Meet the Grandchildren

That play poster. Rehearsals are coming along
really well. It promises to be a superb production.
If you are looking to go, buy your tickets soon .
Some of the days are selling out already.

Bit of a mixed bag today and the first post on the borrowed laptop where I'm not 100% yet on the very sensitive keyboard or some of the options. If this post looks a bit ropy compared to normal (or better!) then bear with me and I'll wear it in like a new pair of boots. Elizabeth will probably never want to use it again and already does a good line in laughing at my typing rhythm. I use only first fingers and the occasional thumb on the space bar. I'm reasonably quick but will obviously never get as fast as a proper, 8 fingers and 2 thumbs typist.

Last knockings of the Christmas leg of ham. It has been splendid
throughout and the skeleton is now being turned into the best
stock for pea+ham soup EVER. 

To slow me down even more, the 'caterers' have just passed me a superb plate of our own 'Parma' (style) ham and wee dice of galia melon. This has been a superb product throughout and only now, in mid March, am I nibbling the last few scraps off the bones with my fancy, long-bladed, special Spanish ham carving knife.

The tiny cradle that takes the '2032' lithium battery.

But back to the sudden need for a laptop. The PC has finally died and will no longer load Google Chrome. We had read on the Internet that these "imminent death" warnings are just an artefact of the tiny, euro-coin sized lithium battery in your Mother-Board going flat. Like us, you may not have known that such a battery existed but may I assure you it does.

Flowering currant just starting.

Do not rush to stock up on these 70 cent batteries, however, because I fitted my new one this morning and I can further assure you it made not 70 cents worth of difference. Ah well. Our 2nd 'fix-it' option is that Mrs C buys a tablet and I inherit the laptop. That's the next move.

Some early uncrossed buns. They were lovely!

A minor rant, then. We wish that the companies that made medicine for sheeps, would cater better for we small holders who only have half a dozen sheep to treat,

The turkeys and Guineas were starting to damage the Spring
bulbs. We rescued the pots to a strawberry cage.

I needed to buy a fluke-drench for my 4 and the smallest quantity I could buy was a 1 litre bottle. The dose per ewe is 5.25 millilitres, so I have 190 doses here and the product only has a 2 year shelf life. We smallholders end up trying to buy co-operatively between a number of us, or risk throwing 9/10 of the stuff away. The bottle was €29.99 which is not a killer, but I'd love to have been able to buy the  25 ml bottle at a tenner. How about it big-pharma?

'Shawn' the dog? Deefer, post clip

The dogs got their long overdue clip. They were all three very shaggy and Deefer, especially, tangles her hair into dirty 'rat's tails', so I chose the first warm day and had at them. Deefer got done slowly, using my 3mm clipper head sliding slowly under all that tangle. All three came out looking like new lambs. Their hair was as short as a Jack Russell and they were sparkling white. Also soft and felty to the touch rather than 'ropy' and reminiscent if dreadlocks.

Daisy 'Dook' looking as cool as....

On the Thursday night, I went along with Elizabeth to watch the latest rehearsal of the village play, "Anyone Can Rob a Bank" and to take some pics for the website. No spoilers obviously, but it is looking very promising for a real fun evening. The Lisacul Players have put together a superb production with some superb farce, belly-laugh action in it. It's going to be GREAT. Tickets are 4th, 6th and 7th of April and are selling fast, so if you are thinking of going, don't leave it too late.

Out walking the dogs, I have got talking o some 'new' people - well new friends to us, anyway. Hi Joe and Olivia. They were very interested in our pigs and we are very interested in the fact that they have Dexter cattle, so some reciprocal visits are in order. Today they dropped in on us and came to admire Bo, Luke and Daisy. They proclaimed them very clean and healthy looking, plus enormous for their 10 week age. I gave them the number for our breeder and they are off hunting down some Oxford Sandy and Blacks very soon.

The entire flock muster on the front lawn.

Meanwhile, the newest lambs came up to the 2-week age this weekend and it is more than warm enough for them to go outside 24/7. So Mum 'Rosie', her suckled ram lamb and our bottle fed ewe-lamb 'Bábóg' all got shunted out onto the front lawn this morning where they were joined by the rest of the gang (being Lily with Tigger, Polly with her twins and slowcoach Myfanwy who does not know whether to be pregnant or not yet). It occurred to me that we therefore have 3 generations out there - Lily is Mum to our newest breeding ewe, Rosie and she has twins. Meet the Grandchildren, Lily?

Did you sneak in there trying to nick the bait, hen?
Not at all - what made you think that?

Sadly, I am going to finish on a down beat. At some point while we were either showing the visitors round or moving sheep, another female duck vanished, presumably snatched by Brer Fox. We saw nothing of him this time, nor heard anything and neither did the Giineas, unusually. Ah well. These things happen, but why did it have to be a female. We only have one duck left laying eggs now. The fox trap has caught only chickens!

Biker Boy

Our first 2016 'clocker' goes broody in a completely useless
place. And sitting on NOTHING. No eggs. Nada.

In the last post, in all the excitement about the Lisacul 365 project, I managed to completely forget to note 2 good signs of Spring. The first is that lovely burst of realisation when your eye falls on a 'new' clump of crocus which you obviously planted at some point last year but then promptly forgot. I have two nice ones in the bank beside the driveway. One is nicely backward so may do OK but the other came out into the teeth of the last named storm and it's little retinue of fronts.

Barbara on some hay bales.

Crocus should (and like to) push their flowers up through the warming grass into the Spring sunshine where they can open the top part of their flowers nice and flat and bright. These poor things emerged into a howling gale and lashing rain, so they have sat and sulked, firmly closed, for the last week and I fear are being knocked about so much they may never open properly before they rot off. Our other spring note was our first 'clocker'; one of the Buff Orps went broody in the worst choice of place ever - in the car port. Yes she was well hidden behind the wheel of my pushbike and she was on the remains of a good, dry bale of hay. She was also slotted in between the 2CV and the hay-barn wall but she was, too, exposed on 3 sides to Brer Fox.

Progress on the Sligo house. The pale upper walls in the centre
are 'scratch-coated with a pale clement. 

We think from her subsequent behaviour that she is the one from last year who was fiercely determined to go broody under an elder bush and had to be protected in situ becuase we couldn't persuade her to move or quit. No option to do that this year and anyway she has gone broody on nothing - not one egg, so I am reduced to gathering her up at lock up time and carry her, chuntering angrily to herself, back to the safely of the main coop. When we release her in the morning she makes a beeline back to her little slot and humpily sits down on the empty nest for another day. Idiot bird. I expect when we want her to go broody on some pure Buff Orp eggs she will have lost interest.

The porch - I get to lay some blocks!

Good progress out on the Sligo house rebuild and, for me, 2 new experiences. The exterior is coming on well with 90% of the fancy stone work done and now the upper 'half' of those new walls given their 'scratch coat' (rough plaster) of special pale cement made with crushed granite sand and white cement powder. This looks gorgeous and sets off the darker stonework beautifully. The outer finish coat will be the same pale buff colour and will not need painting. The chimney stack has now burst out through the new roof and is being dressed with a stone capping and that same pale cement covering. The roof is now 99% covered with membrane and battens ready to take the natural slate which was delivered today. The 99% thing is due to the old western chimney still having the original electricty supply lashed to it and needing that removed (by ESB) before we are allowed to take down the stack and finish off that gable.

The way that day worked out found K-Dub minding his poorly young son in the mobile home while Mum shot off to the shops, giving us an enforced, rather long lunch break. I'd finished and was ready to go back to work but was on my own. We were all set up to lay blocks up into the gable of the new porch so the boss suggested I just start on my own. Never laid a block or brick in my life but I've (now) seen quite a few laid and anyway, if I made a complete Horlicks of it, it would have been the work of minutes to tear down and start again. I did OK. When I step through that front door now and look up, I will know that up there, above the 'head' (lintel) stone are 2 courses of 4 inch "solids" that were all my own work! "There's kudos in building porches!" said K-Dub. My work stood and he carried on up when Mum returned to look after the boy.

An old gravestone for the 365 Project

My second treat that day was to be given a lift home the 20 minutes riding pillion on K-Dub's 'serious' motorbike. This, I am told, is a BMW 1150 RT, a cruising bike with saddles like armchairs, built for comfort rather than racing performance. I have not been on any kind of bike since the 70s (I was asked to ride a moped home from the hay fields to the home farm) so all the leaning was a bit of a surprise (a thrill, if you like) but K-Dub was very gentle with this rookie who was hanging on tight round his waist. I survived and was delivered safe home intact.

Dead now, my faithful Canon EOS D1000

Finally, who knew that you could fry the mother board of a Canon EOS digital camera by taking too many long exposures of night sky in succession. I managed to make my lovely, faithful but old camera go sick while photo-ing the Perseid meteors (or, rather, failing to capture any on film). It was suddenly unable to stay turned on and would power down at the first hint of work (auto focus or the need to use the pop-up flash). I parked it and have been using a little 'compact' ever since but with all this 365 photography going on I decided to disinter it, find out what was wrong and whether it could be fixed. Liz was off to the local camera club to do a presentation about 365 to them, so I asked to come along too in support and might as well bring the EOS and see if there were any experts in the club.

To cut a long story short, long exposures can warm up the mother board on "some Canons" and successions of long exposures overheat the board. They only have a design life of about 10 years anyway so my 7/8 year old one is now not economic to repair (it would be €250 touch). This  thought-process and research has now led me to a rather unwanted conclusion and , combined with the imminent need to acquire archery equipment, to making a hard decision and a life-changing move BUT, that is for another post so you will have to hold yourselves in patience till next time. Mean, huh?