Lake View

We are having a bit of a pleasant surprise mini heat-wave to go with our autumn Equinox, blue skies, temperatures up to 25 degrees C (very warm for us here!) and a warm gentle breeze. We sweat real sweat when working and I was even perspiring a bit when just walking the dogs down the lane. Definitely not complaining.

Well, the 'All Ireland' is now come and gone and Liz, Sparks and K-Dub are all happy because Dublin won the famous 'Sam Maguire' trophy by just a point. It wasn't a particularly good game, low scoring but close enough. Of course Tony, in the local Post Office, is not happy but today he was waxing philosophical saying that "for all their crowing, they only bate us by a point!" At the far end of the village (Lough Glynn) is a small group of houses lived in by Dublin-born families and these guys have great fun putting out all the pale/dark blue Dublin flags and bunting like a small blue island in a sea of green and red Mayo flags.

One of the Dads is a really nice, funny bloke and he was straight on the phone to Tony this morning asking if the post office would be open, or closed for mourning. Tony assured him it would, indeed, be open, so the guy nipped along the main street in his normal clothes but with a big bag under his arm. Tony says that when he got to the PO he hid round the corner and changed into a huge array of Dublin gear - silly hats, huge gloves ("He looked like bloomin' Jeronimo!") - so that he could burst in on Tony and tease him for a while. Then he nipped back round the corner, changed back and went home wearing his 'civvies'. Crazy dude!

Goldie the Rabbit has now got a full time job. She is our mower for the path round the pond, so we are thinking of renaming her house 'Lake View'. As she eats each box of grass we pull her round to the next bit. She particularly seems to like the plantains and clovers - these always vanish first. She grazes off the grass when there is nothing else left. Amusingly there is a real house just down the lane called Lake View because, presumably, when it was built it had a good view down to Lough Feigh, our local lake. Like so many other houses here it was built in a corner of one of the fields of the family farm, and Mum moved in. Now the farm has prospered and they have built a huge new cattle shed and feed-silo opposite Mum's house, completely blocking any view of the Lake from her windows or garden. I bet that went down well!

Accidental crop

Picture here is an accidental crop. In 2012 we grew, deliberately, some decorative gourds but then forgot that we had and tried to eat one of the two-colour, light-bulb-shaped "squashes" in a casserole. Luckily for us the chunks of squash in the stew were so bitter that we quickly realised that these were not edible and have since found out that they are actually quite poisonous.

This year I have tried to stick to courgettes, pumpkins and custard squash but I have somehow mixed up some growing plants and planted (or transplanted) another of these lightbulb gourds into one of the kitchen garden beds where it has done very well. We left it be, and have now cut these weird looking gourds, now big enough to have sprouted warty lumps all over, for purely decorative reasons and they are attracting much comment from visitors, drying as they are on the front windowsill.

Liz has bravely gone off and found a very good, new (to us) hair dresser in Balla-D, this one a lady called Noelle in a shop called Halo. Liz had been getting quite shaggy having not had a decent haircut yet in Ireland and was getting fed up with it. She was looking longingly at a photo we have of her from 10-15 years back, framed in the spare room. She took the picture out of its frame and carried it along with her to Halo where they were happy to oblige and Liz is delighted with the restoration of an earlier look. I like it very much. I like it too, especially because there was talk at one stage of me having to have a go with my scissors. I can't think I'd have been able to produce anything as nice as this!

Out in the allotment I am mad into some autumn tidying. I had grown some marigolds and nasturtiums this year intending them as a companion plant to a row of new raspberry canes, to attract in a few insects and help with pollination. In the event they went completely mad burying the poor raspberries under a forest of 2 foot tall marigolds and rampaging nasturtium stems, covering the ridge and flooding sideways and down into the trenches either side. While they were in full flower they were quite a picture, blazing with the hot oranges and yellows or the marigolds and the deeper red of the nasturtium which was a stated variety I have now forgotten.

 Now, though, they are an over blown mess which needs tidying up, so I have been in there yesterday and today clearing the trenches and finally being able to scythe off the shaggy grass of the edge-path and then mow right to the edge. I know it is only mid September and very warm, but I am hoping that the grass will soon start to slow down a bit and this will be nearly the final mow for some of these areas; that they are now tidied and 'put to bed' for autumn. I doubt it somehow. We are pleased with the artichokes pictured. These plants were grown from seed only this spring so we were not really hoping for any crop this year, but these guys have obliged us with a couple of small tennis-ball sized heads which will go nicely with supper tonight.

We took a nice phone call today, from Mentor Anne. She and Simon are, rather excitingly, going to build a straw-bale building as a broody house for their quail. They have done this before using the technology to create a real actual human house in which they lived in one of their previous Irish small holdings. They end up being quite a sophisticated building perfectly habitable for modern families with all the mod cons. For this one, Simon needs a lend of our cement mixer which we bought during our own build. I will  check with Anne whether she is happy for me to provide links to her own blog where the build is described and depicted in pictures, or possibly if I might borrow some images. It will be nice for the mixer to get some use. It did very well for us during our own works but has since sat in the shed gathering dust.

Post Match Punditry

As a quick rider to my 'GAA' story yesterday, we were both amused by the contrast in the post-match analysis depending on who you supported and how you saw the match. To Sparks, dyed in the wool Dub it had been a massive conspiracy of unfair refereeing which Dublin were lucky to prevail against. "All Ireland?", mocked Sparks - "More like 31 counties against one!" (Dublin, obviously). To our good friend Tony in the local Post Office it was the exact opposite. Not only had they deliberately selected a ref who was from the next county to Dublin (Meath) so that he'd be biased. He was allegedly very easy on the 'dirty' Dublin players, giving them yellow cards instead of reds (i.e. cautioning them instead of sending them off), but he let "two bucks who should have been sent off away Scot-free!" Tony is also convinced that the Dubs were 'on something'. The fierce mad intensity of them! It wasn't water they were drinking!

The above conversation was me talking to Tony while Liz, who I am sure Tony knows is also a Dub, stood quietly smiling, so it may well be that Tony was teasing and trying to goad a reaction out of her but if so, she wasn't buying. In the 'unfair reffing' at least, some things never change. Fans have always blamed the Ref when decisions didn't always go their team's way. I can remember friends at work in Kent when their team had been beaten by Manchester United saying, tongue in cheek, that the linesman's Man United scarf had blown up into his eyes, so he didn't see the foul. I can also remember Rugby-fan, Welsh comedian Max Boyce singing a song (The Incredible Plan) in which the punchline had gate-crashing fans trying to get into the match "dressed as Refs with dark glasses, Alsatians, white sticks and tin cans".

..and then we got Plastered

The biggest story this week has been the plastering. This has been carried out by a team of lads Sparks knows from working in Dublin, but who actually hail from County Mayo. Instead of using ladders or trestles and planks to reach the high bits, these guys put on 4 feet tall stilts and stride around at heights where they can just reach up and work away. The boss we will call Mayo Joe (the stilt-walker) and he turned up on day 1 with his labourer, huge tall broad Lithuanian 'Robbie' (possibly not his real name!).

Joe does the actual spreading and smoothing of plaster, Robbie the mixing in a big bucket with man-sized whisk, as well as racing round in front of Joe preparing rooms by 'scrimming' the joints (scrim is a mesh cloth tape) and filling gaps with 'bonding coat' (undercoat plaster) or jointing compound. He tidies up out-facing corners and edges using mini-mesh 'corner bead' strips and stop-bead. He also checks that our fixing of thermal panels and plasterboard is done well enough (no movement) and fires in more anchors (mushrooms) if he thinks it needs it (More of that later).

These two guys are joined on day 2 by another pairing, Mayo Joe's brothers Kenny and Tony who are also plasterers, in this case Kenny 'labouring' for Tony. The four of them make a very efficient, fast and accurate team producing a brilliant result. Their preparation is meticulous, all corner and end beads being carefully cut out as mitre joints and set in spirit levelled both ways. All our imperfections (a mushroom thumped too hard or a bruised edge to a gyprock (plaster board) sheet, a panel not quite lined up with its neighbours or a gap left at the ceiling/wall join, are fillered and sorted. The plastering on stilts is brilliant to watch although the humans are only allowed into the house occasionally to take pictures and dogs are completely banished lest we get under the stilted feet of a bloke who is concentrating on a ceiling. The plaster gets smoothed and re-smoothed, wetted and fussed and stroked till all surfaces have a flat sheen to the eye and a marble-like smoothness to the touch.

My little comment about Robbie-the-Whisk firing in the anchors brings up the guys' one and only mistake, which they luckily got away with. Robbie concerned about our panels being a bit proud near ground level at the bathroom door led to him to reach for the drill and whizz a quick hole in order to thump in another 'anchor' (mushroom). Sparks raised his head from bathroom tiling on hearing the drill just in time to see Robbie potentially drilling into 'plumb central', the cavity which takes many water pipes and mains cables just beneath the surface.

"NO!!! Robbie! Stop!". Where Robbie had drilled, Sparks could not believe he'd not hit something vital. The only option was to open up the panel, cutting carefully down and examine the vitals below. Some how, and unbelievably, Robbie's drill bit had slid between a water pipe, only grazing it, and a thick cable (grazing that). You could not have done that if you'd had deliberate, millimetric layout knowledge. With huge sighs of relief they closed up the hole with bonding coat, no harm done. Robbie drilled no more holes after that!

The indoor plastering is finished by the Thursday evening so we take our leave of Mayo Joe the Stilt Walker and Robbie the Whisk, with just Ken and Tony returning on the Friday to mop up a few outdoor rendering tasks. There are one or two windows where we have adjusted the position or fitted a lintel, there's a broken patch of render by the front door where one of the boys has hit it with a barrow going out, and there's the new bit of the Utility room. All these jobs are handled with the same care and precision as the indoor plastering was done.

We really cannot praise these boys enough and Dad says, if anyone needs a plasterer or render-wrangler in the east or the west, we can thoroughly recommend these guys.

Well plastered
Deefs