Wild tomatoes and goldcrests

My goodness, how time flies when you're having fun!  It's ages since I wrote anything here - sorry.  As I've said before, work gets in the way of this sort of thing (and of getting on with anything worth writing about).

So, we've had our second lot of overnight visitors and we've already managed to poison one!  Poor Mum was fine when she arrived, but felt ill during the night and spent the rest of their stay in bed with just half a piece of toast to keep her going the whole time - well, we don't want to overdo the hospitality you know!  No seriously, I don't think it was anything we did - we went out for a meal the first evening and between us all we had the same as Mum without after effects, guess it must be a bug.  Anyway, she felt a bit better by Friday, but they went home again instead of carrying on up north as planned.

After our meal out, but before the bug took effect.

Yesterday, Bob moved the bird feeders from outside the caravan to the silver birch trees across the mudpatch from the kitchen door.  So, this morning we were a bit more attentive to the birdlife out there again.  Over breakfast I watched a robin trying to learn how to use the feeder.  Unlike the great tits and blue tits, it just doesn't seem to come naturally to a robin.  It gets marks for persistance though.  After a few attempts using the hummingbird technique of flapping like mad to hover without actually landing, it had a bit of a sit down and think on top of the logpile before having another go and actually managing to land on the feeder.  It then looked a bit puzzled about what to do next, so went for a fly around to have a ponder and then came back, landed, pecked at the nuts and I think managed to dislodge something because it then spent a while pecking around the ground under the feeder.  Later in the morning, we were working upstairs with the windows open and could hear a lot of tiny, very high-pitched bird noises - either long-tailed tits or goldcrests was our guess and so we hung out of the window to see.  Goldcrests - loads of them.  They are really tiny (I think they are Britains smallest birds, but don't quote me) and they just never sit still, so it's quite difficult to get a good look at them.  We had the binoculars though and managed to watch them for long enough to be sure.  They are quite cute (they make wrens look big) and have a very distinctive yellow stripe front to back on their head.  It was lovely to see so many just outside our window.

We now have another door in place - the ensuite now has privacy, how posh is that?!  Like the bedroom door, this has to fit under the tie-beam and so is tiny, but the pair of them look really good.  You know its funny but, now that there is a door on there, we feel the need to shut it when we've never worried about it before - just because we can I suppose. 

Like the bedroom door, we salvaged some old hinges we had lying around, cleaned them up and blacked them and they look really good.  These hinges have a separate, square spike which knocks into the door post and the loop at the end of the hinge drops onto the round peg attached to the spike.  It takes a fair whacking to get the spike into the oak post (even pre-drilled and chiselled out) and there is a worry that plaster will start dropping off with the thumping, but it seems to have survived - phew!


I finally got round to making the Christmas cake.  I was all set to do it on Monday and had decided to bake it in the woodburner oven.  So I lit the woodburner after lunch to get it up to temperature, but then various things happened and by the time I was ready to do it, I couldn't really be bothered and sat and read instead, now how bad is that?!  So, I did it on Friday instead and in the normal oven because it was really too warm to have the woodburner lit all afternoon.  I had to get my old Kenwood Chef out of storage for the occasion and was happily chopping nuts and cherries while the Kenwood worked away on creaming the butter and sugar when I looked up to see smoke billowing out of the mixer - darn it, another thing bites the dust!  So, I had to finish the cake with the hand-held mixer.  Bob took the Kenwood apart and there was one very obvious burnt-out bit (the capacitor I think).  We've had a look on-line and I think you can get a new bit, so some day we may try to repair it I suppose.  Anyway, the cake seems to have turned out OK and is now soaking up several spoons of brandy.

The other thing to bite the dust was our mouse (the computer mouse that is - I'm sure the real mice are still running round as healthy as anything).  The last blog I did was using the pad thing on the laptop and it took me ages - a real pain.  So we went to buy a new one in Currys - how many different sorts of mice can there be?!  All too complicated, so we went to a little proper computer place on the industrial estate and told them what we use the computer for and they told us what we needed - much simpler!  So we now have a wireless mouse which goes to sleep by itself if you ignore it for too long.  This means we are now the proud owners of a nano-dongle as well - impressed? We are!  I assume this is the tiny little thing you plug into the side of the laptop which 'talks' to the mouse itself.  You learn something every day!

I found a wild tomato plant this morning.  Bizarrly . . . . bizzarely . . . . bizzarley . . . ? . . strangely, it is growing in the stones behind the trailer.  It is about two feet tall, has flowers on it and some little green tomatoes - who said you need growbags, geenhouses and sunshine?!  I can only think that it must have grown from a seed planted by one of the chickens - they love tomatoes you know.