Ten Years a-Blogging!

Yep. November the 18th. It was on this day exactly ten years ago that I first stuck a rather wary toe into the unknown waters of blogging. I can remember I didn't have a clue and I can tell that from those first posts with titles like "Bear with me on this...." and no photographs. I have been a diary-writer all my life and I thought it should be fairly a-kin to that. I had recently bought our Westie bitch 'Deefer'. I thought it would be cute/clever/funny to go exploring the 'blogosphere' as if seeing it through her eyes, so my cast of characters in the early posts had me as 'Dad', Liz and 'Mum', our old dogs as 'Big Sister' and so on.

First ever post. 

I have only 2 bits of advice for anyone thinking that they might try blogging and the first would be don't do that "cute", speaking-as-if-you-were-a-pet thing. It quickly became rather limiting, not funny and plainly rather silly. It also got a bit complicated finding new pseudonyms for everyone. I was quickly looking for a good break-point where I could bail out as 'Deefer' and take over the keyboard myself. The other option was to stop altogether and then, after a break, return, as if by magic, as a human. In the end I took the 30,000 page-views point. It was as good a land mark as any.

My other advice, for what it's worth, is make sure you have something to say; a story to tell or opinions bursting out of you that you just HAVE to share with someone. There is nothing worse than a blog post which says "I'm bored". If you've nothing to say, then park the thing till you have something. If you have an urge to write then this can be easier said than done, but I know this blog flagged a bit when it was all "went to work, came home, walked the dogs, ate, went to bed". It is so much better when I got to 'moved to Ireland' and 'ripped the house to bits and rebuilt it' or we started to accumulate livestock. The latter also made for much better pictures accompanying the text.

There's always food! This a rolled rib roast.

Anyway, here we are, ten years, 1794 posts and 156,884 page views later. I am obviously never destined to be a best seller, I never went "viral" (as they now say) and I have never hob-nobbed it with JK Rowling but I chug along with around 30 people looking in at each post. Mainly you are friends and family and I am eternally grateful for your support, comments and loyalty. Once we were in Ireland the blog also quickly became a sub for a "letter home to Mum" - she gets colour prints of all these posts (thanks to my very generous, UK-based bro' ) and tells me she knows more about what Liz and I get up to now we are 500 miles away than when we were 45 miles away in Kent.

It is quite tricky to get a pic of the 5 sheep as Silas always
comes sprinting over to say 'Hello'.

Meanwhile, back out in the bitterly cold, slightly snowy landscape, the 18th November is also significant as being Day 18 of Silas's visit. You will recall from an earlier post that ewes 'cycle' around a 13-18 day heat and, had they been on heat when he showed up, by today all 4 of them should have come fully on and been 'seen to'. We would now be changing the raddle colour and watching him for another 18 days to see did any of the ewes "return to service". If they picked up the new radde colour that would mean that they had not been made pregnant last time round (and now might be).

A light dusting of snow last night.

In practise it is proving to be a lot less exact and scientific than I thought it would. We have not seen Silas chasing anyone about in any convincing way or mounting anyone. He quickly 'washed off' the raddle colour on the wet grass and none of the ewes have ever been convincingly 'slapped' with the blue paint. Never mind. The lad is staying in there till, probably, the other side of Christmas so he has plenty of time to grow a bit in size and in confidence and, if he doesn't actually 'score' this time he will, we hope, have had some fun learning and practising and he will be all the better for it next winter. For the moment, anyway, he is the only show in town.

The weather has taken a turn for the worse and Thursday saw us getting some first sleet. There was a dusting of white on the car, log piles and the grass this morning and we had to scrape the windows of the car clear for Liz to drive to work. Local comment has it that this is "very early"; they were all enjoying the very mild weather.

3 whooper swams dramatically lit against the dark forestry
and storm clouds

The Whooper swans are back - our winter visitors who join is each November from their Iceland nesting grounds. We first see a few flying in to the local lough (L.Feigh) and then notice their fluting chatter of an evening after dark, which comes to us on the wind or in the stillness. I nipped down to the lough armed with the long lens and caught a few reasonable pictures of them glowing white in the sunshine against the dark of the forestry and an impressive storm cloud. I was also gifted a flock of wigeon - another winter visitor (a duck this time).

Wigeon

In our own birds we are nearly through processing the Hubbard meat chickens and we are very pleased with them. The (5) roosters have all come in with oven ready weights of 2.4 to 2.8 kg and the (7) hens just under 2 kg each. We had one of the hens roasted last night, when a leg each and a breast between us did us proud, so the remaining breast, wings and stripped bits served as cold left overs tonight with garlic bread and our regular Bulgarian "shopska" salad (like Greek salad but with no olives!)

Mute swans down on the lough.

Ah well, I hope you join me in wishing this blog a Happy Birthday for the first ten years. I am not sure I can promise another ten but it is with me for the fore-see able future.

Bitty News

Sometimes I get a bit busy for 'proper' long stories on this blog and my news comes in little bite sized pieces. I hope you enjoy them anyway.

First up, this blog passes the 70,000 page views landmark today. I have long since given up on the dream that I will suddenly go 'viral' (as they say) and turn into JK Rowling, or even Barbara Kingsolver. Naive 'innocent abroad' that I am, when I finished the latter's book a couple of days back (It stayed brilliant to the end) and thought it would be nice to send her an admiring e-mail and offer her this blog address so she could see what we were up to here. Some chance! I forget that these best-seller authors are now so hidden behind walls of agents and secretaries that they do not even have 'Contact Us' links on the websites, probably to protect them from getting 70,000 idiots like me every day trying to cram their inboxes!

Down in the Silverwood's, Mrs S is having her own little medical drama and has spent some time in Tullamore Hospital, So Liz has polished up the shining armour and dragged the milk white steed out of his stable, she has zoomed off to the rescue, ready to do a bit of babysitting and house keeping to let Mr S go to work. Mr S works in the same outfit as I used to do and I know they run a lean, mean machine, border-line under staffed; they can rarely spare you to take time off. They allow but definitely begrudge time taken off for such 'silly' reasons as "wife rushed to hospital". Liz was last heard of up to her oxters in making 'cock-a-leekie' soup and 'sugo' (pasta sauce) to keep them all going. Steak Lady rides in on Friday to help out too, relieving Liz, I hope, to come home for a while. Mrs S is back home now, at least. Get well soon Mrs S.

2.515 kg of lamb leg.

By chance, prior to us getting the call about Mrs S, Liz had extracted a 2.5 kg leg of lamb from the freezer intending it for supper. We couldn't re-freeze it, so I was left on my own to cook it. It got a smear of anchovy and garlic and was roasted for 2 hours at 175 degrees C. It was delicious, even though I carved a laughably small amount off for my supper, barely scratching the surface. No matter. The cold remains have now been stripped off the bones into four by 250 g bags for the freezer and a bag for my supper cous-cous. These animals are nicely butchered by Ignatius G who leaves the long shank attached but folded round, so we get three nice bones off these leg joints. Handy when you have three Westies. The house, as I type this, resounds to the gnawing of happy dogs. They pin their three respective chunks down under front paws and grind away with their bums in the air in each of three rooms, well separated from their fellow dogs, so the gnawing comes at me from under the kitchen cupboards, over by the range and above my head on the bare boards of the landing (my computer station is under the stairs). It's a bit loud.

Ginny the rabbit escaped again. I have built a new run at the bottom of the allotment on a patch of lanky grass under an ash tree, in the protected spot where we intend to put the bee hive. The plan is for Ginny and Padfoot to keep this mowed and clear ready for the buzzing crowd. The run is a rather bodged, temporary affair and the chicken wire, though buried, is not fixed taut, tall and upright and Ginny had sussed that in one place if she stood up on her hind legs and leaned on it, it would sag enough to make a ramp up which she could hop onto an allotment ridge. She came into the yard to wish me goodnight and let me know she was out (!). Ginny, though, is not a very convinced escape artist and by morning she is looking to me for a carrot, back in the run, so she follows me about as I release chickens and shepherd geese about and then, this morning, was waiting by the new run gate to be let back in and given a carrot. Daft animal.

Our next dose of wind and rain. Map from AA WeatherWatch

The geese do not fly much and never high - they go in for a running charge with lots of honking and wing flapping which just occasionally has them enough lift to be a little bit 'flying' just above the ground. While the gander, George, is still doing his one-woman thing, I am shepherding them home separately, the happy couple first, down the left hand side of the out building to their door, then going back to the orchard to gather up the 'gooseberry' girl who comes down the right hand side and round to her door in the yard. She has, up to now, stood around in the orchard chuntering to herself while I do the pair though she is quite happy to come waddling home when I go back for her. But not yesterday. Yesterday I was part way home with the pair when I suddenly felt the whoosh of heavy wing-beats and Goosey (the loner) rocketed past me on my right at elbow height, cleared the pair of geese just above their heads (they ducked in surprise!), landed, and pulled up just short of the building. She had decided to fly home. Blow all this patient waiting mallarkey! Noisy chaos ensued while George tried to protect his woman from this airborne 'assault' and get by her to his door. She tried to work out where she was and how to find the yard from this new unfamiliar angle. We got there in the end.

Unusual sight lately - washing drying OUTSIDE!

We've had a break from the wind and rain these last 48 hours and the ground quickly dries out, the puddles draining away nicely. I was able to barrow the latest load of calf muck round to the heap, all be it going the 'long way' through the yard to avoid the sloppiest ground. Just as well, as I got another call from Bob, who was ready for me to go collect more. We seem to have got into a routine now and these collections are once a week. No doubt Bob is delighted to have someone else muck out his bullocks, but my heap is starting to get big enough now - it all needs to rot down for 6 months or so before I can use it on the garden. I don't want to say no to Bob, but I am eagerly awaiting his decision that spring is done, the ground dry, the grass growing and he can let the cattle back out onto the grass. This probably not till April, I guess, so I have at least another 8-10 muck-outs to accommodate on my heap. It will take several seasons to use it up, so I don't know what happens next winter. Thank you though, Bob - it is all good stuff.  AA Weather Watch have pictures of the next storm coming in from the SW today and through tonight. This had me nipping out to rescue the washing as the wind rose and the sky turned dark. Batten down the hatches (again), people!

Comments are Welcome

Just to let you know that we have just officially taken the plunge and moved this blog over to an Irish email address. Up to now it's been running with the old British Telecom address which, although we stopped paying for the service in October last year when we left the Whitstable Road address, is still up there and seems to be working. We now use a Google-Mail address for most things (@gmail.com) but, bizarrely, this domain name is not acceptable to Blogger.com, so we have been unable to "move". To Hell with all that, we said and today we signed up for an Eircom email address (we are paying Eircom for Broadband anyway) and tried that on Blogger and it was accepted.

Which if all that sort of thing goes flying over your head without touching a hair means, in short....

YOU CAN NOW COMMENT ON THIS BLOG and we will get the comments and, if appropriate, answer them. We would love to hear from you and to know that someone out there is paying attention and, hopefully, enjoying what we do here.

My site meter, incidentally, tells me we are now approaching 30,000 page views, so somebody must be in and looking.

Meanwhile, Thank you for your attention and support in the past.

Coo, don't I sound 'official'?
The Deefs.

Another landmark

We pass another landmark today, or rather we pass two. We have, during the course of today, seen our 6000th hit on this blog (now 6008) and our 9000th Page View (currently 9017). We are also keeping up our usual good spread across the world and all this despite the fact that I've not been quite so good lately at posting as frequently.

Some of this is down to a bit of drift in the enthusiasm department - I was struggling to find anything more interesting to say besides "went to the Rec again and met Luca the Lurcher / Theo the Dalmatian / Smudge1 / Smudge2 / Barney / Bailey etc etc". We dogs do not live interesting lives all the time.

A part of it too is that some of the posting drive on this computer is now shared with Dad's other love, the SB Cambria, where he posts every day. If you fancy a quick look visit the Cambria Trust website and look in "Volunteer's Views" - that's Dad posting those. They are all about barges, though, so be warned.

Meanwhile, thanks for reading this stuff and creeping those stats up. It all makes it seem more worthwhile, knowing I'm not just launching these off into the ether to be lost and abandoned.

Deefski

Peaked out at 106

Looks like we peaked out at 106 page views last night, and we're now back down to 96, I see. Must have been the consistently high numbers of viewers while the Sussex Saga was running. I'm afraid we're now back in the hum-drum of normal work days and walks.

Haggis's 12th Birthday next weekend though.........

Deefer

One Hundred and Two

Today we celebrate passing a new milestone in bloggishness. Just every now and then we nip into the Site Meter stats you can link to from this page (top right), just to see how often it's read and where the readers are from. We have several regulars, we know, (recently Mrs S's Ozzie rels have joined us - Hellow you guys!), and then you get one offs from (we notice recently) Germany, Romania, Singapore, all over.

We generally chug along at about 40 visits a week and 50-60 page views. Lately though, with the Sussex saga this has swelled to an all time record of 102 views as of today, in the last week. We are delighted - sometimes it feels as if we are writing into the big black void - it's good to know 102 people have spotted us this week.

Perhaps not a best-seller yet.....

Deefer