A lovely time

Our family with my parents.

I'm not sorry the blog is late again this week, we had a really wonderful time with our family in the UK. Earlier on this year our youngest son surprised us with an offer to pay for tickets to fly to the UK for a long weekend, as birthday presents for us both (okay mine was in April but we won't quibble about that). He knows it is a little bit difficult for us to take a great deal of time off together to see family and our family have trouble getting across to see us, so a long weekend seemed like the best option. He also arranged with our daughter for the family to meet up at her house and he made sure that Ian's brothers, their wives and my parents knew about it too. I think the general consensus was that it was lovely to see each other for a happy occasion, rather than a funeral as seems to be the case more recently.

It is damp in the mornings now

A dew covered dandelion head looking like a diamond
encrusted flower

Before the weekend we were pottering about doing the usual tasks around the farm. There are so many harvesting jobs to do and we wanted to get many done before the weekend away and some possible rain. We celebrated Ian's birthday on Tuesday by digging up potatoes and then going to the hotel for a meal. We were dismayed though that there was no hot French Chocolate cake, which is one of Ian's favourite desserts. He had to make do with an enormous bowl of ice-cream instead.

Most of the tomatoes are now harvested. The
Amaranth seed on the left has been sieved and sifted
a bit. The bright red berries are the raspberries and
the bucket on the right is hemp seed for eating
through the winter. There is little point in keeping any
for sowing next year, it will have seeded itself all
over the plot anyway.

Our autumn raspberries this year have been a roaring success. Last year we only had a few raspberries before a hard frost then finished them off. This year we have had at least three bucketfuls already and there are still lots to come and no forecasts of frosts yet. The first ones were sweet but the last ones are not as nice, but they will be fine dried and in cakes. We are also still harvesting the green grapes so we are really going to miss the fresh fruit on our breakfast when the frosts come and finish them all off. We've been having fruit on our breakfasts straight off the bush or the vine since late June.

Playing nicely 

Posing for the camera

Grandad and granddaughter reading a book about our farm
that we gave to her one Christmas

On Friday we got to the UK and then had a mad dash through the traffic to see our oldest granddaughter come out of school. It is only a little thing in so many ways, but not one we get to do often, so worth the effort. I had to squeeze into the back of our son's rather small car. (don't ask what it is, I didn't take notes and I'm useless with makes of cars). The front seats are fine, but even I struggled with head room and knee room in the back and I'm only around 5ft (152cm) tall. The advantage though is that I could put my knees on the seat in front and snooze.

Our youngest son's partner, our daughter's youngest son,
our oldest son's youngest daughter and our youngest son's
partner's daughter in the background. Got all that? 

We were treated well and had Fish and Chips for tea (dinner!) our normal treat when we are in the UK. I was good and only had a very small handful of chips but nearly the whole fish, so was rather relieved that it didn't have a disastrous effect on my blood sugar. I would have been heartbroken if it had. The full English breakfast the following morning was good and our son even nipped out in the morning to get supplies in for that. We went out for cake and coffee at a nice little cafe on a street that had quite a few such places but it felt rather weird sitting there feeling quite foreign somehow. England in some ways feels like a different country to the one we left, or maybe we have just become quite comfortable on mainland Europe that England just feels different. It's hard to explain in some ways.  We did realise after a while though that we were not sat on the sunny side of the street and that was probably why the cafe we were in was quieter than the one across the road that morning though.

A strawberry offering from our youngest granddaughter

Our oldest grandson (son of our oldest son)

In the evening we had dinner with our son's partner's father. We had met before but not actually sat down with him to eat and chat. It was a very entertaining evening and nice to find out a bit more about Chile where he comes from. We had something in common as he had studied sociology in his younger years and so we could discuss the type of topics that you wouldn't normally chat about around the table or at least from that kind of perspective.

The dolls house is mine that was made for me when I was a
child by my Nan's neighbour

The morning of the family get together our son made pancakes for breakfast. Not bad for someone who didn't really do much cooking at home and when he did it was beautifully arranged but cold. Fortunately the pancakes weren't cold. Our trip up was not as eventful as our other son's the night before. He arrived with his small family at 11:30pm after a hold up on one of the motorways after a crash. On our way from the airport the few days before there was an enormous hold up due to another crash. Folks had got out of their cars and were striking up conversations with fellow travellers, it was that long a delay. I really do hate the traffic in the UK and is often something we mention when people ask if we would move back.

Two of our grandchildren playing with our great, great niece,
who were delighted to see and had invited herself.

Anyway, fortunately everyone arrived safely and we sat around and ate, talked and cuddled babies. A perfect type of day for me. One of Ian's cousins also popped in for a short while, since he was in the area. The little ones were really good and played well together. If they argued at all it was short-lived and heartening to see them getting on so well.

It looks like the youngest too are weighing up who has the
best vehicle. They are cute, at least I think so.

To finish off we took our oldest granddaughter off to school and then decided that rather than risk any more hold ups on the way to the airport we would set off early. We had a tour around Cambridgeshire, avoiding heavy traffic and had lunch not far from the airport. Quite relaxed and uneventful for our trip home. Unfortunately for us in Latvia we clipped a small deer that ran out in front of us. It did get up though and shakily went on its way. We also had an unexpected trip down memory lane as we had to take a route back home that we haven't used in years since they asphalted the road to Riga. One of the river bridges was closed to traffic overnight and so we had to take a detour. Still at least there wasn't the congestion like in the UK, although we sometimes think there are more cars on the roads late at night in rural areas than during the day.

Good day at the office, dear?

On the road back from Jekabpils, a stone house on the hill

Things are settling down a little here and we are getting back to some kind of normality, whatever that might be. Normal for us, isn't exactly most people's idea of normal. I often ask Ian if he has "had a good day at the office" knowing full well that his office is the caravan, or the woods, or the alpaca paddocks. So Ian is now back to his regular routine of going out to the land, a bit earlier now each day since the days are getting longer, where he first lets the alpacas out, feeds the chickens and has a cup of coffee whilst sitting down to watch the chickens, usually with the cats on his lap. Next he will clear the alpaca poo, gathering up the precious manure for the gardens later on in the year or for the pasture, before then giving the animals fresh hay if they are low. After that it depends on the day, cut up wood, clear some more of the forest, sort out electric to the barn, do maintenance on the car, or other myriad winter jobs. After lunch he feeds the alpacas with beets, squash, apples or carrots depending on what we have, with some commercial food concentrate. The amount of concentrate varies according to the temperature. Their rations will be cut this week as the temperatures have risen, so much so that the snow has practically all melted. Then it is back to the other jobs of the day.

A little village where we take a short cut

Every time we take this route, we wonder if it will still see
this house standing, as the weather slowly eats its way
through the cob walls

My days have been filled with studying again. I got some good news and bad news this week on that score. The good news is that the academic paper that I finally submitted has not been rejected, the bad news is that I have to do a bit of a re-write of one of the sections and a cull of some others. I was actually encouraged by the pre-review process though, as the editor was quite encouraging and the basic work of interviews with different people can remain the same - at least at this stage and that means the core of the paper was good. At first I was wondering what on earth would I have to cull, but after looking at the paper again, I can see where the editor wants me to aim and I think I might be able to use the carefully crafted work in another paper (not all my own crafting I hasten to add, my supervisor has been working hard on it too), so in the end, she may even have done me a favour and I like that bit.

A frozen river. Sorry the photo was taken
whilst Ian was driving - hence the lines

There is lots of sand mining in Latvia. Many hills are just
plain sand

I am trying to take weekends off from studying to give my brain chance to process things and pace myself better. I will study at the weekends if I have had to take days off to do something else during the week, but otherwise I have been much better at putting the work away. This week I made some bread, sliced the bacon, packed some files away, sorted out the knitting patterns, did some washing, put some new elastic into my pyjama trousers, resewed the channel for the elastic by hand and finally put away the nativity scene (oh yes, the nativity scene! It just kind of sat there, rather unobtrusively and got forgotten about). The Christmas tree is still up though, albeit without decorations and it is only just now beginning to drop needles, but I think that is because it hasn't been watered for a while.

A little cottage by the woods

They are trying to add wild ponies back to some areas

This week I did take extra days off, as we had to sort out the radiators at our other apartment. If you read last week's blog you will know that our old ones cracked or even exploded in the freezing weather. As the weather warmed up slowly, the radiators began to leak and the floors still needed cleaning from the bursts before that all liquified and ruined the laminate. I seemed to have spent quite a bit of this last week on my knees and it wasn't in prayer. I cleaned up our living room floor where we live, because of all the mess from Benedikts over the previous week and then I spent the rest of the day cleaning the floors and emptying pots sat under the leaks at our other place. A friend of ours came with some young men to remove the old radiators on the Tuesday and take them for scrap, thankfully before the real thaw got going. One advantage of the old radiators is that the cast iron weighs a lot and we got enough to cover one replacement radiator anyway, which we got from Jekabpils. We were blessed by the fact that one of our neighbours was outside when we got back and he immediately offered to help take in the radiators for us.

Most of Latvia is like this, flat!

Looks like it has seen better days

A trip to Jekabpils does mean "Fish and Chips" but we were disappointed this time, no pureed peas, French fry type chips instead of English style chips and the batter was all wrong. It was okay as a meal and the fish was nice, but it was not like our little bit of Englishness that we had come to expect. We are pretty good at not really missing much from the UK in terms of food. If we can't get it, we either do without or I make it. So I am quite adept at making bacon now, although that is actually quite simple anyway and I make pies and cakes from time to time. After that it is pretty much the way I have always cooked, using what vegetables we have. We make a joke that we eat a lot of processed food at this time of the year, the difference is that we have processed it, so we eat a lot of frozen food or food in jars and really we only have squash, potatoes and onions that aren't processed in some way.

The race against time. The sun is setting here and we had to
get back to put animals away

The cake display today was even better than this

So that's about this week, a fairly ordinary week! I am back in Tartu again after my regular four bus journey starting at 7:15am and going through till 5pm ready for lectures to start tomorrow morning at 8:15am (that is not a civilised time of the day to have lectures) and Ian is still back at home. I did find though that Cesis on a Monday morning is a little livelier than Cesis at about the same time on a Sunday morning and I even found a lovely little cafe for a hot chocolate and a piece of cake. I wish I had taken a photo now as the window looked even more stunning today than in this photo taken off the internet.