Tea with a neighbour

Well I had tea with Geofrey next door, he has a nice wee cottage his parents renovated and he has been working on since, very small rooms but ultra cosy with 3 ft thick walls and a stomper of a stove that gets it to 26C on next to no fuel. He put me right on the best places to fish, which is his passion and the reason he chooses to live here, which builders not to use and the like. He also told me about a wind farm that had been proposed on the mountainside opposite the houses here that he had thwarted thankfully. It would spoil the magic views. We had a wander round and he showed me the boundry against his garden which actually gives me even more land than I thought lol unfortunately its under brambles.

Thankfully there wont be windmills in this view.

Angie took the Ford in for a service today and I have yet to hear how much that will have cost, I think the tyres were getting close to bald so it could be scary, I gave it a good clean out yesterday as it gets used as a dog kennel / taxi most days, poor car.  

I see on the news that traffic wardens have been getting rewards for overperforming, for years, Wardens in Westminster have been sent a newsletter by parking contractor NSL offering them points to use in Argos and Homebase in exchange for suggesting new areas to snare drivers. Enforcement officers are also being given the reward for performance "above [the] beat average". Fine them for looking for a legal spot to park, emmmmm fine them for waiting for a spot, emmm fine them for cycling to work, how about a fine if your efforts to get a fine dissmissed are unsucsesful or sucsesful for that matter.



7 billion people

Well there are 7 billion people alive on Earth as we speak, or thereabouts, hmmm, they are all on Earth just the number was thereabouts, hmmm apart from 3 who are on the International Space Station. Anyway I found this calculator that works out what number you were when you were born I was the 3,126,341,966th person alive at that time. Its a worry that the population has more than doubled in my lifetime even though I didnt contribute to it. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515  I cant see a single person or house as I look out of my office window here and that suits me fine, I used to be a hermit now I'm just crabby.

Another lovely day

Well it has been another sunny mild day, spent today clearing round my garden shed and doing more burning off. We rented a couple of movies and have just watched the first one it was called "Lies and Illusions" and starred Christian Slater, it wont be nominated for any Oscar infact if there was an award for absolute rubbish it would do well, maybe call the award the Racso Award thats Oscar backwards or it could mean "Really Awful Calimeriferous Sewage Outfall" I suppose. I'm hopeing the second one "The Adjustment Bureau" will be better it stars Matt Damion and is toasted as "Bourne meets Inception" and it contains a discreet sex scene? not sure what one of those is.

Its a clear night again and the stars are amazing here, no backlights from houses or street lamps, the Southern sky has more stars but here in the North we have a star that sits above the Pole and has a cracking pointer that is easy to see in the night sky, when its clear. Jupiter is the brightest planet visible just now and Capella, Aldeberan, Altair and Vega are easy picked out.

Things you can do with a 25 gallon drum

Cut the top of it and a few holes make it a good brazier, I have been burning twigs and small branches as I clear them and have a whole load for tomorrow again. Fireworks are illegal in Ireland and Bonfire night isnt done here. There are however some other celebrations Following the revels of Hallowe’en, the ancient Irish celebrated the festival of the dead - Samhain, which is pronounced sow-en, and is usually translated as “summer’s end.”

In Celtic lore, the year is divided into two halves associated with the dark and the light. The dark half begins at sunset on November 1st with Samhain and the cycle ends when the light half begins at sunset on May 1st, which is the festival of Bealtaine. Both festivals are closely linked, but in general, Samhain is considered to be the most important.

In the old days, extensive preparations were made for the sharing of a communal feast that included the dearly departed as guests of honor. To enable them to come and go freely, all doors and windows were left unlatched; a special cake was made exclusively for their consumption, and a certain amount of other food was set aside just for them. This had to be left untouched by any mortal hand for the duration of the ritual period. Eating the food of the dead was considered to be a major sacrilege and it condemned the perpetrator to becoming a hungry spirit after death, forever banned from sharing in the Samhain feast.

The weather has been great this last two days which will hopefully let the waterlogged grass get a chance to dry out a bit. I got a trailer load of peat for 40 euro which will hopefully do me a few months and have covered it up with a tarp. I have a peat shed across the road but it is full of junk so I shall just work out of the trailer until the shed is cleared. I'd like to store my bikes in it too down the track.

Just had a keek outside and its bright with a three quarter moon and stars I shall have to get my telescope out

New DR

Well I went and registered / met a dr local for me here and he seems a nice bloke, he knew the house as he looked after Lord Harrington when he was here. I got bitten by an insect about a week ago, my arm swelled up and the bite didnt heal and same again yesterday so he gave me an antihistamine and also something for a chest infection that has been hanging around so I have an extra  4 tablets to take every day lol. Today is dreich so I'm having a garden free day and am just about to fill some cracks on a ceiling here.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday look nice on the forecast so I am hoping to have some help and get some more anti brambling anti fuchsiaing done "fuchsiaing" sounds really Chineese ehh but It is named after German botanist Leonhard Fuchs! The flowers were named by Charles Plumier when he found them on the Caribbean island Hispaniola in 1696. He named them after his idol Fuchs, who was one of the founding fathers of botany. They have gone wild in my garden and are 7 foot tall and cover about a 60 meter square area in one part, I am chopping them down apart for 3 bunches of about 3 ft which I shall leave as bushes. I have found that the hedge trimmer attachment on my strimmer works better for clearing brambles than the strimmer attachment but my elbow gets a bit sore if I use it for extended periods.

Draining and a swamp monster

Well I didnt get any guisers this year :( but the good thing is there are loads of sweeties left lol, I suppose people dont know we are here yet as the house is well screened from the road, actually it would be blinkin scary walking down to the house through the tree lined drive with boughs creaking, owls hooting, things scurrying surreptiously away and the axe man waiting silently in the shadows.

We cleaned out most of the drains at the top end of the garden today, took a good few hours and was muddy, wet and smelly work which Gus just loved, he went from being a black and white collie dog to a brown stinking swamp monster who had to be put under the hose and then swum in the ocean to get him clean at the end of the day.

Tomorrow I have a visit with a new GP and it looks like it is going to be windy and wet again, today was lovely and sunny and about 13C. The Low Pressure that gave New York its snow late last week has crossed the Atlantic with the promise of Gales and rain, hopefully we may have better days on Thursday and Friday and my drains will get a good clean out. I'm tempted to make French drains out of some of them and cover them over.

The Department of Finance has confirmed that Ireland's debt is €3.6bn lower than previously thought due to an accounting error. I regularilly mislay cash then find it down the track in washed jean pockets or raincoats that havent been worn for a few weeks but the bn stands for Billions thats a lot to go missing ehh lol.

Thinning photos

I have been busy clearing branches and cutting out dead wood, I'm concentrating on getting it so I can walk through the woods first then will select the branches that are spoiling the look of the trees and take them out, clearing branches after I cut them is harder work than actually cutting them down.

It started off driech today but it loks like it is clearing up for tomorrow. I have a young bloke coming tomorrow to help me in the garden clear leaves out of the wee burns/ drains that run through the garden.