4 weeks till sale goes through

Well I got an email confirming retention planning perrmision has been granted so the house sale should be finalized and go through by April :)
I had the offer of 2 VIP tickets to the rugby at Murrayfield (Scotland v France) with food and grog thrown in, for free, but getting there and other expenses made it not viable this weekend unfortunately. I havent had any work since moving in here.
Yesterday was a lovely day with a glimpse of sun and today looks good too, its been a long wet old winter this year, I much prefered last winter with the really low temperatures but sunny dry weather. Anyway plants are sprouting and popping up everywhere here which is awesome and I shall have to invest in a lawnmower within the next few weeks as the grass is starting to grow too. They are expensive but getting someone just to cut the lawns here not even do the edging will cost about 1500 Euros a year and this being Ireland they will probably never come. Ohh there were four ducks on my lilly pond this morning and the heron visits every day too.

Ireland play Italy today and England v Wales and Scotland v France tomorrow so I better get my skates on, have some breakfast and do some work before I sit down and watch those games this afternoon.

Nice weather

Well today was lovely weather for a change and it was spent, yes you guessed it, gardening again lol at this rate I will get green fingers. I had gloves on but my hands are still all nicked by brambles. Cut away loads again this weekend and exposed some other nice feature walls, he must have spent ages making all the walls when the garden was made initially and a lot of them have been covered over with bushes. I was lucky not to have got an electric shock the other day as I cut through the power cord of the mulcher. Gus had to have a bath when we finished for the day as he was covered in mud.

I was just watching a show on tv called the biggest loser, it's a show were contestants are put through an excersise , diet regime for 10 weeks and the person to lose the most weight wins, then I saw on the news that a Swedish man was dug out alive after being snowed in to his car on a forest track for two months with no food, police and local media have reported, bet he lost a bit. Can't imagine how his Volvo smells inside either.

There's now a calf here called Xi Jinping, lucky calf ehh. It was named after the Chinesse Vice president who is visiting this week. I wonder how he took the honor.

It was lovely to see the sun today. Angie may have a chance of a trip to melbourne with her work in July for a couple of weeks so that would be nice as she could visit Sydney

furniture and banning Angie from the kitchen

Well its one of those drizzly dreich days today, I did two hours clearing debris of a bush I ripped out yesterday and then was "rained off". What I normally do in this instance is to move furniture around so that's exactly what I did today. After discovering last weeks Scallop shells decomposing in a wee fridge? What was she thinking? I have two fridges, one is large and does amply for the two of us and the other just gets put to use if we have visitors or need a beer fridge so its turned off. Angie went and hid the bliddy shells in it for some reason. I cleaned out the refuse bin, the recycle bin and all sorts before I traced it down and POW when I opened the door, so shes banned and will have to walk down the hall instead of taking a short cut through my kitchen sheeeze. LOL.

My office got a bit of a move about. I put the small desk below the window so it is easier to move when the window is getting replaced. When that will be noone knows, my solicitor emailed the other day to see if I had heard anything lol I wrote back and said I was waiting for word from you.

Back to the weather, from my wee weather station there has been  97.5mm rain since the 15th January,max pressure has been 1035.8 Hpa, strongest wind has been 23.5 knts max temp has been 14.9C and min  -2.5C isn't that a handy wee bit of information for you all, to be sure.

I am getting a program called Dreamweaver for website design so will be learning that when it arrives, that may stop me rearanging the bliddy furniture ehh.

Employment Benefit Trusts

Glasgow Rangers have entered administration over an alleged £9million owed to HM Revenue & Customs. They are also facing another potential bill of more than £70million after an ongoing inquiry into the use of a tax avoidance device, Employment Benefit Trusts. EBTs allowed foreign stars to have their wages paid into a trust — and then withdraw the money once they were no longer living in Britain. They would then avoid paying the top 50 per cent rate of UK tax. But the taxman has declared that illegal — and claims Rangers' previous owners used the trusts to avoid paying millions of pounds in tax and National Insurance on the player payroll. 8 English clubs are also being looked at for the same thing. If you ask me the whole bally lot of them are paid far too much.

Angie is away to Denmark, left around 0600 this morning, travelled >12 hours today to get there for a meeting tommorow and she wont get home till Friday afternoon. Means I dont have to watch Hercule Poirot and Heartbeat on the tv this evening. I made a wee video clip of the dogs and its on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10150536439915754

Scallops a rib eye and a cancelled game

Well we were giftted a dozen or so scallops yesterday so they did as a starter seared in garlic butter with a cheese sauce and asparagus, then we had the best steak I have had in a long time on the barbi. Just what you need before heading out to watch the rugby. 73,000 fans in Paris told 2mins before kickoff that the game was cancelled sheeeeeze I,m glad I never took the car to Galway then go-bus to Dublin and then flew to Paris paid a fortune for a hotel and a taxi and overpriced beer at the venue.
Instead Mark, John and I went to the local at Carraroe and had a good old knees up until 0230 then came home and made pizza and fried spuds, Angie had fallen asleep on the couch so she was into pizza too. All in all it was a good night.

Yesterday John and I made another two raised garden beds and used peat dust to fill one and half fill the second, the peat shed had years worth,and half a foot of peat dust on the floor so using it for my veggies killed two birds with the one stone so to speak as the shed got partially cleaned out too. There was also some nice composted leaf mould that got mixed in, so I,m nearly set for planting.

My ICD was reset to start at a heart rate of 188bpm instead of 220bpm as it would have been possible for me to have blacked out with arythmias before the device activated, then presumably the heart rate increases and the device would have shocked me. When I waiting to be seen at the hospital I got chatting to a couple of other patients who have same device and they have had shocks too which gave us something to chat about. Angie had a health check this week and the dr phoned at about 7 pm on Friday night to tell her that her results were in and they were perfect on all counts and some of the best he had seen, obviously he didn't do mental checks lol he told her that"whatever you are doing keep doing it" gawdddd.

Scotland play Wales today which could be a thrashing but we will wait and see, I,m not going to put on the rugby shirt as it seems to put a hex on things.

I,m a lumberjack and I don't care

I wear high heels and an up thrust bra la de da, not I don't it was a song I was remembering, Monty python sketch. John and I have been busy clearing yet more trees and branches, ran power cords down to the other side of the pond and took the mulcher down there today and got rid of some branches. It's starting to look good now.

Have to go to the hospital tomorrow as they want to adjust my ICD so I will have a day off, have to get a new chain for the saw on the way home. Just took the dogs down for a swim and called in for a beer and a couple of games of pool I won 3 -2 :) nice after a hard days graft.

I,m looking forward to the summer and getting the yacht and tinny in the water for some fishing. Today was misty and kinda dreich to say the least.

Go Scotland go

Well I have my fingers crossed that Scotland can put on a good performance today and beat the auld enemy at Murrayfield. I've just watched the France  v Italy game and it wasnt a great spectacle, I shall miss the super 15 rugby from the Southern hemisphere this year as it isnt on the tv here.

We have been having milder weather here than the rest of the UK and more cloudy, I got a couple of small trees felled today before it started raining but that was a good excuse to get inside with the fire on and watch the rugger.

I have another blog http://doirechoill.blogspot.com/2012/02/doire-choill-project.html which probably wont be of any interest to you but its about web design and how and why  I am making changes to my site. There is also now a facebook page for Doire Choill website design.

John is coming up on Monday I hope, to help out in the garden again so it will be good to have some company.

pond ice

Well the pond stayed covered in ice all day today, it is in the shade right enough. I spent the day with the chainsaw and clearing up branches. One of the bits I cleared is a wee walled garden with about 7 trees in it, my plan is to dismantle part of the wall so it is accessable from more directions, it would be a good spot for a shed or even a wee stable for a donkey or two. It would certainly be handy to have somewhere down there I could leave tools rather than carry them all back up to the house.

Grrrr one of my pet hates is doing a blog only to have the website crash and me lose all my typing, which just happened. Now I have to remember what I was ranting about 20 mins ago, not an easy task, ohh yes Angie has a conference in Paraquay in September and it came up in conversation that she could perhaps change her business class ticket for 2 economy class ones. Now in the past I would have jumped at the chance of visiting somewhere I havent been before but I'm not sure if its my age or the fact that Paraquay is land locked and doesnt have anything on my bucket list ( good movie that btw) but I'd rather go sailing on my boat. Places I would like to go are the Canadian Rockies, I got a taster when I visited Vancouver but would love to cross them by train or road. The Norwegian Fyords and Greek isles would be great and I'd love to visit the Scottish isles on the yacht and some of the places I used to go on the puffer.

Bird nesting box

Well today was bonny and I got a bit done about the garden, made a nesting box for any bird that fancies my carpentry and I got some more firewood chopped. I'm running out of places to store it now I have that much. The wood I cut down today has been dead a while so its ready to burn, to get the logs up from the bottom part of the garden I got one of those gardening bucket things, and use it like a creel so every walk back up from down there means a load of logs are transported. I'd rather have a quad bike with a trailer lol anyway walking with logs is probably healthier and there isnt a track that the bike wouldnt make a quagmire out of anyway.

The breeze is in the NE today which is cold but it has been bright and sunny which is great for a change.

The dogs were flattening the plants on the slope at the patio so I made a wee fence out of bamboo which seems to be working and fenced off a bit of muddy ground below.

It looks a bit sparse around the sides of the pond as we pruned back all the bushes pretty hard but they will green up pretty quickly and it really needed done as they were very woody. Behind the pond there are still lots of trees to be thinned out, by the time I'm done there will be a lot more light coming through from behind, taking the weeds out of the water has lots more light reflecting on the pond too.

Lovely smell of baking bread coming from the kitchen here as I have Moms bread making machine going.