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.

Happy Bonfire Night!

Happy Bonfire Night!  Well, we have our own little bonfire (in the woodburner).  There is a proper bonfire and fireworks at the pub in the village and we should really go along and support it and have a pint in the pub, and we were going to, but Bob doesn't get excited about fireworks and  the accompanying karaoke and disco does kinda put you off!  So, sausage casserole here and our own little fire will have to do.

This has been an odd week - I went from having very few extra hours at work (which was quite nice) to working late one night, going in early another day and working eight hours on my day off!  So, being, there until gone 8pm last night and back in for 7am this morning, it felt as though I might as well have just stayed there overnight.  I'm in at 8am tomorrow too, but at least I have Monday off in place of Friday and I'm going to say no to any extra this week!

House-wise, we now have a bedroom door which seems really strange.  We're used to seeing light from the rooflight above the 'stairs', but now there is just blackness in that direction.  Bob took the old door apart, cut it down to size and re-attached the ledges and braces to make it fit the hole. Once he had cut it down and laid it out downstairs, he had to go back up and check the measurements several times because it looked so tiny.  In place, it reminds me of the door in Alice in Wonderland that she has to drink the potion to get through - quite cute really.



I guess this should have a person in the picture to emphisise
the titchiness of the door, but Bob wasn't available to pose!

And this has been my contribution this week - I've painted the boxing in in the oak room.  Bob has also chopped the bottom of the bed, so that can now be put back together ready for our next visitors.  Mum and Dad are coming on Wednesday for two nights on their way to the Lake District.  They have been to 'stay' many times while we were in the caravan, but following a very cold December week in the caravan the first year we were here, they have opted for the local Travel Lodge ever since!  So, it'll be nice to be able to offer them proper accomodation at last! 

Getting Strangled!

We have not really done too much work since I last reported - kind of semi-days-off.  On Thursday we went shopping - Sainsbury-type and Builders Merchant-type.  We had run out of plasterboard and used most of our bag of plaster and we needed to get some trowels, etc for our new skimming hobby.  Then in the afternoon we did some of the fiddly bits of plasterboard - round the little draft-hole windows, rooflight and the cubby-hole above the bread oven - they all take much longer than they should do of course.  Bob also did some of the beading around the windows.  Modern plaster generally has very square corners which we didn't really want.  Our plastering guru, Phil, told us that traditionally wooden dowel was fixed on outside cornersand then skimmed over which just gives a slightly rounded corner - good idea!

On Friday while waiting for the promised early morning plasterboard delivery I made a cake and gave the caravan a really good clean and Bob started insulating the lean-to where the hot water tank will be housed.  The plasterboard finally arrived at about 1pm - just as we sat down for a sandwich (isn't it always the way?).  So we then had to carry all that through to store it in the 'lounge'.  We then collected another trailer full of woodchips from Phil and Anne, had a leisurely cup of tea in their garden and then came home to spread the chips.  Some on the path to keep the mud at bay and some in the bottom of the hedge to keep the weeds at bay.  After that, we couldn't muster the enthusiasm to do anything else and so the only solution was to sit on the bench and have a beer . . . . it's a hard life sometimes!

Yesterday Carol and Graham (my sister and brother-in-law) came for a visit - hence the cake-making and cleaning - and we had a really lovely day.  Graham had a works 'do' in the evening which meant they had to leave at about 4pm, so they got up really early and arrived at about 9am - in time for bacon and egg baps.  I have to admit I was feeling a little delicate (the beer on the bench led to more than one bottle of wine and was rounded off by a tidying up session of the sloe gin and blackcurrant vodka bottles).  The bacon butty helped though and after a tour of the house we went for a walk along the other side of the valley.  The weather was just fantastic and we sat looking at the view back across to our house with a homemade pasty for lunch and got back with just enough time for a cuppa and a piece of cake - all very civilised.

As we knew in advance that Carol and Graham would be leaving early, last week we booked tickets to see The Stranglers play in Birmingham - it sounded like a good idea at the time!  After lugging the plasterboard up awkward steps on Friday and then the up-and-downy walk during the day, our legs were quite tired and achy.  I don't think I'd drunk enough water either and so had a splitting headache.  Now, that doesn't bode well for an enjoyable evening standing watching a very loud concert.  When the first support act came on the music was so loud you could feel it thumping through your whole body . . . . and I still had a headache!  Really weirdly though my headache disappeared straightaway.  It must have been thumped out of my head, through my ears and got trampled on the floor!  We ended up really enjoying it.  The Stranglers still sound like they used to (not like old men trying to thump out the hits they had 30 years ago) and the second support act - Wilko Johnson from Dr Feelgood - was just as good as when we saw him before we moved.  It then took us a whole hour to get out of Birmingham city centre - roadworks meant it was just gridlocked . . . . . at 11.30pm!  How can it be that busy?!

Today we didn't actually get up until 11.30am - absolutely disgraceful, I know!  But it is ages since we've done that and we did get the paper read in bed, so it's not as if we were wasting time or anything!

We're creeping toward the double-figure mark with blog-followers!  One more and we're there.  So, hello to Andrew who I am pretty sure is Phil and Ann's son, their name on here is Panda - so, a baby Panda . . . well hardly a baby actually!

I've decorated the wall on the floor??!!

Yep, how exciting is that - I've done some real decorating!  I've painted two walls . . . . on the floor.  Ben had real trouble getting his head around that until I explained that these were the plasterboard panels which fit in the oak frame.  Because the green oak will shrink over time, we've cut rebates in it for the plasterboard to fit in.  That way, we won't get a gap between the plasterboard and the oak when it shrinks.  So, it makes sense to paint the plasterboard before it fits into the oak frame, so we won't even get a grey line round the edge when it shrinks.  So, we laid all the pieces (14 in all) out on the floor and I have put the first coat on.  It took us all day to cut the pieces to fit.  There are some fiddly bits around the knee braces (the diagonal timbers across the top corners of the walls) involving slightly curving edges and small triangular pieces and then the end wall has a sloping top and a window hole, also with a sloping top.  We also had to cut bits out for sockets.  Still, they are all precision fits and it was a good job done. 

Once again, we had to stop for lots of chats today.  The delivery driver from the builders merchant always stops for a cuppa and a chat when he's here, then this afternoon the Quarry Manager called on his way back from town ostensibly to check the quarry boundary, but he didn't do much checking and we had quite a chat with him.  Then Roy, one of the neighbours who helped with the oak frame had to stop for a while.  He owns a rescue greyhound who is as soft as anything and always enjoys having her ears tickled while we chat.  It has got to the point that she won't walk past without stopping for a tickle and a chat.  I looked out from where we were working and she'd firmly planted her feet and was refusing to move no matter how much Roy coaxed her.  As soon as Bob said 'Come on then', she trotted over and almost jumped off the retaining wall in an effort to get close enough to be stroked.  She then refused to carry on with her walk and Roy had to pick her up and carry her off!  What a softie!  Then, just as we got back to work someone else walking their dog stopped for a chat.  No wonder this house is taking so long!  Only joking, I really like that part of living here.

Oh, nearly forgot - we had a letter from the Planning Department approving the extra window in the timber-frame room which is really good news, I think it will make a lot of difference in there.

Last night's talk on beekeeping was really interesting and has us all fired up to get a hive and give it a go.  I've read a bit about it over the last few months, but was put off because it all sounds so darned complicated and we'd resigned ourselves to just planting flowers to attract bees and maybe making a few 'bee homes' for solitary bees (we'll still do that).  The chap talking was the President of the Shropshire Beekeepers and was very down-to-earth and understood exactly when I said it all sounded too complicated from the books, but said it wasn't really unless you wanted to get fanatical about it.  Did you know you can actually get artificial insemination kits for bees?  Now, how bizarre is that?!  So, maybe next spring we'll get into beekeeping.

We're off to the Far East this weekend . . . . well, Peterborough.  You know, we feel like real country bumpkins whenever we venture out of our little 15 mile radius.  Big roads, fast cars - we're just not used to it.  It's also funny how the jeans I thought were clean and perfectly presentable when I'm slobbing around here, going to the village shop or builders merchants suddenly look shabby and dirty as soon as we get on the M6!  Anyway, we're visiting Bob's Dad and then I'm going to see my neices in a song and dance show and having a girly evening (not sure I can remember how to do girly!) with them, my sister and Laura while Bob comes back here.  Then on Sunday I'm meeting Ben and getting my car back - I'll have forgotten how to drive it it's been so long.  He did promise to clean and hoover it, fill the tank and supply sweets for my journey home - yum.