Ahhhhhh...Middlin'

Ireland missed the 'blood moon' lunar eclipse due
to cloud/rain but I've been waking early lately and seen some
lovely sunrises. A bit misty, this one.

SPOILER ALERT: Self pitying aul' git on a minor rant. Fans of the healthy, happy blogger might like to skip the first few paragraphs.

The heatwave officially ended when
the 'Mighty Coat' came back out of the
cupboard.

Health update: Readers of the posts about the hospital stay might like a progress on the recovery. A few days ago, when I was planning this post, this section was going to be  a right old 'woe is me' whinge. I was not happy and the recovery seemed to be going all to Hell. Now I find myself in a much better frame of mind and waxing pragmatic and realistic.

The mountain ashes think it's Autumn already.

You'll know that I am in a 4 week 'stabilising' phase now, taking great care on the fluid intake, taking the tapered end of the steroids course (3 more days till I'm off them), weighing myself every day and watching anxiously for weight gains of 1-2 kg per day, taking it easy, letting my lungs recover. I came out of hospital thinking that'd be easy, buoyed up by my famous recovery in there, clearing my lungs and losing 14 kg of fluid in 14 days, surrounded by cheering nurses, delighted, enthusiastic medics and a blizzard of well wishers.

Our lovely current Help-X volunteers,
Emma (l) and Flora.

I am now back home and down with a bump into a more realistic rate of recovery. The limited fluids began as a real pain; I was craving water, wet food and juicy fruit, eking out my ration, scoring every sip I took with pills on my sheet and enviously watching Elizabeth and the guests sloshing generous slugs of supper time water into their glasses of elderflower cordial. Despite all that "hardship" I was still putting on weight at about half a kilo a day. A worrying trend which had me looking down the barrel of more congestion, re-swollen ankles, no breathing and a return to hospital.

That lost raised bed which the girls have been clearing.

Anyone else putting on lots of weight (what would you even eat if you WANTED to put on half a kilo a day?) might be thinking "Who ate all the pies?" but in my current state it is a water retention and 'water-works' control issue. Obviously I am back in touch with the doctors (well, trying to be. They not that easy to reach!) and keeping a careful eye on the figures. We even started putting a tape measure round my ankles to spot swelling.

Self seeded mullein (Verbascum) at last.

A couple of frustrated, scared, upset, wobbly days then but we have now put the water thing on a much more manageable method. I am allowed a (250 ml) coffee with each of he three main meals and the remaining 750 ml I take as a 750 ml bottle of water which I keep in the fridge (out of sight and.....) and sip away at. I have got used to this and find myself not only not craving water all day, but actually being left with some, un-drunk.

"Kuku", Iranian spinach tortilla. Beautifully light and
fresh-tasting after the spud-based Spanish one.

If ever I fancy something else (a tiny beer, for example), I decant the equivalent amount of water into the sink. There may also have been an alleged problem with me 'horsing' the carbs on my return to civvie street (Hey, I was ill, weak, needing to build my strength up!) but the catering dept is on that one and carefully watching my portion control!

The girls helped make the meringue for this black currant
Pavlova. They also picked the currants.

In these parts they have a lovely expression for if you are not good but not bad. In that superbly understated Irish way, where you'd not want to 'put yourself forward' by claiming to be either very healthy or very ill, they reply to 'How are you?', with "Ahhh middlin' ". I am going to adopt this now and give that reply to anyone who asks. I am streets ahead of where I was 3 weeks ago, but not quite yet fixed, so 'middling' nails it.

Falafels and banana bread.

But enough of this  medical malarkey. How about the rest of the place? I am now back in the groove here (all be it on light duties, no heavy lifting) assisted by our lovely current Help X volunteers, Emma and Flora. I have had them doing all manner of gardening and tidying jobs including mowing and brush cutter-ing, cleaning out a duck house, clearing the big raised bed and rescuing all the plants.

Emma scratching some piggy backs.

One of them, Flora, turned out to be a closet vegetarian. She'd not told us in advance (we told her off for that, silly girl!) and had been trying not to give the game away to Liz in that first week, taking the plates of food but quietly pushing the meat bits to one side. Once she was 'out', Elizabeth was able to adjust the menu to suit and happy to join her in 3 weeks of exploring the vegetarian repertoire and we have all enjoyed some real delights and revelations. It has become an evening job for the Woman of the House, pulling out the little used cook-books and choosing what to cook for tomorrow.

We have had a delightful range of baking (cheese and onion pie, anyone?), some lovely soups (butternut and coconut?), an Iranian spinach tortilla (kuku), desserts like pavlova and, yesterday, a gorgeous Mexican spread of wraps, nachos, tomato and pepper hot-stuff, sweetcorn salad, salsas, cheeses and so on. The girls are also keen students in the kitchen and we have had them learning and helping in the baking and food prep. Most recently this was a banana bread and the falafels for lunch.

All aboard! Familiarising the pigs with
the trailer-of-doom.

We have also "harvested" 2 lambs and the biggest pig. The sheep we can round up ourselves at this stage but it was good to have some help from the Help X lasses on my campaign to train the pigs to go into the trailer. This, you may recall, we do by showing them the trailer with tempting food inside for a couple of days before the 'off' so that, on the morning, they will scurry up the ramp quite innocent of our betrayal. This time pushing the trailer around on my own is a bit outside my "light duties" remit, so the girls have been a real God-send. The pigs flew up the ramp at the first try, and we ended up having fun trying to ensure that only the pig we needed (Daisy) was in there (not all three) so that we could close the gate on her.

Soapwort.

Off to the butchers then on Monday morning with the two lambs (including the big ram lamb) and on Tuesday morning with that pig. We will now get all that meat back for the freezer. The lamb offal we collected yesterday. The half-pigs will be collected on Thursday. We will butcher those ourselves, The lamb we will collect next Monday.

Buff-tip moth caterpillar.

A little entomological mini-drama this week when Flora spotted a caterpillar on my '60th Birthday present' white-barked birch tree. When I went back to the tree with the camera I saw that there were actually dozens of them and that they nearly had the tree defoliated. Still, we are following organic principles here, so caterpillars are grist to the mill, Elizabeth posted a few pics up on Facebook to see if we could get an ID.

Clockwise from top left, lamb hearts, livers and kidneys
(still in their suet "jackets")

A UK friend was on to us saying we might have a problem. It might be buff-tip moth but it MIGHT be something called the "Oak processional moth". The latter is a frightening invasive species, notifiable to the Ministry, able to devastate broad leaved forests. It has not made Ireland yet, but the Ministry ask us all to keep a careful eye. Elizabeth fired off pics and an email just in case. Don't panic, came back the Ministry, 'That is just a buff tip moth, but thank you for the notification". There's a relief.

That is enough for this one. When I next post we will be nearing the last days of the girls' stay with us and we will have the pork back from Webb's. I will also, I hope, have had the car re-tested and passed its NCT. Myself, I will almost certainly still be middlin'.

If the Weather's Middlin'......

"If the weather's middlin'...", says John Deere Bob over the weekend, "I'd like you to cut down a couple of ash trees for me...." meaning on Tuesday (21st); he knew we were doing all the pig transport stuff on the Monday. Well, the weather was nowhere near "middling" as the tail end skirts of Hurricane Gonzalo roared through lashing us with a Sou'westerly gale and massive rain, which then veered to the North West and kept whacking us with squalls. The North West is our least favourite direction for winds, and the one which scares us most with its worrying rippling of our old out-building roofs. It has me racing around trying to think of new ways to shore up the weaknesses and lash down any potential flappy bits with wire and concrete blocks.

SW winds come at us all across Galway and finally come up against our massive black spruce trees in our 'woods' out front. The house itself is (we sincerely hope!) sound and the roof itself looked to us like one of the strong points in the property as purchased. At 2 storeys high it does a good job of shielding the outbuildings from the SW. It is the NW winds, thankfully not that frequent, which roar at us out of Clew Bay and in across Mayo, Kilmovee and the fields on that side of us, that have us having these conniptions. They hit the big concrete and rock gable end of the goose/chicken house and are pushed up and over like the wind on the leading edge of an aircraft wing. This puts all kind of lift on the dodgy corrugated iron and corrugated perspex sheets that make the South-facing roof slope, if not tied down, ripple along like (as Liz described it) like the keys on a cartoon piano.

I have shored them up to a degree but it is real bodgery, and if we ever win the lotto, we will be replacing that roof with new. Failing that I need to buy and install about 12 feet of some nice strong two by one and a half, which I can screw all the panels in that area to as a kind of 'not-fixed-down' top plate. That will replace what is there, in bits, mostly rotted out. You can not, of course insure these out buildings without the man from FBD wants to come and inspect them; I am sure any sensible insurance risk-assessor would take one look at ours and laugh like a drain. I wouldn't blame him! Anyway, Hurricane Gonzalo, as I write this, seems to have largely passed through leaving us with our roof panels shaken but not stirred. We appear to have gotten away with it this time.

Meanwhile, the Longford Bee Keepers group hold another of their monthly meetings, where a speaker will talk to us about swarm control but also about the training and exam for the next stage of our 'Bee School'. Coincidentally, they will also be able to give us our smart certificates for the last stage, our "Preliminary" certs. Most of 'us' got them last month but we missed that meeting, it being the day I flew home from the UK. Apparently there was an official photographer an' all, but we won't be in that one!

Extreme gardening - trimming brambles around the bee hive

Liz has already decided not to proceed on to the intermediate stage, which comprises three exams in a lot more depth than the first step, a written bee-science 'paper', a written method/process paper and a practical exam taken at your own apiary. She is happy, she says to stay on the nursery slopes. I am in two minds. I like the idea of going on, climbing through the official levels of 'expertise' up to the grand sounding "Bee Master" but some of these beekeepers get way more involved in their hives, more interfering, more 'control freak' and more fussing than we like to be with our own hive.

Liz gets to grips with our first
'pork' output.

We listen to our 'Two Marys' advising us to stop fussing, to leave the hive alone and let the bees get on with it. A lot of the fussing, the weekly (or even more frequent) cracking open of the hive to inspect it, is all about trying to squeeze every drop of honey out of the task. We are not that fussed about honey or maximising production, squeezing the assets as it were. We are more focused on the 'green' gardening, ecosystem, healthy population of pollinators aspect. I worry that to pass these exams and certainly to show sufficient experience with hive manipulation to convince the examiners that I am skilled enough to get the ticket, I will be forced to 'fuss' more than I am comfortable with. There's a conundrum for you.

Pig liver and heart. 

We dropped by the butcher today to collect our livers and hearts. The kidneys, apparently, one is still in each the carcass, the other gets cut about extracting samples for the trichinosis tests (which we have apparently 'passed' (i.e. negatives). The meat hangs in his fridge till Friday afternoon. Not having seen this before we were both amazed by how big an entire pig's liver is. They weighed about 1.75 kg each! They have now been cut up and bagged up as 9 sensible portions.

Finally, I am delighted to see that 'our' Whooper Swans are back, the first half a dozen have arrived at our local lough for their winter stay. I can now hear their fluting calls drifting up the ridge as I supervise the dogs in their off-the-lead session in the orchard. They must have flown in last night, so they have presumably had their own fun and games with Hurricane Gonzalo's skirt-train. Unless they were over on the Mayo coast, which would have given them quite a tail-wind, they would have been either skirting or battling into the storm. Autumn is definitely here.