The Thousand Natural Shocks that Flesh is Heir to

80,000 kms of good rumpy-bumpy potholed Irish roads did for
the poor Panda's suspension. New shocks at the back and a wishbone
at the sharp end. €290 - ker-ching. Ah well. 

OK. The normal PC I use for this is at the 'doctors' (slow and old like it's owner; hopefully more fix-able!). This  is being typed on Liz's posher, newer and faster lap top which I am able to blag while she is out at knitting. The machine is, though, unfamiliar to me so if this blog posts has any howlers in it - typo's, missing pictures etc, then bear with me and I will try to fix them when I get the old familiar dog of a machine back, improved.

Shiny new wishbone drivers side front.

Also, little happening just now so I will keep this one fairly short. Main job today was to take the car round to the local tyre place and get new shocks fitted at the back and a wishbone at the front. Fiats are highly regarded here for the cheapness and ease of fitting of parts but even they will eventually wear suspension parts rumbling up and down our pot-holey, rippled roads.

Rain has stopped play in silage locally, but we heard a mower
going round a local field - we might be back on.

I'd noticed uneven tyre wear at the front and a "play in the suspension" rumble at low speed, so got it checked out up on the ramp at the tyre centre. Mr Fixer there declared play in a front wishbone and the upper bushes of both rear shocks very tired. Also recommended a tracking adjustment (after the new bits, obviously!).

Twitter stats for that @IrelandsFarmers account I steered
last week. You can see where I took over at the right hand
end of the graph. I did 3 times the traffic of the 3 weeks prior
combined. The boss was delighted!

I was quite impressed by the tracking machine - 4 laser/mirror contraptions get clamped one to each wheel rim and then the computer screen lights up with little graphics, diagrams and results for each wheel vertical-ness and horizontal toe-in. Modern cars apparently have adjustment on the back suspension as well as the front. Very cool. Ah well, I am €290 poorer but the car is safe and should see us through the next NCT, at least on that aspect.

I managed to get some statistics back for my week on the @IrelandsFarmers Twitter account. I knew I'd been busy and I was fairly sure the owners/bosses of the account would be delighted. I was and they were. Turns out you measure Twitter 'traffic' on 3 main criteria as well as how many posts you create, pictures you put up etc. These are "impressions" (where someone else clicks on your post to expand it or do other things with it (copy, follow links etc) - they create an impression of your post on their own screen. Secondly how many people 'like' it and 3rd, how many copy it on to all their followers (called "re-tweeting").

In the 28 days ending with my week, the account got a million impressions and over 500,000 of these were from my posts - they told me I got more in my week that in the 3 weeks prior. Not bad All the other graphs also show big peaks on the right hand end, my days - re-tweets, likes and replies. Some of the latter may be my own - Twitter only allows 140 characters. If you need more space you reply to your first tweet with the 2nd part of the anecdote and on and on. Some of mine went to 4 'replies' which were not really replies at all. I am quite proud of all this even though it probably confirms to all my own followers that I talk too much!

Baby George being minded by his 4 responsible adults.

The only other news is that the adult geese have finally brought the one baby gosling off the nest and started to show him off and show him around.

I'm saying "him" here; we have no idea really but for now he is Baby-George. I may have posted before that there were two. There are not and I don't think there ever were. I just miss-saw a 2nd between all the 6 legs in the nest.

When they go out for a sensible amount of time and I can shut the door on them safely I will get a chance to finally get in there and clean up, and throw out the failed eggs. Right. That's it for this lap-top post. I hope it all works.

Break Through

I am currently struggling with my camera/PC link (mainly due to having nearly 16 Gig of pics on the camera card, which takes the PC more than 10 minutes to riffle through looking for new ones it has not seen before! It gets fed up looking and times out declaring, like a teenager sent to find their school uniform in a typical bedroom, "Nope.... It's not there"). This post may get published sans pictures and I will edit some in at a later date. If you are reading it now like that, then do come back in a day or two and check them out.

Kitchen looking from 'old' to 'new'

We reached a major landmark in the kitchen extension project on Sunday, finally breaking through the inner wall to reveal the true size of the new room. You may recall that the wall here was the traditional Roscommon blend of boulders and concrete (at least down here on the ground floor - upstairs this changes to modern cavity blocks telling us that this rear extension was built in 2 stages) 11 inches thick inside of which we, when we rebuilt, we added standard studwork framed with '3 by 2' timber, infilled with 3" insulating foam but then covered with half inch plywood and then the plaster-board. The ply being to let the wall take the weight of any shelving we might decide to put in there and load to the gunwales, as we do. Total wall thickness then, 15 inches. No mean wall.

...and from new to old

You may also recall that we had kango'd our hole from the outside inwards but left all the stud-wall intact (with a sheet of MDF across the window) so as not to fill the kitchen with dust and rubble. Eventually though, we were going to have to make the new end (door/windows unit) draught-tight and lock-able and then cut out our aperture through the stud-wall. That was, as I said, Sunday's game. We also made the concrete step which rises you from the old kitchen. 3" or so up to the new.

Our replacement suite

You can now stand in the kitchen and see the full size of the the new space. It was (and still is) 8 feet wide but was, up to now, only 8'3" long. A bit 'bijou' and hence Liz having to do all her bakery prep, bread-kneading etc in the Dining Room as well as us having to store a lot of kitchen gear, bakery stores and crockery in there too. The extension adds 11'9" to that length giving us a new dimension of 20 feet. I don't think we have ever owned a room with a 20' length in any house.

There is icing on this cake and a cherry on top, too! The icing is that we now have a big area of glass looking out at the garden, the raised flower bed and the big pond, plus at sunsets in Summer. OK, it also looks out at the car-port and the various piles of wood, pallets and straw bales there-in but every silver lining has a cloud. We have never had a window looking out that way up till now (except the old kitchen window which was always a bit 'tunnel vision' buried as it was 11 feet down between house and Tígín). It is also nice when I am walking the dogs or working out there to be able to look in, see the kitchen light on and wave to anyone in the kitchen. After a couple of weeks with the west window aperture boarded up with that MDF it is also amazingly light in the new kitchen now that we have the acres of glass.

I treated my chain saw to a new chain for the 'Doris' tree

The 'cherry' is undoubtedly the cat flap. Cat-folk will know that cats can be very demanding of being allowed in and out and you spend a good part of any day hearing the pleading 'miaow' and getting up from what you are doing to open a door for the animal. If it's raining they tend to get you to try all the doors in succession just in case it might not be raining out of the 'next' one. They will also happily use the house as a corridor, miaowing to come in the front door, then striding through the house and straightway asking to be let out the back. Or asking to be let out and then sprinting round to another door to be let back in.

The tree looks much diminished now
it's all cut up.

We have 4 cats at present so all of the above is four-fold. Each cat has its own way of making its demands known. Blue will scrabble and scratch at the aluminium threshold at the bottom of the front door. Soldier seems to fling himself at the door like some kind of DEA policeman on a drugs bust and hangs by his front claws from the window panel with his chin just high enough to look in accusingly like the "What? No Meat?" character in the war-time cartoon. He has destroyed the paintwork and scratched up the wood quite badly. If we can ever break him of the habit it will take quite some filler, sanding and painting to get the front door back to its glossy red of 5 years ago.

Messing with the bottom slice of tree.

Up to now we have not been able to do a cat-flap - both the front and back door are good strong ones with fancy panels which would not take a shop-bought cat flap. The new kitchen 'end' though has flat panels (all be it 3 cms thick) so we installed one and are now getting the cats used to it. All 4 quickly learned how to use it and that it is always open, even when humans are asleep or not indoors or (Heaven forbid!) saying things like "No - I just let you in the other door...you can bloomin' well wait!"

No more need, soon then, for our in house 'scoring' system which we use to decide whose turn it is NOW to let the cat in/out. We started with a simple "Please, Liz, I have a dog on my lap" - if you had a dog on your lap you were exempted from cat doorman duties, making coffee/tea or what ever. This then got a bit more complicated if we both had a dog, and a whole Poker-score system evolved. A dog on your lap AND a kitten on your shoulder trumped a mere dog. A single cat trumps a single dog. A cat and knitting trumps any combination not containing knitting. I'm on the phone/email/Twitter/Facebook carries some weight but not much. Ultimately, if all else is equal then a simple "I did the last one" settles it.

Our dogs never do "lying in a heap". None can stand being
in contact with another to sleep - so 3 dogs, 3 beds!

Possibly, just possibly, all that will go away and all the cats will exclusively use the cat flap. There will be no more need of humans attending doors, upstairs windows (yep, they quickly worked out that you can shout in through the main bedroom window from the new kitchen roof; you just leap onto the cattle-race wall and from there up the Tígín north gable, then walk along the ridge of that building and descend to the roof at the south end. Wait on the kitchen roof though - a half asleep human might knock you off the window sill when they open the window for you). What could POSSibly go wrong?