Kato goes A.W.O.L.

There's a pain in my left ear, Daddy.... Make it go away. Off to the
vet's with #1 Son, 'Towser'. Not happy. 

Off to the vets for #1 Son, 'Towser' this week, when he starts to show a lot of discomfort round his left ear. He seems to do this as an annual thing, so we are ready for him and know exactly what to do. Maybe he likes that 'pub regular' thing of being able to stroll into the vet's and ask for "The Usual, Mr Vet". His problem is a good old heady brew of ear infection going which gunges up his ear canal with nasty, dark brown waxy muck which sets hard and dry around the hair in his ear. He then spends all day shaking his head to flap his ears and try to clear it, or walking around rubbing the left side of his head on the furniture and door frames. Very sorry for himself.

Fancy 4-solution ear gel.

Unable to get him to the vet straight away, I tried a trick that used to work on my own ears which gummed up in my youth (well, younger than now anyway!) to the point of needing syringing, that being olive oil. I thought it would at least soften the 'muck' so I could wipe it out with tissues and I had also heard somewhere that if ear-mites are the problem, the oil 'drowns' them.  Turns out olive oil is NOT a good idea.

A goodly haul for our first pick over the strawberries.

Off to the vets then where our man has a good old look down in there and a wipe around as well as giving Towser a small pain-killer jab and an anti-inflammatory one. He also gives me a tube of ear-gel which he rates highly as it solves all 4 common problems at once - it is anti-parasite, "anti-infective" (?), anti-fungal and anti inflammatory. It is NOT an antibiotic as the vet explained, they are really cutting down on antibiotics now. If this gel has not solved the problem by Monday I must bring Towser back for an antibiotic jab but we don't anticipate that being necessary. "I wouldn't," he says, "put anything oily down a dog's ear as a rule". That's me told.

'We' also do not think we need the anti-parasite aspect as this is not ear-mites, just a heady brew of yeast, fungi and possibly bacteria. Anyway, the lad is on the mend now. The angry pink is gone from his ear, as well as most of the dark brown gick and he doesn't mind so much me dribbling stuff down there, folding his ear 'closed' and massaging the 'bulb' part. He just has to put up with the left side of his face being greasy looking where the stuff smears out onto his white fur, till we run out of gel and can shampoo his head back to Westie perfection.

We had no sensible jars for the strawberry
jam so here is a 2 litre 'bulk-pack. 

But my header says Kato was the one causing problems this week, so what is THAT all about? The pair of marmalade 'kittens' are by now a year old and while the female (Chivers) loves to hang around the house and be with her 'Mum', the boy (Kato) is getting a bit more adventurous. Friends of the Blog will know that on my daily dog-walk down to the bridge, I am sometimes accompanied by the full-grown black and white cat, Soldier, whom I have got used to having along and who is 100% sensible around traffic, quickly diving off the tarmac into the verge when a vehicle comes and staying there till he sees me come back onto the lane with the three dogs.

The cutter heads of my shears come back from the sharpener
with a good keen edge. 

Not so Kato, who seems to be a complete ditz and whom, if he tries to follow me down the drive, I will quickly text Liz to come and wrangle him to safety while the dogs and I get out of sight.

Deep-clean of the chicken house

That plan failed yesterday when I'd got a good half mile down the lane before a loud 'Miaow!' behind me alerted me to the fact that Kato had decided to chase us and had caught up. Ah well, too far 'gone' here to expect Liz to come rescue him, I foolishly decided to give him a try and walked gently on making sure he kept up. There were no cars about so I thought we could cope. I texted Liz to put her on alert.

The authentic lime-wash "slappy" brush

No sooner had I done that than a tractor with mower came round the corner. Kato froze. I flagged down the tractor and made to grab the cat but the cat fled, sprinting along the lane. The tractor driver gave me that "What yer gonna do?" look and moved off slowly, "following" the cat. I watched them go out of sight round the next bend with Kato still sprinting down the tarmac and the tractor carefully following. Every time the cat paused, the tractor man stopped too and tried to inch by but Kato wasn't having any of that and ran on again. That was the last I saw of him (at that stage).

Lime-washing the old stone work. 

Liz then appeared in the car (and in her PJs!) having seen the tractor pass the house safely by but no sign of Kato. I walked the dogs home and was clinging to the fact that no news (no splatted body and no sad marmalade shape in the grass verge) was good news. We then had that awful anxious wait that most cat-owners will know, re-tracing our walk/drive, calling, whistling, praying for Kato to be OK and to come home right as rain. Surely he's just strayed off the lane or gone to hide up, upset, in an abandoned building or barn somewhere. Well, to cut a long story short, he kept us on tenterhooks from midday-ish, right round to just gone 10 pm. I had gone to bed but Liz was still up and stepped into the Kitchen Garden for another hopeful look and spotted him sprinting up the drive, not a care in the world and a relaxed, unworried "Hi, Mum! I'm home!" look on his face.

Well be-spattered with lime wash

Other than that, not a lot of excitement. We have had, as you can see from the pictures, a really good harvest of strawberries for a first pick. These plants are protected behind a chicken-wire cage and I had just been checking the few fruit you can see near the 'fence'. I thought we had a couple weeks more to wait. Then I looked down in from the top and all I could see was red down in below the leaf canopy. We lifted the cage and started picking, quickly filling the tiddly, pessimistic punnets we had started with. In short order we had gathered  nearly 2.9 kg or gorgeous, ripe fruit. This is way more than we can use up 'fresh' so we had to re-think our 'no more jam' policy and go buy some sugar.

You don't want your best clothes on for
this job.

Then today we got stuck into the deep-clean long overdue on the old stone out-building we use as a chicken/goose house. In theory we are waiting till #3 broody goose finishes and abandons the nest but in practise we have become impatient and have started on the non-goose end. We are shoveling out barrow loads of old bedding and poo, giving the internal stonework a good brush down and removing all the old tired chicken wire (no longer fit for purpose and gathering cobwebs to a Gothic degree).

Finally we are going to lime-wash all that algae-encrusted, dusty masonry back to a clean, anti-bacterial, anti-insect white as only lime-wash will allow.

A 4-Way Birthday and some New Babies

Early Purple Orchid at Kiltybranks

Friends of the blog may recall that Jun 3rd is Birthday for 3 of our main animals (was 4) who are all 5 years old. The pups, Towser and Poppea were getting born on that night down in Mrs Silverwood's house in County Laois while we were also waiting for news of a birth of kittens at Mrs S's friend's house just around the corner. The two joyful news, triumphant phone calls met in the middle at breakfast.

'Twayblade' (orchid) at Kiltybranks

Lily had whelped 7 (I think) pups and the cat had kitted 3 little balls of fluff. Since then we have lost one of the kittens (Rolo) to an RTA but we have gained a rescue cat (Soldier) of whom we do not know a birth date. We have therefore given Soldier the 3rd of June too, so HAPPY  5th BIRTHDAY the 4 of you, Soldier plus Blue, Towser and Poppea.

Getting the painting gear out. 

My main news events since the last post, though concern not these animals, but a coat of paint (or two) on the kitchen and the arrival of yet more livestock. The new kitchen got its paint on Saturday and we decided to carry the colour on throughout the old which has been up to now Brilliant White.

Liz had fallen in love with the colour of the dry, bare plaster (a very pale grey) and could not think of a better colour to sit alongside the new floor tiles, the bare, raked-out-and-repointed stone wall or, in fact, the existing splash-back on the sink in the old kitchen. As anyone who has decorated their house will know, you can now pretty much get paint in any colour you like. The shop stocks white base paint and has a high tech, computerised colour dosing machine that mixes the tin to the shade you have chosen from the swatch cards.

The new paint looks well against the stone
wall. Ignore the dodgy plastic wall socket.
That is only there temporarily. 

We had tried the older method of buying small 'match-pots' and painting little test patches but could not get a pale enough grey - the kitchen risked looking like a WW2 battleship! Wouldn't you know it, the ideal colour was from the (Dulux?) "Colour Trends" range, the most expensive paint in the shop. This was going to be €36 for the 2.5 litres we doubted would go the whole room even once.

Watercress in a bog ditch. I had thought that stiff needed a clear
flowing, pure chalky stream.

To our rescue, the shop guy who is probably well used to penny pinching customers (his shop is in Roscommon!) who said that he quite often makes up the colour in the "standard" Dulux version of the base-paint and it always works. That was now €19 for the tin which was especially nice when it became obvious that we'd run out of paint and need a 5 litre tin to finish the first, and complete the 2nd coat. 5 litres was €29 which was not so bad. I didn't ask what a 5 litre tin of the real 'Colour Trends' version would have been.

The 10 week turkey poults arrive

Today, then, saw delivered both our turkey poults and our day old Hubbard meat-bird chickens. The turkeys come from Sue and Rob who are currently breeding them by the dozen, hoping to sell birds for people to 'grow' for the Christmas market. It is nice to know that her parent birds are, in some cases, raised from the eggs laid by our own (late) Tom and Barbara pair, so the DNA has been working away over there and is now coming 'home' in a sense.

Sue and Rob hatch these either in an incubator or sneaked under any broody hen who has space under her skirts. One such "clocker" (broody hen) got a mention in my recent sheep-shearing post when we discovered a hatched turkey during a pause from the wool clipping. Once hatched they are kept under good heat; an 'electric hen' AND and Infra Red bulb till they are about 9 weeks old. They then get a week off heat before they go to their new homes, acclimatized.

We have 'landed' ours into one of our well used redundant rabbit runs, which have a cosy, draught-free, bedroom at one end. They spend a week or two in there getting used to the sights, sounds and smells of our yard and all the other birds (and cats and us), before we start letting them out free range and try to persuade them to move home to the proper chicken/goose coops. This year we will be more careful around the start of cold weather and the increased braveness of foxes. Last year we lost all three in November and had beef for Christmas dinner. It was lovely but we still hated that fox for stealing our turkey(s)!

Hubbard chick at day 1

Friends of the blog will also know that we have done several batches of the Hubbard chickens as meat over the years, lately one from May-June to August and a 2nd Aug to Oct/Nov. We join in with Anne and Simon who have access to a big commercial hatchery (long term friends of the Manager) and when they drive all the way up there to get their birds, they always ask us would we like some too. Thank you very much, Anne and Simon.

The Hubbard is a popular variety in Ireland among the commercial boys who are supplying supermarkets with Free Range and/or Organic birds. They make a nicely keeled oven-ready carcass and have a phenomenal growth rate, achieving 2-4 kg (oven ready) in 80-120 days. We kill ours at about 100 days on our 'genuine free range' system and it has always been the tastiest, most succulent chicken meat you ever tasted.

Long may it continue. We also enjoy having Anne and Simon in for a chat, a cup of tea and either dillisk, or chilli-cheese-and-bacon biscuits (or both) which Liz rustles up within minutes of us all sitting down at the table.  We got 13 chicks this year (a miscount at the source!) instead of the straight dozen and we have been amazed by the speed with which they have learned to peck up their own food. In previous years I have spent some time pecking at the food with the point of a chopstick to 'show' them what to do and, even, picking up bits of food and carrying it to their little, hopeful, upward pointing beaks. This lot were straight in. Good luck to them.

Speaking too Soon

Our own ham and our own green tomato chutney make for
a delicious "left overs" sandwich. 

Sometimes I "go to print" on these blog posts with a funny feeling that I may have spoken too soon - my confidence and complacency; my urge to rush a good story onto these pages will be my undoing. This has been close to the truth no fewer than three times over Christmas as I will now relate. The pictures may not be relevant but you will probably cope.

Still some chocs left when I took this. All gone now!

Three posts ago I was happily relating that we had decorated the Christmas Tree, that the kittens had had a brief play with low-hanging baubles but then got bored and moved on and that we'd sat down with a Gluhwein thinking "Job well done". Not for us the horror stories of trees wrecked by cats. I even included a picture of my old favourite decoration, a plaster lobster dressed as a waiter delivering a tray of 'beignets' (fried buns), a prized souvenir of my one and only trip to New Orleans.

For a party claiming not to have drunk much
we were still well laden for the "drive of shame"

Well, no sooner had I gone to press and my back turned than the kittens managed to upturn the tree with Liz seeing it all in slow motion ("NooooOOOO!!!!) and diving to save it but too late. Very little damage done but my lobster hit the tiled floor and smashed into 3 pieces. We have found his body and his arm holding the tray of beignets but where his tail 'flukes' have gone we have no idea.

A first sign of Spring - the daffs in the
lane emerging.

Next up, my joy at having solved the jackdaw problem with my bloke, accompanied by Soldier the Cat, shinnying up those ladders to demolish the jackdaw nest and fit our jackdaw-cage pots to prevent anyone moving back in. Storm Barbara had other ideas. The next morning saw one of the 'cages' lifted out of the chimney pot and dropped into Liz's rose garden.

Odd disco lighting effects from the sun
reflecting off the fancy candle-cover at the
bottom of this picture. 

The design of these, you may recall, involves a flat cone top like a Chinese 'paddy-field' worker's hat, with a ring of outward-sprung rods which you pull together to fit the ends down inside the bore of the pot. You can imagine that the 'hat' must give a fair amount of lift, like an aircraft wing 'aerofoil' in a cross wind, and I suppose the wagging back and forth in gusts might 'walk' the legs up the chimney bore like a ratchet. Being worried about the lack of draw (caused in the end by the jackdaw nest) I had asked the guy to position the pots high up, well proud of the chimney. My mistake. He is coming back to put the fallen one back - I will get him to set them lower this time.

Our 3 roosters hang in the polytunnel to
await processing in the kitchen

Finally, I told you that we had taken the fox trap back to Sue and Rob's, confident that our fox was shot dead and the problem solved. I was not happy the following morning to find that *someone* had got at the three roosters we had hung in the poly tunnel overnight to await processing in the morning. A head had been pulled off one leaving a bloody, strap-like, skinned neck hanging down and a small puff of torn out feathers on the grass  outside the tunnel. My heart sank. I was convinced it was a fox, though I was surprised the beast had not ripped down a whole bird (or all three). Mum in Law (Steak Lady) has since suggested that it might, in fact, have been a cat. That makes more sense. I had not thought of that.

A litre tub of yogurt and one of those roosters make the basis
of a rather fine curry. 

Other than that, we have just been chugging our way through all those left-overs, recovering and tidying up the place, making the most of the relaxing days between the two main events.

The Ministry post us details of a new grant
scheme but we are too small to be eligible

I have been serving my 2nd ever week (1st was in January) as the "voice of Irish smallholders". Well, the Twitter voice anyway - I am this week the "curator" (= guest twitterer) of the @smallholderIRL Twitter account. If you don't 'do' Twitter or have no  experience of it, it is quite fun. It is a very fast and chatty but very lightweight and ephemeral space where you can look in, chat away to who ever is 'on' and then drop off again. You can only speak in 'soundbites' (140 characters) so it is no place to go for a heavy, wordy discussion, though some people do post links to longer articles. You can click through to them or not according to preference and time available.

The '365' project is about to enter its final month.

Like Facebook, users tend to accumulate like-minded 'friends' and coalesce into groups. The small holder group currently has 2500 'followers' not all small holders. When you log out it 'twitters' away without you with hundreds of snatches of chat a bit like stepping out of the pub for fresh air. When they are said, they are quickly gone, pushed down thread by more recent 'tweets'. As I said, 'ephemeral'. Nobody really goes in and then back-tracks down the old stuff, though there is a way of getting it to 'remember' posts where you were included, replies to your posts and so on. Occasionally posts or links strike a chord with lots of posters and the 're-tweet' them to pass them on and that story spreads far and wide, it "goes viral" in modern parlance. It is basically harmless fun but I love the fact that I can share my experiences with 2000+ other small holders all trying to meet and solve the same problems, enjoying similar weather, admiring the same sunsets and munching on their turkey sandwiches and pickles.

Talk to you again next year.

Fairy Lights and Chimney Smoke

Most of my readers are old enough, I think, to have their own horror stories about Christmas Lights. Getting the lights out and onto the tree was always a major adventure - if they didn't work you had to comb through all those 'dead', screw-in sockets with your known good bulb till you found the failed bulb. There was a 'fuse bulb' too, as I recall which you might have to replace to get any bulbs to light, so you had to keep the box the lights came in, so that you would always have spare bulbs and spare fuses. The happy days of "incandescent" bulbs.

Then some clever soul invented the LED, the 'light emitting diode', a semi-conductor component which could do the same amount of light by "electroluminescence" (now there's a good word) with none of the hot filament problems, brittle glass 'envelope'  or high energy consumption or mad expense. They also had much faster 'switching' ability so they could be used in 'blinking', 'flickering' and 'twinkling' applications. It was inevitable that one of the uses in the "task lighting" group spotted by the makers trying to go commercial would be Christmas 'fairy lights' - they could surely flog gazillions and bring the price right down.

We have never been ones for lighting up the outsides of our houses; all those trees, reindeer, penguins and Santas you see rigged up in front gardens and on roofs. We used to drive round spotting the good ones but our house was always one of the 'boring' ones with no lights. Well, we have finally cracked, just in a small way and gone over to the 'dark side' (or should that be the twinkly lit side?). Liz spotted an advert for our favourite household 'stuff' shop up in Sligo, "HomeStore+More". They were doing 48 metre 'strings' of clear white light LEDs at only €25 each with a handy 10 metre blank 'lead' to get you out from plug socket to garden.

The tree is bought and fitted to its stand
but not indoors yet. Trees are very cheap
compared to the UK. This 2.5 m one was
 €30 in the local SuperValu

By happy coincidence, our front-lawn fence is 10 m  from the plug socket in the sitting room as the electron flies and the fence from there to the front gate is almost exactly 48 m ! A 2nd strand (she bought 2, unable to resist this temptation) was planned for the other side of the drive but could not be worked, so I strung it from one of the Tígín sockets, in a big loop along both gutters and up over both 'barge ends', up to the apex either end and a quick loop round the little stub chimney.

Yesterday's full moon sets into cloud
made pink by a real 'red sky in the morning'
sunrise behind me. 

The little control box on these (part of the plug) has quite sophisticated electronics in it allowing you to toggle between 8 light 'patterns' (always on, all on/off, 50/50 batches alternating etc). We like a soft twinkly pattern so there we are. Not too showy, tastefully lacking in penguins and Santas, no reindeer 'grazing' on the front lawn. (One final point; a 'note to self'. Do not attempt to string 48m of fairy lights along your fence while there are cats and kittens around keen to 'assist' That is all.)

Soldier the Cat assesses the 20' extending ladder for safety
prior to allowing the chimney sweep to climb it. He is up it
no bother and down again forwards a few minutes later. One
cool feline.  

Meanwhile I lit a nice fire in the sitting room a few days back hoping to surprise Liz with a lovely warm room on her return from work, where she could sit in her 'new' settee and relax with a gin. In the past, we have had issues with this fireplace and chimney which get very cold when not in use and provide a freezing down-draught for the range at the other end of the house. We have had to wedge old pillows up it to block it. This time I managed to quickly and very effectively fill the downstairs with smoke.

They sweep chimneys from the top down
in this country. 

Patently all was not well. I had swept it in January and we had had jackdaw pots fitted in Summer so we couldn't work out what the problem might be. Step forward our local roofer/chimney bloke, the guy who had done the jackdaw pots. He was worried that we might have had a masonry collapse - these old chimneys made from stone and cement (originally often lime mortar) can suffer from degradation of the 'cement' by all the hot/cold cycles over 150 years. The mortar turns to dust and trickles out like the sand through an hour glass.

365 project still going strong.

No such drama in the end; our man peered down the flue and spotted a great big jackdaw nest blocking the flue. The birds must have built it between me sweeping the flue and the fitting of our pots and it was far enough down that he didn't spot it (no torch that day) back then. Downstairs then, to masking tape a handy sheet of heavyweight plastic across the hearth to stop any dirt indoors, then up again with his sweeping brush rods and then a big solid lath of timber to bash down the jackdaws' "foundations". They can certainly wedge a stick across a chimney, those nest-builders.

If one of the kittens nicks your box, then
sit on top till it collapses on him. Enlist
the help of his sister to speed up the
process.

While we were at it Soldier the Cat impressed us with a demonstration of his ladder climbing skills, quickly up 16 feet or so to my gutters and then back down under full control at walking pace, front first with his body leaning forward almost vertically. One cool cat. The chimneys are all sorted now with the jackdaw 'cage' pots back in and the flue drawing like a cart-horse and Lizzie warm as toast tonight on her settee.

A new bed goes under the stairs now that the marmalade
kittens can kick the dogs out of 'their' beds.

That's about it for this one - one small bit of 'sad'. We lost another Buff Orpington hen today bringing our fox death-toll to 17. This bird survived the attack but never really recovered from what ever injuries or shock she had received. She never wanted to come back out of the shed and she stood and sulked. She would not take food or water brought to her, at least not while I was watching her, so she just faded across the days and has now given up the ghost. We hope that is it for young Mr Fox, himself now dead 15 days.

A Mum-Seeking Missile

Our two new kittens, who came to us on the day after Brexit-vote day (24th June) are, we estimate, now 4 months old. They are big and lively and have long out-grown their willingness to stay contained within the Sitting Room so we leave that window ajar for them and have taught them to come and go through it so that they get access to the whole garden and yard.

Chip (boy)

They are, however, a bit small  and silly yet to be able to cope with a chase or an attack by the terriers. Deefer would possibly be OK on her own but the 'pups' in pack-mode are a different species, rushing in teeth-first, desperately trying to get in faster than their sibling. Real 'red mist' stuff with no thought to whether this is allowed prey or just ratty vermin needing several bites and shakes to kill it as fast as a dog can. The kittens have showed a tendency to try to get back into the house through the other (non-Sitting Room) windows or doors, which would (and has) land(ed) them in the doggy parts of the house. A mad scramble then ensues to rescue the silly kitten and secure the dogs. We have to remember when we open the Sitting Room window, to close all the others far enough to prevent kitten ingress.

Chivers (girl)

We have started to warily try out some controlled 'meetings' and looking at options like crating the kittens in a room to let the dogs get a bit familiar with them and calm down the killer instinct a bit. Liz tried one yesterday where the 'pups' were locked in the bedroom and Deefer was allowed access downstairs. She apparently walked right past the kittens to go steal their food. Progress of a sort, we guess.

The Araucana x game cock-bird always
manages to look totally demented.

This morning, though, a rude awakening of a new sort. We were lying there semi-asleep in the last few minutes before my alarm goes off (07:30) with the dogs scattered over the duvet as normal. I had every reason to think the alarm would sound, I would get up and then prod some snoozing dogs into action so that I could take them out for a 'comfort stop'. Suddenly all hell broke loose and the three dogs were charging about the bedroom down and around each side of the bed, round the foot-end or over the top (and us).

Guinea Fowl also managing to look demented. 

They can't actually get under the bed as the space is full of suit cases, crates of bed linen and 'other season' clothes but the spaces are small enough to allow in cats and Soldier in particular likes to wake me up for (his) breakfast by playing with the dogs and winding them up. In the half light I assumed he would be, as usual, on my bed side table 'asking' to be let out (and then fed downstairs, of course). Then I saw the real cause of the chaos - a kitten was running around and diving under the bed whenever a dog got too close for comfort. Luckily he was still intact and Liz, awake and out of bed in an instant was able to scoop him up while I tried to hold all three dogs at a distance. Obviously we had left too many windows open and the bedroom door, and the kitten had woken up, then gone out, come back in through the kitchen and hunted us down in our sleep. "That boy is like a Mum-seeking Missile" was Liz's comment. Luckily, no harm done and a lesson learned.

K-Dub hacks off render with the medium
sized kango hammer. 

Meanwhile, work has started on the kitchen extension. First job once the site had been cleared was to hack off the render on the house side of the new space, so that we get a lovely attractive stone wall in the kitchen, instead of the stippled "gravel-dash". The plan was to hack off this, rake out the (pointing) cracks between stones and repoint with pale mortar which will contrast with the beautiful dark grey of (we hoped) the lovely quarried, shaped stones.

Raking out the old pointing and the 'gobs'
of render in the cracks

We were not at all sure that the stone would be beautiful, of course. Plenty of the internal walls proved to be a right old mess of concrete blocks, old bricks and re-used rubble. But 'no', we were delighted to find quality stone work with big blocky 'coin' stones at the corners and well bonded rows of good stone throughout. Some of the coins are 13" high and one was a gorgeous black stone which will make quite a feature. We were also delighted with how "handy" (well) the render came away. You can be days chipping away inch by inch. You don't know till you start. The kango-ing, raking out and then wire-brushing were all dusty, messy jobs and my hair felt like a Lego man's one-piece plastic wig by the end. It was pure joy to be able to get into the shower.

Lovely stonework revealed. 

Since these pics were taken we have moved on. The plumbing has been moved to accommodate the new roof (mainly sneaking the vent 'stack' out sideways through what will be a block-work in-fill mini-wall so that we do not have to make a big hole in the new roof). We have also measured up and now ordered all the timber for rafters etc. That should arrive tomorrow. More on this in the next post.

The Buff chicks are a month old now. 

Tonight we will be a bit more careful with the windows at lock up. By the way, I love that the spell-checker on this site offers you 'mango' for Kango. While trying to work out what a Mango-hammer might look like, I am also trying to see tropical fruit used to remove concrete render from the outside of a house.