Autumn well and truly here

Well the sun is barely clearing the trees now and the dew is staying on the grass most of the day, this means I can get back into my ripping and clearing again wooohoo good for the waistline. This last couple of days I have been attacking the hillock which was totally densely overgrown just across the big lawn from the house, even Gus couldn't break his way through this undergrowth which is saying something. Anyway it used to look like this

I,m about 90 % finished and now the house is visible and the bushes can start growing again from the stumps.

I have left some of the evergreen bushes at the front as they were nice but ripped out the old tall stuff.

The front of the house got debushed during the midge season and I flattened it out a bit with 16 tons of topsoil, I wanted to get my lawnmower over it basically and the bushes looked scraggly. The grass seed I put down has started to grow and I am happy with the result so far.

The spring and summer months are full time just keeping things mowed and from going haywire so its good to have some projects for the next few months. Having been here for two seasons now I know which bushes look great during the flowering season. I didn't take a photo of the front of the house before I started ripping out the bush but this old shot up the drive kind of shows how it was. Its the bit on the right hand side, the drive looked better after its new gravel too and they had to widen it to get the excavator in last winter.

My garden is always going to be a sort of woodland and kind of rough and ready but i like it like this :)

The boat is all tucked away for the winter

I have her covered with a tarp to keep the leaves off, they tend to rot and mark the gell coat so its hard to clean her come springtime.

Another job I did was to take out the bushes to the right of the house, the top photo is the before one.

I better get back to it only 5 months before things start growing like mad again.

Test video

A new customer of mine has a video they would like included on their website so I have been fooling around with a couple of programs to see what is possible. This one is just still shots of flowing plants I had in the garden this year. I tried uploading it to FaceBook but they wouldn't publish it because of the sound clip and copyright, what a load of twaddle you go out and buy a cd and then aren't allowed to use the music. No wonder people are into pirating tracks. Rolling Stones tickets in the O2 last year cost up to £950, for an average 2 hour concert that is pretty good money when you times it by 40,000 people.

My brother in Law John, (my gardener brother) is in hospital so my thoughts are with him, it has been a pretty crook year this one for friends and family being unwell so everyone out there who has been down with illness I hope you all are better soon.

Today looks dry and bright again before the rain comes in on Wednesday for the next few days so I shall try and get some whipper snipping done while the going is good, the next few wet days I think I shall try and do some ceiling painting. 

Been a while

Well I haven't had a good old blog for a while so I thought I had better get you all up to date with the midgies and whatever. I was hoping to have had my parents down for a visit but unfortunately my Dad managed to dislocate his hip, twice, each time needing a helicopter ride to Glasgow to reset it, so we have postponed the trip until after he is repaired. He sounds a bit like a robot there ehh, well he is a bit like me, have being fitted with new bits, mine is the elbow.

Its a bonny day out and no midgies wooohoo maybe they have dissipated for the year, it was only 5C this morning when I got up at 0600 to wave goodbye to Angela who was off to Dublin for the day and a two hour course. Managed to get all the grass cut, hopefully it wont need too many more cuts this year now, it has been hard work keeping up with it over the summer, every nice day the bugs were out in clouds and gardening with an audience isn't fun especially if the audience is eating you alive. 

The yacht is safely in the garden for the winter covered in a big tarp to keep the falling leaves off her, I have to go down to the marina office with my pass key at some point, in fact that is my next job for the day. Got some nice fresh Cod off the fisheries research vessel yesterday so I might just make that famous New Zealand dish "fush and Chups" for dinner tonight.

Derigging and frozen brakes

Well I had a good day today, it was sunny and warm and I spent the day taking the yachts mast off and derigging it and getting the boat ready to put on her trailer for the winter. I could have been out sailing but mucking about on the boat is the next best thing. One of the brakes on the trailer was jammed on so I had to to take the wheel off and use the Irish screwdriver ( hammer) to sort that out. This year I have taken the spreaders off the mast and totally derigged it instead of just dropping the thing into its cradle and leaving the wires on. Its better doing it this way as everything gets inspected properly even though it takes longer.

The rubber dingy was deflated and I moved the other trailer onto the down ramp to the shed where I had the yacht trailer all summer so it is out of the way there. I will put the bikes and dingy in it and cover it with a tarp as the shed is pretty full.

I am hoping to get my Mom and Dad down for a visit in the next couple of weeks I was looking around at all the things that have been done since they were here last and they include the new septic tank and percolation area, a new down ramp to the shed, new gravel on the widened driveway, new doors and windows, new paint on the exterior of the house, a new bathroom and two bathrooms with new tiles on the floor, A wall removed in a bathroom, kitchen tiled and a new ceiling and archway between it and the living room, new stove, wood floors in the living room, central heating from the new log burner, insulation in the ceiling, most rooms stripped of wallpaper and painted and lots of trees and bushes either chopped down or trimmed. Not bad going really.

Working on a website for Galway Cardiology department at the moment and still have Corrib agricultural and environmental services, Balinasloe garden center, Irish Connemara Ponies, a builder and a couple of others still to get back to me with content for their sites, if they would I would be quite busy lol.

The skitter chase

Well what a morning I have had so far. Woke up and had a nice hot shower and waddled through to the living room to find that at least one of the dogs hadn't made it through the night without a toilet break actually they hadn't made it through without 12 and it was in a nice spray format. I was gagging. A roll of kitchen roll and a quick mop let me get a lot of the furniture out  then I set to work disinfecting the place. This is deckhands work, anyway the chase bit was when I was trying to get young Ben outside he kept running around through the spray effect adding to it probably cos he was scared at my expletives poor wee  &*$%^£$%. He managed to get out into the hallway "ohh nooooooooo" ohh yes and then into the laundry the spare bedroom and the porch leaking all the way.

I haven't had breakfast yet dont feel quite up to it yet, I'm trying to think what gave him such a bad case and am putting it down to Rowan berries as I noticed yesterday both him and Jessy were busy eating them when I was working outside. The two big dogs are on a bit of a diet but he was still underweight I guess he is even more underweight this morning.

Stripped the wallpaper off my office walls and gave it a coat of paint over the last couple of days so it is fresher but my elbow was aching like mad by the time I had finished the cold weather makes it ache too so I may keep a look out for a support sleeve thing see if that will help, I am kind of sore in a lot of my joints so am wondering if I should ask the Dr to up my prendisone drug as it gave me these symptoms when I was weening off it in Australia and the arthritis expert thought it was because my body wasn't producing enough of its own steroids anymore. Old age doesn't come alone, it comes with dog doodaa apparently.

another wild day

Well its still blowing hard here with intermittent heavy showers and sunny breaks, I,m in and out of the house like a yoyo and the dogs are covered in mud from the soil spreading.
Listening to Radio Scotland and the World Service online in the showers, there was a good discussion on wind farming on the other day and it was interesting to see that 99% of the people phoning in were anti wind farms. The spokesman / expert was of course a government employed (so therefore pro wind) wally who came out with the same old rhetoric that we hear all the time like the huge amounts of jobs that will be created, how wind farming produces no Co2  etc etc all total lies. There has been no news about the wind farm here but then again they can stall for as long as they like I suppose.

Angie is at a First aid course today it must be about the tenth one she has done, the last one I did was the Ship Masters First aid which was much more in depth, giving intravenous injections and the like. When you do the basic first aid over and over it gets a bit boring, mind you they change CPR every course you go to, weird seeing the position of the heart hasn't changed recently. She is going offshore (England) tomorrow for a couple of days.

I should go change the bedsheets here till the sun comes out again.

Not many boats in

Well it dried up for a couple of hours so I got 5 barrow loads of soil spread and  a few punnets of brambles gathered, Angie is making a bramble / apple tart for desert as I type. I also went down and checked the boat moorings, she is fine and sheltered in my wee corner of the marina, below is the oyster yacht I mentioned in my previous post and some boats in the harbour today, I thought there would be more considering the weather but they may well be sheltering in the Aran Islands as it is 2 hours closer to the fishing grounds and probably more craic there.

He has renewed the standing stainless rigging and had her sand blasted and checked for osmosis which she passed with flying colours, the self furler was damaged by sun and rain exposure so he had to buy a new sail there but the rest have hardly had any use. She is the sort of boat you could sail anywhere, wish she was mine.