Sleeping Through the Night

We are looking good for some fruit types despite the drought

Now there's a subject close to the hearts of all the new parents struggling with sleepless nights and night feeds of the new infant. I have adopted it as a milestone in the slow progress of my recovery from the recent pneumonia. When I first came out of hospital, I had some bad nights with a ticklish, persistent chesty cough which had at me as soon as I laid down to sleep and had me reaching for the trusty Benylin "dry cough" linctus. This may be too much information, but I was also getting up to pee at about 4 a.m. and had the cough all over again when I laid back down.

The only relief then was to sit bolt upright, so I would spend the last 2-3 hours of each night sitting against the head of the bed, usually joined by the cuddle-loving Poppea (dog), until I could realistically give up and get up at 6 o'clock. As the days went by it was encouraging to see these 2 coughing sessions get  better and shorter. I started to be able to get straight to sleep at night and even started to only get the morning one from half past 4, then 5, half 5 and so on. I was looking at being able to sleep right through the night. They were clear improvements on the way to recovery.

A new one for us this year - we may have some damsons.

At the same time, I know that productive cough is good, in that it is the lungs' way of clearing out the muck and dirt of illness. In my case, this silver lining had a small cloud - this new "muck" might be a sign that I was congesting up again. I guess I also have to take on the chin an occasional bad night like last night, where the bedtime coughing just would not stop and still had me sitting upright, sometimes downstairs, till 2 o'clock in the morning. To be fair, I then got to sleep and slept right round to 8 a.m. Swings and roundabouts. No other health news.

Beautifully mowed grass.

That Help-X lad (Rafael) never did show, so we are setting up August accordingly with Elizabeth picking up all the hard work as it comes due and me stuck on 'light duties'. One of these jobs this week was the mowing, her first time using the mower. I'd heard the mower chug into life when I was sitting round the front of the house. She was well away.

By the time I came down from a good nap, the pond garden was like a billiard table. "Good Job!", I said. "It was EASY!" she commented, sounding a bit surprised. I will have to watch that I don't lose these jobs while I'm 'ill'.

The timber arrives for the chicken house roof.

I was more worried about that other big job to which I would have put the missing Help-X-er, that of helping our builder chum K-Dub re-roof the chicken house. I remember from helping K-Dub do his house roof in Sligo, those are some big baulks of timber and , certainly to start with. Charlotte and I had to stand sticking out of the top of the part built house on ladders holding the new ridge-beam up in fresh air where it would ultimately sit, while K-Dub fitted the rafters to it (and nailed them to the wall plates).

K-Dub starts cutting out the 'barge ends'

Looking up at the beam and the sky, with the moving clouds, your eye had no fixed perspective to help balance. You had to keep looking down to the horizon to prevent falling off the ladder. Quickly, K-Dub fixed enough rafters to it that they were taking its weight, and we helpers could let go of it and come down our ladders to safety.

Not to worry. K-Dub turned up today (an EARLY builder!) - he was waiting on a sink for another job, so he had today free and decided to start. He would cut through the concrete 'barge' ends (gables) to free up the rusty old corrugated iron, plus cut all the rafters to shape/length in preparation.

We are looking at a reasonable plum crop.

This roof, he said, would be nothing like as hard as the house, mainly because the ridge beam gets slung between the two gables. There is no wobbling around on ladders. He can fix it in position with battens, while he brings all the rafters to bear. He anticipates being able to do most of the job on Monday - stripping off the old 'tin', demolishing the old timbers with a chainsaw and re-assembling with new wood.

Mum out with 'The Bumbles' in the woods.

If we don't get as far as new 'tin' on Monday, we can sling the good tarpaulin back over the new wood frame overnight to keep the birds dry. Tuesday will be for making good and finishing off the ridge which gets series of 8 foot long 'V' shaped bits overlapping. We had a good day today and got most of it done, till the 110 volt transformer 'died'. Ah well. I had thought we were starting on Monday, so EVERYthing we did today was a bonus.

I found Connie's hidey-hole down behind some scrap plaster
board in the Tígín

Friends of the Blog will recall that we had 2 birds we were calling 'AWOL', rather than dead to fox. I was poking about in the Tígín and happened to pull out some scrap plaster board and I found Connie sitting on 6 (very old) eggs. She was not out in a hedge and vulnerable to the fox after all. That status is now reserved for the female Guinea Fowl.

Snouts down for some apples.

Meanwhile, Brer Fox has changed his tactics again and nailed a couple more birds. He has lately come every day, instead of every 10th day. On Weds morning at about 9, he was spotted by Elizabeth as he first appeared in 'The Woods'. She happened to be looking out of an upstairs window. She shouted, so I let the dogs out of the front door. Unfortunately, months of training told them to turn left and head for the front lawn gate. Mr Fox was to the right, so able to make good his escape.

A nice sturdy cherry tree but no cherries
this year. The drought got them.

At this time of year, 'The Woods' presents a lovely sunny bank in the morning and can be full of birds. Foxy can sneak in up the 5 acre field, nip through the hedge anywhere and ambush a sleepy bird. On Tuesday, I took up position out there with all three dogs and waited all through the 9 o'clock 'slot' thinking I'd deter him. Not that fella. He waited till I went in at 10, gave it half an hour and then bang! He snatched a young poult. He was probably watching all the time and thinking, Matt can't stay here 24/7.

R+R, Roscommon style.

I thought we'd be safe today. This fox has always left us a week or so after a successful raid. I was out there with K-Dub and Elizabeth was about too, setting up to dig the big raised bed. Surely enough human presence to deter a fox? No. He came in at about 9 a.m. and managed to snatch one of the small goslings.

Ah well, enough for this one. Maybe by the time I write again, a completed chicken house roof and no more foxy deaths. Finally, to be fair to Rafael he has apologised for his 'mistake' today in an e-mail. For what it is worth.

Tree Fellers

Apologies for the subject line - please feel free to insert you favourite cod-Oirish joke here and yes, there were only two of them. I have mentioned in previous posts that we had a plan to get the three big Black Spruce trees on our front lawn taken down; the three trees we fear most likely to fall on the house when some 'cousin' of Storm Desmond comes rattling through from the SW. I had warned you to listen out for shouts of "Timber!" A phone call last night confirmed that they would be here today and asked me to please take down the post and rail fence as agreed.

A fascinating machine to watch - a tracked
cherry-picker which deploys 4 'feet' hydraulically

That would have worked really well if my ancient and 'last legs' 14V Bosch electric screw driver had not chosen to die last night and refuse to take on any charge overnight. Huge thank you to K-Dub who lent me a very nice De-Walt version for the day worth, I hear, about €350. Gulp - look after it!

Three quarter tonne of diesel shredder/chipper which made
short work even of branches up to 4-5 inches thick

If readers were expecting these 'lumberjacks' to turn up in dungarees and check shirts, all beardy and 'pioneer'-ish, to cut a great wedge at the base of the tree and send 65 feet of tree crashing into the horizontal position amid heroic shouts, then they were in for a shock. These guys are very careful and professional tree surgeons clad in all the safety gear, kevlar trousers and mesh-visor hard hats. They work their way up the tree lopping off all the side branches, using a cherry picker to get about 2/3 of the way up but then putting on foot irons, full climbing harness and a loop of rope round the tree at waist-height to carry on up till the main trunk was sufficiently thin to be worth cutting through. Then they work their way back down cutting off 5 foot (ish) chunks of trunk till they get to cherry-picker height. At that stage cherry-picker man takes over again and works his way down slicing off 12" thick rounds (for me to split up with the axe later) till he gets to about 10 feet, which they refer to as the 'butt'. This bit alone gets the 'Timber!' treatment, getting dropped to horizontal before being sliced up.

Starting his 'walk' up the tree.

All the time, the lads are working a clear-as-you-go policy shredding all the branches with a huge diesel powered chipper which fires its output into their tipper lorry. You can have this for garden mulch and paths - they are more than happy to park the heap where ever they can get to.  Finally they do a huge clear up raking and shovelling up rubbish, barrowing it away to a position of your choice and even using a leaf-blower to turn your grass back to green and your drive back to gravel-grey. The 'logs' they stack where ever you want, within reason, obviously.

One of the lads is in the cherry picker here but
top left you can just see the walk-up harness guy
removing the last few branches on his tree

So there you had it. 2 lads 'removed' 3 huge fir trees in about 8 hours. Every thing is tidier than when they arrived (we don't leaf-blow our driveway in general!), nobody got hurt, no tree trunks fell on our house and the only casualty was my Bosch screwdriver. They are brilliant lads and charge a really fair price and I would have no hesitation in recommending them to anyone.

Finishing off the stumps. 

We no longer have the fear of those trees blowing down and we have a lovely, open, well lit aspect to the front of the house.It does not look all 'loomed over'. It has room to breathe. Tomorrow morning, from my pillow, I will be able to see sky instead of just ten feet or so of tree trunk. As we come in through the main gate in the car, we can now see the whole house, not just the right hand side of it. I need to re-instate the fence, but I will wait till I have replaced the dead screwdriver before I do that.

Job done and squared away - about 6pm in this picture so
getting dusky but you can see how open the view now is.

That task kept us all entertained all day; we even spent some of the day sitting outside on our front terrace in the garden-chairs just leaning back and watching the lads clambering about and dropping bits of tree. It was easier that way to look up, rather than stand with your neck all cricked, looking upwards. All done now, though. The guys had tea and accepted some of Liz's goo-ey chocolate cake leaving us to admire the new 'big sky' view of the house from the lane. We are very pleased.

Nanny Óg looking big. Here watched by Marta (lamb)

In other news, Charlotte is back from college for a bit of Easter Holidays (all be it having to nip back to Dublin each weekend for her paid job), so we have told Nanny Óg that she can now get on with the job of kidding. Nanny Óg does not seem at all interested though she did spend a lot of today lying down in the straw shelter looking huge.

Barbara (front) displays right back at Tom.

The turkeys took us by surprise today with a new (to us) behaviour. We have seen lots and lots of Tom displaying; he is quite obsessive about it. We have not had any eggs yet as far as we know, though Barbara may be hiding them. Today, though, she started doing a male-style display right back at Tom - tail erect and fanned, back-feathers all raised and wings pressed down hard to the ground. We have no explanation for this. The presence of the 'strangers' (our tree guys) and their big noisy shredder/chipper may have had something to do with it.

Anyway, enough for this one post. I will leave you with a nice shot of the geese splashing about in their bath (George the gander and one of the ladies here) in the sunshine.