Pub Quizzing and Extreme(?) Archery

Snow flurries are very fashionable this week

With Storm Doris now a memory and her successor (Ewan) a comparatively mild (though very wet) one I should have been able to report by now all the damage repaired and secured and the mess tidied away. Sadly, the weather has lately been a succession of wet, windy days featuring a bitingly cold NW wind and flurries of snow and sleet and hail storms. The ground is very wet underfoot and we have returned to puddles everywhere. We have been rather pinned down and not keen to go out and do garden stuff, so the entertainments have all been indoor flavoured.

The ewes in a sleet-flurry

Liz got back involved in our much-loved Kent-days hobby of pub-quizzing. The 'Centre' (really the 'Village Hall') where she works, organise a table quiz annually as a fund raiser for the Hall and Liz, in her 'admin' role was looking at doing 'scorer'. I had cried off on the grounds that the questions would all have an Irish flavour and leave me feeling foolish in my ignorance of Irish history, politics, geography, GAA/sports and so on. At the 11th hour another scorer volunteered and Liz was free to join a table and compete.

New dark green tarp turns white in the wet snow.

In the event it was a hugely successful night and Liz had a great time. Her table came 4th behind the winning (Chairman's) gang and 2nd placed table Captained by her boss, so appropriate, politically correct decorum was maintained! The questions were not very Irish at all, so my fears were groundless and I regretted not going - I have put my name down for the next one. In fact, Liz won a decent meat-voucher in the raffle, so she came out of the night in profit. Everyone's a winner!

Assembling the target 'tug' - that little
Mercedes by Paul's right foot.

My indoor entertainment came in the form of a rather silly fun-shoot at archery, jokingly called "Extreme Archery, Moving Targets" on Sunday. Club coach (Con) had decided we should all shoot at balloons towed behind a radio controlled, battery operated toy car which he would drive up and down in front of the big, arrow-stopping, target 'butts'. Helium balloons would be used to hold up the ends of the tow-rope and the shoot-able balloons would be tied on half way up this. That way, the car would zoom across the range dragging all the targets in its wake like an upside-down bridal wedding train. Mad? It was.

Three archers start shooting as the yellow balloon (sorry,
 barely visible in this pic) enters the top right corner of the
killing zone. 

Just in time we established a rule that you could only shoot at targets while they were in front of the butts. That way we should get fewer arrows embedded in the nice, clean, new plastered walls.

About to let fly. 

You were very rarely able to hit the helium balloons because these only trailed down into the zone when the car was going full speed, straight across the range. I finally nailed those (both with one arrow!) late in the game and we found that the one remaining helium one was not buoyant enough to hold up the train. The game was over and we had to go back to serious target-shooting. It was all very silly but good fun.

Warming Winter food - roast chicken 'saddles' and 'champ'

Which brings us to pancake day. As I sit here and write this, I am comfortably full of pancakes expertly cooked, as ever, by the Lady of the House. Liz is long established as the best pancake cook 'we' know and we spent many a Shrove Tuesday with Diane and John. plus D's step-father Denis consuming Liz's output so fast that she had to put her foot down at the end and save some for herself, or she'd have used up all the batter watching us hoover them up. For me, the ONLY WAY is lemon juice and sugar but Liz does occasionally sneak a 'Nutella' one down.

Liz is off tonight at the latest play rehearsal while she digests hers - these days 'we' let all the pancakes get cooked and stacked in the warm oven before either of 'us' starts one. I don't suppose I actually could keep up with her 2-pan cookery but it'd be fun trying. Pass me the next lemon and the jar of vanilla sugar, now.

To Kildare in the Car Boot!

The 2 surplus Buff Orpington roosters, now gone to Kildare

Our advert in the classified ads website 'DoneDeal.ie' to sell our excess roosters bore fruit and a gent promised to drop in to collect both the surplus birds en route home from Donegal to Kildare following a weekend family event 'up there'. He had a long journey in front of him and no real idea when he'd arrive; some time between 4 pm and 7 pm, he guessed. In the event, we had 'company' that evening, with Sparks and his Good Lady down for some good Indian cookery but I had no problem adjourning to the yard for the few minutes it might take to hand over the birds.

Celeriac, surely the ugliest veg, but delicious and flexible.

My man (Derek) phoned at 18:30, as instructed from the local village, to get directions and for me to go and stand in the lane in my big yellow Hi-Viz coat. They actually drove in in a 2-car convoy, it turned out that the birds were not, in fact, for Derek, but his brother in law, in car 2. The cars seemed to be full of people, kids asleep in the backs and so on, but only the 2 guys hopped out. They declined tea. They just wanted to get on with it.

Striking some dogwood whips.

Actually, they did not seem to have much clue; I tried to show them 'round' the birds health wise but they were not very interested. I like to at least do a superficial health check on any bird I'm buying; just the basics like bright eyes, bright red clean wattles and comb, clean legs with healthy feet, good clean cover of feathers and a quick check on the bird's vent (stick his head under your armpit!) for lice and fleas. I had also warned them that I had no box to put the birds in and they assured me they would bring their own box. Maybe I should have thought twice about handing over these birds, but I judged the man to be sound, so I handed over the pair and relieved them of the money. We all walked back to the parked cars, where upon the bro-in-law opened the car boot, empty but for newspaper down to protect the lining, and carefully placed the birds in. It was pitch dark except for my head-torch, so the chickens just settled down there and the man gently closed the boot lid. That was that. The convoy moved off, headed for Kildare where these two roos are promised a life of looking after a flock of Jersey Giants and Buff-Orps which has recently lost its own rooster who, the guys told me rather non-specifically, "met with an accident". I assume fox, but I didn't ask. I guess not the best ever transaction we have been part of but acceptable, we thought. Good Luck boys.

Feste with his new ear tag.

Today, Shrove Tuesday, was the day that our young lamb, Feste, came up to 6 weeks old so was due to be tagged. My 'bible' (the Tim Tyne book) says do not tag till the lambs reach 6 weeks as the ears are just too small to take these rather heavy-duty tags (they work well on full grown sheep). To do this we needed to get him (and the grown ups) into the cattle-race where we could restrict their escapes, so we took the opportunity to give Mum (Lily) a tidy up round the butt, where she had got a bit 'daggy' when she was scouring, living indoors. We both like to get involved in this and it is a whole lot easier with one person holding the sheep while the other roots around under the tail (or in the ears, in the case of Feste)

Grazing on the front lawn. 

I'd been assured by Charlotte that my dog clippers would be no good against a sheep fleece but (you know me) I felt I had to try in order to prove it to myself. If I could even just 'crotch' the animals with my clippers I would be able to produce a nice tidy animal with guaranteed no skin nicks. But no, Charlotte was right of course. The clipper head hit the wall of wool fibres and stopped dead. I was back to my dodgy scissors and, with Liz wedging the sheep against the gate with her knees, I was easing poo-y clumps of wool away from the skin of Lily's bum so that I could scissor them off without risking cutting her. She was quite happy with this till I got down a bit close to her udder, when she started trying to kick a bit, but Liz gentled her and made sure the lamb stayed close to her face (so she'd know he was OK) and we got the job done. You get all the most pleasant jobs, shepherding!

Top of the ditch. This was the easy bit. The ditch vanishes
into the background under the trees the other side of that
fence. It's a bit sloppy down there!

Talking of bad jobs, I was down in the rain gulley today clearing the ditch. The pigs use it as a wallow and had collapsed enough bank down to form a low dam at the fence line, so the rain water coming down our efficient under-yard gulley drains stops dead here and forms a pool. I had to create a slit trench through this clag to a point lower than the bed of the 'pool', so it was back on with the wellies and paddling around in the sucking swamp without losing a boot, weilding my traditional Irish pointy-end shovel. Liz could not resist getting a picture.

And so to Pancake Day! Lemon and sugar is your only man.

Pork, Pigs, Paul and Pancakes

When I left you at the previous post, we were gearing up for our big invasion, expecting 12 mouths to feed on roast pork on the Sunday. We can not really cater for this many and had to get K-Dub to bring with him three chairs and to resurrect from the poly-tunnel our spare table. The latter was the original kitchen table which came with the house, inherited from TK-Min but has been serving time as potting-bench in the tunnel. Sunday morning saw me hefting it round on my back so that Liz could give it a good scrub out at the front of the house.

Spare table - a TK-Min original.

We made up with stools, folding chairs and a mountain of cutlery which we keep in a crate for spares. The day was a great success, the house a chaotic buzz of noise, children. chattering gossip, full-time Mums getting a chance to chill out as someone else minded their charges, K-Dub, Mr Silverwood and me able to do some male bonding, Charlotte getting on really well with J-M and Em-J hunting escaped rabbits and so on. The pork, you will recall, had been very-slow roasted, a quick burst of 250 degrees, then 90 degrees for 24 hours. It was a 6.2 kg leg of Gloucester Old Spots reared by Carolyn and, cooked like that, barely needed carving. I could have picked it up the bone at one end and given it a quick shake but the crackling was also superb. Dessert was a date and rhubarb crumble with ice cream and there was a gooey-centred chocolate mousse cake for later. It was a happy gang of well fed, gossiped-out good company that we bade farewell to. Thank you all for coming and enjoying our place so well.

Big Sarpo Mira spuds are still coming out clean from the store.

Back to work then and, as is our wont, the making of a LIST. We love, every now and then, to take a stroll together round the site and make sure we have a handle on everything that needs doing, so we walk round in a big double spiral, note book and pen in hand listing tasks, in this case 32 of them. We have everything from long-running needs we have been avoiding (Digging out the bank!) and big projects like pig-fencing, to back-burner jobs which might never happen (Make the yard dog-proof*), to quick and easy ones (paint bee hive or fence round the raised bed). This list then gets transferred to a spreadsheet (you probably guessed that bit!) so that we can prioritise it.

Occasional huge eggs. This one weighed in at 118 g

That process brought into sharp focus the need to get ready for the pigs in two areas, building the pig ark and getting the fencing installed. I nipped down to our builders' providers in Castlerea this morning to order the bits for the ark. By happy coincidence, we suddenly got the phone call from Paul-the-Fence quoting me a very good price and saying that he would like to start both my pig fence and two entrances he is improving for Vendor Anna, this week. We are suddenly all 'go'. I had been dropping a few spindly dead trees in our woods and logging them up and was tired from hefting the chainsaw, when Liz shouted "I think Paul has arrived!"

We love a pancake!

There he was in his huge van loaded with galvanized gates and massive, 10 inch diameter (and smaller) wooden posts, sheep wire and barbed wire. I thought he was just unloading, ready to start tomorrow but, No, this is Paul. He stopped briefly for tea and some of Liz's home made orange biscuits and then decided that if we made a start now we could get the main post and gate to the pig field done this evening before it got dark at 18:30. I'll do pictures of this, and the ark, when we are a bit further on but I think I am going to be busy over the next few days. Lovely tonight, then, to lock up the chickens, walk the dogs and come indoors from the post-bashing to light the range, and look forward to pancakes from my own expert and Queen of the Pancake. It is bitter sweet to enjoy these remembering that 'we' always did pancakes (Liz doing chef) in Kent with our good friends Diamond, John and (the late) Denis. We love it here but we'd be lying if we said we never missed the Kent days and pancakes is one of those foods which bring it all back. Happy Shrove Tuesday, Diamond and John. Lovely memories of 'Den'.

*Sounds easy but we worry that the chickens would still try to fly in to get to their house so we need a dogs-in-chickens-excluded solution which does not spoil the look of the back yard. We'll get there. We are just not sure how yet.