Philosophising - well maybe!

My first piece of felt from our own alpacas. It is not as
flimsy as it looks here. It is quite a sturdy piece of fabric

I had a spare few minutes this weekend, or maybe actually I was avoiding reading vast numbers of papers for my next course, so I decided to make my first piece of felt from Herkules fleece. Herkules is not our best fleece producer and the part of the fleece I used was probably the roughest bit, but at least it  did work. I got a decent size, if itchy, piece of fabric that felt tough enough to use for something. It also came up nice and white in the process. I am not wonder woman, felting is really easy and I even used to teach it to children, quite young children sometimes too. All you need is the type of wool that felts easily, some washing up liquid and as hot water as you can stand or lots of energy if you can't use hot water. Without any extra equipment apart from your hands, it is possible to make felt balls, with a bamboo mat it is possible to make fabric like in the picture. The only problem was that there was fluff everywhere from the process. I will have a go at making some more pieces and see what I can do with them. 

Reunited with the flock. Do you like the Google animation
on this? Clever isn't it!

Our sick sheep has improved and was reunited with our other two sheep. Ian thought it was quite important to do this as it seemed to be developing quite a bond with the brown chickens. Ian lets the chickens run around in the greenhouse for some of the morning and they head straight for a pile of buckwheat and so did the sheep when they were let out. She put her head close down to them and just stood there. She didn't do much, apart from lick a chicken from time to time and they let her do it too. Strange kind of bond, but we decided that she was probably lonely and needed the company of her own kind. We will just have to see how she gets on for the rest of the week. 

One of the brown chickens that the sheep had bonded with

Looking good

All our animals were given vitamin injections and worming injections this week, apart from one errant sheep who Ian couldn't catch. The vet came to help us do this since it was our first time and she also take some samples of skin from two of our alpacas just to make sure they haven't got mites. She loves our alpacas and thinks they are so easy to deal with, even if she had to avoid one of them every now and again, who was registering her displeasure about the skin scrape and injections by spitting. At least she had good reason for spitting, but next time I will knit her a spit bag, so she can't spray everyone at the same time.

Sitting down on the job! The job of eating that is

More snow this week

We re-visited the camelid place this week. I went along mainly to make sure Ian did not come back with a camel or a llama. Well that is what I told everyone. It was a good chance to talk to the ladies who run the attraction place and find out how they look after their animals and what they do to make sure they are healthy. We feel we are on track, but we are going to start giving monthly vitamin injections for the winter, and we are trying some different vegetables to see if they will eat them. So far only the older one likes veg, which actually works out really well as her condition is not absolutely brilliant, she is a lot older and this might account for it, but we would like her condition to be better next year, so she can have one more cria (baby). The others tend to muscle in if there is the sheep concentrate on offer, but the veg they don't care for and so our old one gets the chance to eat all she wants of that, with no interference from the others. 

Sunrise on a winter's morning

Even the lake is starting to freeze in our village

Ian would still like a camel though and wondered if it could be trained to pull a plough. Now that would make folks stop and stare. They are bad enough stopping to gawk at our alpacas. Good job the road isn't a particularly busy one or they would cause an accident. One thing we learnt about camels is that they live for 50 years, so if we did get one, our kids would likely inherit it! Now that would make for a funny reading of the will. The other thing we learnt is that young camels like to play! They jump about and skip and try to get people to join in, only they are bigger than me. I think I will stick to cria, at least baby alpacas are only small. 

Snuggling up in the alpaca house. Unfortunately another
chicken that was doing the same has disappeared

The travelling continued this week. I took the train back to Riga as usual and they are still working on the train tracks, which means getting on a bus for part of the journey. Getting back onto the train though is like mountain climbing, the train is so very high up from the platform at Cesis. I can barely get up with my rucksack on my back and handbag in hand. The lady behind me was struggling even more, she had a huge and very heavy bag. I stopped to give her a hand and between the two of us, we managed to get the bag up onto the train. Makes me wonder how they would manage with a wheelchair - there is space for one on the train with a special restraint for the chair. The travelling is much easier now and time just seemed to fly by. I got work done on my computer and was at the various stops before I knew it. In my weekly travels though, I am always astounded by the ability of young men to fall asleep. They get on, pay for their ticket and then nod off. Youngsters just don't seem to have the stamina these days! (only joking by the way - I need emoticons on this)

Thornless berry leaves

I had a last minute meeting with a lady who is monitoring meetings between a government department and ordinary people. It was quite fascinating and very encouraging to hear about. It seems like the work is going in the right direction, at least in some departments anyway. I had to wait a little while for her to arrive for our meeting and I waited in the doorway of a shop and was much amused to watch two young women photographing a willow structure reindeer with a parcel balanced precariously on its back. They moved the reindeer successively towards the door and then eventually out of it? It was even more amusing to watch them trying to keep the parcel on its back when it was obviously just made out of cardboard and it was windy outside. But what that was all about, I have no idea. As I said the meeting went well and we were chatting and chatting, eventually I said I really have to go and she showed me to the lifts. I didn't know my way around the shop very well and when I got out of the lift, I obviously headed in the wrong direction and came out on a street I wasn't expecting. It took me a little time to get my bearings and ended up running for the bus - well part of the way anyway. I turned up, just in time to see the bus pulling out of the bay. I was just very relieved it wasn't the last bus home, otherwise I would have been in trouble.

Sitting around on straw in the snow seems to be the thing
to do

I have mentioned before that Ian is having to do some of the work that I used to do and this week he had to sort some paperwork without me, not easy. He was going to finalise the papers for the apartment we ended up buying, so someone didn't lose their home (explanation here if you missed it) and also to make sure the greenhouse was registered properly on the land book (the paper that notes all owners, past and present, not much of a book at the moment, but over the years I think it will be). The problem is that I sent him with the wrong file that didn't contain an important piece of paper, he also found out it could have been done at the same time as the barn project was done, which is annoying as I had mentioned it at the time we were trying to sort that out, but we had been told not to bother just then - not the bureaucrats fault this time. Arrrgghh! It means a few more trips backwards and forwards, which is very annoying for Ian, as his time is limited with the short daylight hours.

Tartu university, not the one that I go to, the other one

This week I was supposed to have a full week of "Philosophy of Science" and to prepare for this I was confronted with many, many papers to read of great length and some were really irritating to read. It was even more irritating when the tutor didn't show up in the morning. I have to wait until tomorrow to find out what happened to her. Despite the irritations however, I do like some concepts, such as facts are not facts in a vacuum, they depend on our perception of them. For instance measurements are not absolutes they are relative - what do I mean by that? Measurements are just an aid to measure changes or how big things are, but it is based not on a fact but on a standard developed to measure those changes or sizes. You can measure using imperial measurements or metric, which are both based on standards developed, both equally valid, but different. If measurements were absolutes, the Mars orbiter would not have crashed into Mars because the measurements would have been fixed, instead there was a mix up between the imperial measurements and the metric. Whoops! Only a mere $125m mistake. Kind of makes the point though that which standard you use is important.

Tartu city centre Christmas lights

Scientists like to think they are neutral, that their work is purely based on facts, but they are not as neutral as they like to think they are. It came as quite a shock to me, coming as I do from a natural science background, to realise that my understanding of the world determined the results and outcomes as much as what I measured. I think I kind of realised that when I finished my degree in Pharmacology and Chemistry, as there was one thing I was absolutely sure about and that was, I was not going into the pharmaceutical industry, as I did not agree with the ethics. The pharmaceutical industry is not a neutral evidence based industry, but one based on the profit motive. Drugs are not developed for their effectiveness but for their ability to generate a nice fat income for the company, so forget those one off cures, they are looking at heart disease where the incidence is high and they can keep feeding people drugs for quite a while and don't even get me started on Statins.

Winter jobs, putting fleece around the hay to stop most of
the snow getting to it

Whilst on philosophy I can't leave without mentioning the passing of Nelson Mandela. I have a huge respect for a man who sought peace and lived out forgiveness. He was no saint and that in itself is inspiring. He was grounded in reality and worked hard to see his people walk in freedom. There is still a long way to go in South Africa, but it is inspiring how far he did take the country and not always from the seat of power, as he chose not to stay in that place but work from the outside. I wonder what his legacy will be?

Pathways, roadways and ponds are now marked out with
sticks so we know where they are in the winter when the
snow gets deep

Ooeerr! It's winter already

Here, what's all this white stuff? And who nicked all the
grass?

It is no longer squelchy under foot, in fact it is downright crunchy and am I happy about that? Well no actually. I have to admit to having been caught out by the snow and the cold this year. It is forecast to warm up soon and then we will have to get back on with our pre-winter preparations, but we feel rather unready for this rather early onset of very wintry weather. Ian continued on with his Franken creations and made a Frankenmanger (available for hire for Christmas nativity scenes, only you will have to fight the alpacas for it as it is a big hit with them). We had to up the alpacas feed a lot over the last few days and Ian was desperately trying to finish off the feeder for them as the snow was coming down, another pre-winter job that got caught out by the changing weather. Prior to that they were quite happy on the grass which is now under about 15-20cm of snow. Have you noticed though that Ian has started a trend with his Franken creations with the Americans heading for Frankenstorm? A fellow blogger also wrote to say she had reblogged our blog about Franken-items and described her own Franken-paths. I think he should have patented the idea!

Frankenmanger

You probably can't see but hidden amongst the hay is
Sofie. She jumped in when the alpacas got a bit close
and then she couldn't get out as they were eating from the
rack. It was very funny to watch the interactions

A right pain to have all this snow, but it does look pretty

Normally I welcome the onset of the snow as it covers a usually grim scene of mud, but the last week had been quite nice, but then it would be as my parents were here on holiday. My parents have rarely had any bad weather on holiday in the 49 years they have holidayed together, apart from the odd shower that is. I do seem to remember sitting in a tent with the rain dripping as a kid, but I must have remembered that because of it being so unusual for holiday weather. My parents, bless em' came prepared to help out and my dad seemed to enjoy trundling around helping us get veg beds sorted out for the winter and dahlias dug up, at least he knew what he was doing, I didn't (I hope the ones we put in the shed were alright as I wasn't expecting the intense cold and I thought I would have got them down into the cellar before the heavy frosts - for once this year the forecasts were pretty close to being reliable). My dad was also a great source of information as he has a lot of practical experience gained through being around farms from a young age, although never a farmer himself, family friends were. He even managed to help where the internet failed - so own up, who else knows how to prepare a duck for the table? What do you do with those little feathers? Apparently you use meths and set fire to it, to singe off the little feathers. It wasn't all one way though, we have gained quite a bit of information along the way too, such as cockchafer bugs make great chicken snacks, which my dad didn't know.

Cesis castle

We didn't make my parents work the whole time, nearly but not quite. They enjoyed going out to the hotel a couple of times and revelled in the fact it was nowhere near as expensive as the restaurants in the UK, we also took a trip to a castle and museum in Cesis. When we bought the tickets to get into the castle we were given lanterns to go up the tower, it was certainly steep and dark, but well worth it for the view out of the tower of the town of Cesis and surrounding areas.  We also popped along to a nearby camelid farm that had some alpacas. It was rather comical watching the staff try to move an alpaca that they wanted to trim the toenails of, because there was no way that alpaca was getting up so they could get to the toenails. It sat down very firmly on its haunches. Hope ours are a little more cooperative. They had an alpaca in from another farm for breeding and their male was at other farm, so it looks like we have scope for exchange for breeding purposes, only the alpaca brought in was so tiny compared to ours, we are not sure about breeding from that one, but they maybe interested in our alpaca male anyway. It will be good to have a little cooperation between alpaca owners in Latvia, it can only be of benefit to all of us. Mind you, I am not sure about Ian's new found love of camels, alpacas is one thing but a camel!!!! Noooooooo!

A view from the tower with Cesis in the
background

A park in Cesis. You can see what good
weather my parents brought with them

A view of Cesis from the new castle

The new bucket, just the right size for
making trenches

The big news from the last two weeks is that we have organised to get electricity to our land. We have paid for the cable and it is residing at the electricians house, we also organised our friend to make a bucket for the tractor and now we just need that dratted weather to warm up a bit to dig a trench so the cable can be laid. We are hoping to get the electric down to the greenhouse and then we can at least provide heat for our animals if it turns out worse than now. Our chickens are doing okay in the greenhouse and we have moved the caravan in, so that should provide a bit of extra protection as a heat source, if it absorbs any heat during the day that is. If the weather turns really bad then we will move the alpacas in there too to contribute to the overall heat of the place.

Our orchard plot at sunset

Talking of heating, our issue is still ongoing with that, but a meeting to review the situation got a surprisingly good turn out at short notice from the other apartment dwellers and a surprising amount of agreement at last. They seem to be beginning to see that the heating company is not acting fairly. In fact other apartment blocks owe more money than ours does and still got heat, but because we actually complained about the cold water they sent last winter they have decided to single us out! We did finally get our heat back on, just in time for the sharp drop in temperatures, after two council members stood up for us, but it was pretty close. Little by little we hope to sort out this situation, alongside others that is - we can't do it on our own.

Frost on the gate

Work has been better this past couple of weeks too, much quieter. Kind of boring again! Just the way I like it now. Actually it is not that boring really, it is still interesting to learn more about the students from all walks of life, something I still find fascinating after nearly 9 years of doing this job, but I will still settle for the quiet life in that department for the time being. There is one thing I am glad about in my job, is the fact that the director is great guy to work for, it made dealing with the issues the past few weeks much easier. My daughter passed on a blog regarding leadership and it is so spot on, I much prefer working for someone who recognises giftings in people and works to put a good team around himself, instead of a group of yes men. If you want a read it is by a guy called Steve McAlpine, another great guy, who obviously thinks a lot and yes I've met him a couple of times.

The chickens content in the greenhouse
along with our caravan