Craft and Conflict(s)

We mixed a bit of fun in with the logging today to answer a friend's desire for a bit of 'revenge'. One of Liz's friends is having a torrid time at work currently being asked to take over and rescue a failed project in another department but at the same time keep the colleague who has failed, sweet. The failing project ex-manager is known only as 'SHE' and she is not at all impressed by being rescued and replaced and is being a total bitch but Liz's chum has been instructed by the boss to (using modern parlance) "suck it up". We suspect that SHE is only still in the job because the company has failed to even start a disciplinary process so cannot actually sack her yet. We think her time may come if she is found guilty of even half the devious and conspiratorial manouvres that have been reported and which include pouring poison into the ear of the external client for whom the project is being done.

Be all that as it may, cleaving through wood with an axe has got to be a good way of venting one's spleen so Liz jokingly offered to paint the word 'SHE' onto a chunk of wood and have me chop it to bits while she took photographs which the friend could then look at and dream of being able to exact a more physical and satisfying revenge on this hated enemy. How could we refuse? Therapy at a distance by axe-murder. The friend (and others) were delighted with the pictures and are suggesting (tongue in cheek, presumably) that we could take commissions! Mad Boss anyone? Evil Nurse D?

Also in a possible conflict situation is the new gander, George. We can't be sure yet but I saw him today having a pop at one of the female geese and moving as if to claim the other, as if he has 'chosen' one of the girls and decided to reject the other. Tonight as I tried to shepherd them home, which normally works easily as a group of three, he suddenly lunged at one of the girls causing her to veer off track and refuse to go into the goose- house with George and the 'chosen one'. I had to call Liz to assist and between us, via several circuits of the building past the no-longer-comforting-bedroom-doorway, we finally got her to go in. This may just be a one-off, heat of the moment thing and they may all be good again tomorrow but we will have to watch this closely. We can't have George going all one-woman man on us, particularly if he is going start beating up the 'rejected' sister. Watch this space on this one.

Meanwhile we have gone all 'crafty'. From Carolyn of the mini-horses, came a generous supply of baby milk formula tins (SMA brand, the 900 g size) with lids. Liz decided these would be ideal for storing bakery ingredients - flour, sugars, nuts and so on - and would prevent the over-stuffed avalanching cupboard problem which you may know from your own experiences. We set about hunting (unsuccessfully) for coloured 'Fablon' book covering 'sticky-backed' plastic but finally settled on shelf covering sheet. Liz scored some of this by asking in a number of hardware stores for "the stuff your Granny used to cover her shelves with". This had the man in Cahill's on Castlerea Main Street nipping upstairs calling back "I know EXACTLY what you mean!" and reappearing with a choice of colours.

So with the tins cleaned out we started a little cottage industry with Liz measuring and cutting and me smoothing the film onto the curve of the tins. Liz then fired up the label printing computer and thus these rather nifty storage tins are born. We have used up the ten we got and are now off down to Carolyn's to scrounge more, of which she has a good supply, having fed Hungry Henry (2 in February) on the contents. Up-Cycling!

Office, Logging and Garden

We finally getting round to nailing another long standing job, having got a chance to buy wood at Woodie's DIY in Carrick on Shannon on the day of the NCT re-test. That's the gnarly bit under the stairs where the broad band arrives and a phone point but where the work station was still the old green fold-away caravan table. This has now been treated to a nice work top and a shelf for the screen, 2 box-shelf units from IKEA (originally intended for the kitchen but Mum found they didn't 'go' and that was that.) and a new book case unit from Mulligan's in 'Balla' ( we have discovered that all the locals call Ballaghaderreen by this name, which makes life much easier and we can't really go round calling it "Bally-Lala" which was becoming its nickname!)

In the kitchen garden, with the last of the most recent 10 tonne of 804 gravel now shoveled away to become floor of caravan bay in the former hay barn, there is space for Mum and Dad to build the third (of four) raised beds out of our inherited railway sleepers. The first one, completed a while ago is now producing some nice looking crops, particularly shallots, onions, garlic and radish. We are rubbish at labeling things when they get sown, but Dad is "fairly confident" that the radish row was double-planted with parsnip seed as per the advice in the "Vegetable Growing in Ireland" book. Radish takes 3 weeks to crop. Parsnips take 3 weeks to germinate, so you can use radish to mark your parsnip row.

While the chainsaw was out for cutting the railway sleepers in half to make 'ends' for the beds, Dad decided to try his hand at felling his first tree. In the woods to the left of our drive which are, we think, black spruce there are a few dead weedy ones long since over shadowed and killed by big beefy neighbours. They are about 45 feet tall (compared to 60-70 or more for the big, healthy trees) and less than 12 inches diameter at the bottom. Dad selected one which stood a chance of falling into a gap between others, neatly across the drive and onto the lawn. It all "sort of" worked except that the tree kind of bounced off a neighbour and hovered briefly in the clasp of its branches but it came down soon enough when Dad made an extra cut in the trunk. Dad cleaned off the side branches (some of which Mum stole for pea sticks) and then logged it up into 40 odd logs. Nice clean job.

Deefs