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Beware of goats.
We are well used to canine kniptions and explosions of manic barking, people, eagles, coyotes all set them off. To be fair, they are not discouraged, it is their job to alert us to approaching ‘threats’.
The goats normally live behind us, five acres away and are ritually visited for a bark up a couple of times a day. No great threat just a canine ritual.
Insufficient Buggery, Dammit, Bloggery!
Just blame Janus! As you all know, I have nothing but gardens on which to blog. Holding most other activities in anathema, having declared ‘fatwas’ in all directions and holding most appurtenances of modern life to be ‘instruments of the devil’, there is sod all left! Then there is the other side to that coin- When you live in ‘God’s little acre’ why the bother with anywhere else? We actually did emerge this week to go to the tulip festival in Skagit County (one down) with friends. Wonderful tulips but the multicultural aspect proved too much for us, it was mobbed by more of them than us. Vancouver had emptied across the border to view tulips en masse. We retreated to lunch. I didn’t bother to take any pictures. So, just for a change you get more of what is in bloom right now in the garden.
An antidote
To the bloody ludicrous carry on in Boston and the attendant collective denial of the American people-see my acidulous comment on the Boston bombing.
So as an antidote we fled to Canada yesterday to see a spring garden. Nothing like a garden to calm the nerves and reduce the apoplectic blood pressure!
This is Dart’s Hill, about 15 miles North of us, but always seems a bit warmer than home.
Des Res, iron age style.
It’s raining again! I’ve had it with spinning and knitting and the greenhouse is up to date so I am reduced to looking at old photos. I came across these from spring of ’08 that looked apt for the residences blog. NOT that I hasten to add are they part of the competition, that would never do!!! Just thought you might like to see them.
No! Not monster mushrooms, just your genuine brand new iron age des res. This is a tourist trap built in N Pembrokeshire on the site of an iron age fort. The buildings are supposedly actually built on the original sites using the original post holes etc to get the size and clustering of the community.
Ludicrous Weather.
Yesterday reached 70! Blazing sun and bright blue cloudless sky. Absolutely ridiculous, things busting out into leaf overnight a good three weeks early. Flowers appearing by magic!
Happening now with Optional Acid Etching
It has all been a very peculiar winter here. The weather has been rather coldish and wet with interminable rain but nary a snowflake to be seen, not one. Then all of a sudden, it stops, gets 20 degrees warmer and full on sunshine! More like all of sudden it is a different planet!
Of course none of this is to do with ‘global warming’, it is just the usual oscillation of the Pacific doing its El Nino/Nina bit, we have one like this every 5 years or so.
I too have had a peculiar winter to say the least, last Autumn I complained to the doctor of a persistent pain in the back. Always wanting to know the worst and anticipating a healthy dose of lung cancer after smoking for literally 50 years I manned up, or rather womanned up and presented myself for the usual battery of tests. Lo and behold, more bloody gall stones!! Of all the gall! Only about 15% of humanity manage to get them more than once evidently, these are made in the liver on a deo ex machina basis and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it but fish them out! These beasts were the size of rocks, they were duly fished out but had caused massive reflux through blocking the tubes. All this was done without any real inconvenience but then the real kicker! The reflux had been aspirated into my lungs at night and gently acid etched the whole surface! The pulmonologist assures me the condition is reversible, so off we go with various drugs etc to put it right. Then the Damocletian blow! Normally the putting it right is accompanied with large doses of antibiotic to keep other diseases away but I can’t use them as I am totally allergic to virtually ever oral antibiotic. So being in a very delicate condition, I must not be breathed on by anyone or else I’ll end up in the local Lazar house(hospital) in an oxygen tent!
OK folks, you know the drill, retreat, load for bear and mine the drive! No visitors, cancel everything, go nowhere, do nothing etc etc! Now this all gets very very boring, so to keep busy I have been growing things on in the greenhouse awaiting the day to get planting outside. Then the weather broke and a frenzy of activity has taken place, well I’ve got so much in there it all has had to be moved along the system at a great rate of knots.
Early peas, broad beans all out and going.
I really do get so bloody angry!
Never have I read of such total incompetence. A la DM. The need for troops and helicopters to ‘rescue’ rural people. (We already know town dwellers are witless wonders!)
What is wrong with them? If you live in remote rural places you take great care to have sufficient stocks of everything thereunto! Admissions of running out of fuel and food for man and beast after 4 days is ludicrous in the extreme.
Anyone that relies on anything but coal and a solid fuel central heating system wants their heads examining as all other fuel systems require electricity to drive the furnace, most solid fuel systems will still work on convection! Coal is delivered in the Autumn by the ton! You can guarantee that the electricity will go out, so oil lamps with sufficient spare wicks and oil are de rigeur, (yes, they are still made as are old fashioned mantles!) If you have any sense a small generator just to run the freezers. Sufficient box milk, flour and yeast and you are in business!
A Diatribe On Errors in Jabberwocky!
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Lewis Carroll is responsible for a grave error, they weren’t ‘toves’. They were ‘tofus’
This lamentable lexicography has permitted the ongoing perpetration of an unimaginable horror in the borogroves of Seattle. (For those of you lacking in the intrepid exploring gene, they are similar to mangrove swamps but MUCH nastier.)
Officious, officiating officials sent forth by the Imps of ‘elf and safety’ have seized some wretched Oriental female in her den and accused her of the cardinal crime of butchering tofus stolen from the borogroves. To boot, her heinous crimes are worse. She is accused of mistreating them in their death throws! Heating them as they die, prolonging their throes, shipping their still quivering bodies in warm death carts for human consumption and allowing their poor tortured bodies to be set upon by vermin, (four and six legged, we will come to the two legged in due course!). Read more…
Habemus Papam . . .
Well the new guy in Rome must be OK as he is going down like a lead balloon with the Grauniad! They have lost no time at all hitching him to the Junta, how utterly predictable.
I can imagine his reception will be lukewarm in the UK all round with the Falklands scenario too, or the Malvinas as he would have it.
Interesting, the first Jesuit ever, so aesthetic personally, intellectually and doctrinally right wing and socially left wing. A curious mixture. So that will shake the roots of the queer cabal running the Vatican, wonder if that is one of the reasons they gave it to him quite so fast? Only two days to give it to a New World Jesuit? Strikes me they wanted that job off their hands PDQ!
From what I have read, as a person, he really does remind me of Chavez (the dead Venezuelan), if that is so, that will set the cat amongst the pigeons to see personal austerity at the Vatican and the curtailment of perks for Cardinals and big wigs.
I wish him well, he has a hard row to hoe to clean out such extensive Augean stables!
Message for OZ
Answer your email!
Wool has arrived for wolfie second skin and I need a couple of answers before I start!
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