and finish them. She loves knitting up the pieces of a garment but hates the stage where you sew all the bits together, so as at NYD, I had a lovely Aran pullover which was all there but for the assembly and Liz had a blue cardigan and a green woolly in similar states. Well, true to her resolution, my Aran is finished, the cardy just needs buttons (and even has a neck-warmer / 'snood' in the same wool, to go with it.) and the green thing is very nearly completed.

Publicity shot for the Men's Shed. The lads were doing a 'bucket'
collection at the check outs in local SuperValu, "Duffy's". 

And that, genuinely, is it. Till next time.

Eleanor and Fionn

The top limb of a larch tree blocking the driveway.

Friends of the Blog will recall the fun and games here last February when Storm Doris came raging through ripping the roof off the main chicken building and felling a decent sized spruce across the driveway. They may also recall more recent entertainment provided by Ex-Hurricane Ophelia and Storm Dylan. Those two were equally well advertised and came with Met Éireann 'Orange Alert' warnings for high winds, though we mercifully escaped any significant damage from either.

The topless larch. Lots of new sky!

In the last post I described the latest storm (Eleanor) who came with no such warnings (only 'yellow' status) but which, at the time of writing sounded noisier and more scary than any of the previous crew, certainly for the hour or so around 18:30 pm, when I was typing that post. A real screamer - Hurricane style noises howling through the tree tops. We learned a new meteorological term that night - a "Sting Jet". This is a narrow area of intense wind formed as an eddy inside the storm spiral-system. They never had these when I was at school learning Geography / Meteorology so they may be just a more exciting, 'tabloid-y' expression for what has always been there, or they may have been 'invented' as storm-science moves on and learns more detail. What ever the case, we were impressed and we could certainly believe it.

It was with trepidation then, that I went my rounds of the place looking for damage. Relief too, obviously, that we humans were unscathed and even more so to find that all the buildings and livestock were unhurt. That poor, long-suffering 'Doris' tarpaulin over the main chicken house was still hanging in there. The only damage was that the drive was blocked (again!), this time by a big branch broken off the top of one of our lovely, gnarly larches down by the main gate, a small, weedy spruce had been thinned out of the row at the top of the East Field and a hedge-row hawthorn had been felled across the veg patch.

Horizontal hawthorn

The rest was just the usual wheelie-bins gone walk-about, twigs all over the grass and other light stuff (flower pots etc) in some unlikely places. Nothing we couldn't handle with my little chain-saw and some strong-arm branch-dragging.

Silver lining for the sheep. They get to browse the ivy leaves
off the broken branches we toss in to their field. 

The spruce had fallen across the sheep fence, so needed some nifty cutting up and moving lest the sheep walk out over the now 6" tall barrier. That proved to be one of those you get warned about in the chain-saw training manuals, where the (incomplete) break is still under a lot of 'bend' tension and cannot wait for you to uncouple the weight of the tree's 'top' before it springs back upright taking the saw and arm/chin of any idiot, unwary chain-saw man with it. In my case it pinged up so fast it passed through vertical and whip-lashed itself backwards, completing the original break. I'm still here, obviously, so you'll know I was ready and saw that coming.

Not that many logs once they are all tidied up.

It continued more reasonably windy for that whole day and into the next (Thursday 4th) by which time we were getting a bit fed up with 'windy' as an idea. It turned out that a smaller storm (Fionn) was being pulled along behind 'Mum' but that lad mercifully followed a more southerly track and only really affected the island's SE corner, Wexford mainly.

That spruce that came down across the sheep
fence at the top of out East Field.

So what else is going on for us at the moment, in between the blasts of gale-force wind? Mercifully, no more appearances by our fox - and we have been doing a lot of waiting, watching and listening, believe me. We have sprinted out to check at every alarm call from the Guinea Fowl and every burst of goose-based cacophony.

A neighbour's hay barn was 50% shorter after Eleanor and his
cattle-race a bit fuller of scrap iron.

Naturally, in the absence of real fox scares, I had to give myself a self-inflicted DIY scare-myself-silly. On Thursday, I had a 'thing' in nearby town Balla-D at 5.30 pm, so I was racing about a bit trying to get some bread made and all the birds locked up by 5. That would usually be calm and no problem but one of the young Guineas managed to get 'trapped' in the East Field; happy to fly over the gate one way and then can't work out how to get back. I had shepherded the ducks home and then had to back-track to rescue the Guinea, but then very happily sorted her and closed the door behind her as she sprinted indoors to join her 3 colleagues.

Storm Fionn slides by to the south of the island.

Off I went to my meeting, came back at 8 pm to a late supper and a relaxed evening, then went out to do last minute checks at 10 pm. Ooops. The ducks were 'still' out and now very upset at being in the cold and dark and unable to get home; locked out! They had been vulnerable to fox-attack for 5 hours. They must have strolled back out for a final nibble of grass while I was rounding up that Guinea Fowl and I had missed them in my relief at re-capturing her. Lesson learned and a stricter roll-call introduced for lock-up. How can you miss 5 noisy ducks?

Blue perches on the full but still open crates
of Christmas. What could possibly go wrong?

We also dismantled Christmas and stashed the stuff away back into crates in the Tígín. Tomorrow (6th Jan) is the date for that much-loved Irish tradition, Nollaig na mBan (say it nollag na morn) , Ladies' Christmas or 'Little Christmas'. This is those hard-pressed ladies' 'Day of Rest' where we blokes take the helm of the 'farm kitchen' and they get to relax and be spoiled after 2 weeks of solid hard work giving everyone else a superb Christmas. Liz likes to dismantle Christmas and pack it away on the 5th including wrestling with the drying out Tree or, she says, she would just end up hoovering up needles on Nollaig na mBan. Nobody wants that. More on how that went in the next post.

Stay safe, people.

My Ol' Man Said Foller The Van

'Mad Max' vehicle lurking under a sheet. It does good 'lurking'!

I hinted in the last post that we might be in for a busy time of it this New Year as our friends Carolyn (of the mini horses) and K-Dub had been bounced by a rather rapid house sale and the need to clear out of house, yard, out-buildings and garden by the 5th of January. This coming hot on the heels of a family Christmas and then the need to attend a family wedding up in Dublin just prior to New Year.

Billy is a shaggy, out-doorsy kind of lad, pretty close to the
feral Irish 'wild goat'.

Anyone who has tried to move house after living in a place for ten years will be familiar with the sheer amount of 'stuff' that you can accumulate, especially when you have a small-holding with associated animal-management gear (kennels, hutches, horse-tack, buckets, dustbins of feed etc) and a daughter growing up through the teenage years and then shipping off to college. Add to that, that K-Dub is a professional Master-Carpenter, so his 'stuff' comes in the form of fully tooled workshop with massive table-saw, substantial router-deck, BIG pipe-benders and various drills, nail guns and saws which come in suitcase-sized cases.

Nanny Óg - pronounce the 'O' long as in 'bogus'. It is Irish
for 'young Nanny'.

He is also a bike-nut who goes in for heroic bizarre projects like home-built "trikes". Don't get the wrong idea that a "motor-trike" is not much bigger than a motorbike. This project is based around a Ford Transit Van engine, gearbox, diff and rear axle and will have a front wheel the size of a tractor rear one. Unfortunately this was still a work in progress at removal time, and there was no driving out and whizzing round to the new place. Three of us sweated blood manhandling it onto a trailer and bringing it round to my place where it has been given dry-ish car-port storage.

The daffs down by our gate think it is Spring.

We had a punishing, bone-aching time for 4 days packing the stuff and transporting it, some here, much more to an unoccupied house near the new place, generously offered by a soon-to-be-neighbour and a smaller amount to the caravan they have bought as a temporary home while the real house is made ready. Liz, Carolyn and a couple of other friends packed, stripped rooms and cleaned behind themselves while K-Dub and I plus various helpers down from Dublin loaded and hauled what seemed like dozens of loads in a big hi-cube builder's van and a long car-trailer out to the various destinations, often starting at 8 a.m. and finishing well after we had lost the light. It always seemed faster to unload than load; none of us could work out why.

Last of the Seasonal left-overs. The last slice of pud with
ice cream and cream for my lunch today. 

We may have missed the midday deadline on the 5th (it was more like 6pm) but the buyer was cool with that as they were not ready to move in anyway. As to the livestock, they had unshipped most of that, selling off all but one of #1 Daughter's 40+ rabbits, the one going to a local friend for safe-keeping. We inherited the 2 goats, also temporarily much to the amusement of all my friends who have been hearing me shout 'No Goats' ever since we have been here. These are a shaggy, mountainy-looking miniature male and a sweet, possibly pregnant, short haired lady who are called Billy and Nanny Óg. The Óg is pronounced with a long 'o' (as in bogus) and is the Irish word for young but Terry Pratchett fans may have also noticed a pun on the name of one of his 'Wyrd Sisters'.

June born lamb Dylan (left) with Mum

Although we had applied for Goat Herd number registration way back, this number had lapsed with our non-keeping of the species. I had to contact the Ministry boys today to get goats "active" on my list, so that we can officially transfer these two animals into this holding. Nanny is in with the ewes during the day but gets walked home to her warm, dry shed at night. These short-haired 'domestic' goats are derived from Mediterranean animals and they do not thrive in cold and wet. Billy is much more of a shaggy, mountainy, 'Irish' strain, like a French 'Mouflon' (with horns to match) so he is in the pig enclosure for now and sleeping happily in the pig ark.

The Sligo house rebuild looking good now.

And in case you had forgotten, today is 12th Night and Epiphany but much more important to Irish ladies, it is 'Nollaig na Mban' or 'Ladies Christmas'. a day for the ladies to relax and be pampered by their men-folks as a big Thank You for all the hard work those ladies do over the Festive Season. Where are those frozen pizzas I bought cheap from 'salmonella corner' at Lidl's?