Going, going, gone!

Going!

Our polytunnel, that came down over the winter, has now finally totally collapsed, partly due to wind and partly due to a little help from us. One end section came down while Ian was working in the area. He had been sorting through the bits, separating the components and taking out nails and screws so the salvageable wood can be reused and remembers thinking that he wasn't stood in the best of places as it was a bit windy and the end piece could come down anytime, he looked up and the piece had gone. It fell onto the snow so quietly he never heard it and fortunately it fell away from him, otherwise it could have been a different scenario. The opposite end, however was a little more robust as there were still two sections held together with struts and so between the two of us we began the process of taking off the remaining plastic and weakening the construction - Ian inadvertently weakened it a little more than anticipated with the back hoe on the tractor as he drove over a bit of a hump in the doorway, it was only just a bit that caught the top of the doorway but enough to weaken the structure some more and split a crosspiece. A few hefty wallops from a long piece of wood removed some other cross pieces and then we were able to push the rest of the structure over. It was kind of sad really, all that work and aggravation to get it put up in the first place and then we ended up pushing it over. Still the site can now be cleared and work can begin on the new construction, well just as soon as we get the wood - hopefully it's on order but the guy ordering it for us had more important things on his mind as he was making the coffin for his sister-in-law, so we don't think we should hassle him really.

Gone!

Friday night we had been out to some friends and as we rolled up to our doorway there was a group of young men getting out of the car in front of us, we groaned. Not that we have anything against young men but when this lot turn up, it usually means loud music ensues, well not really loud, but the bass can be heard clear up to our apartment from the first floor apartment (English -ground floor) and we are on the third floor (English -second). One of the delights of living in a concrete apartment block is the way that bass sounds carry, which is a shame as normally our neighbours are quite quiet really. The noise levels went up and down practically all night and meant we didn't have a great deal of sleep, if it had been loud all the time I would have got up but because it went up and down I would drift back of to sleep. The other reason for not getting up is the fact it doesn't really happen that often and could be far worse with a young chap in his late teens left to fend for himself as his parents work abroad (all too common in Latvia), however, when the music started again the next night I wasn't prepared to put up with it. We had gone to bed and it was just tolerable but as I lay there the music volume went up, so I waited till one minute past eleven and got up, got dressed (didn't want to frighten him too much and besides it was cold outside and they were in the next section along from our block of six apartments) and went to the apartment to confront the young man. I wasn't sure what to expect, but at least I knew he understood English; in fact he was perfectly pleasant and asked if it was past eleven with a grin (the hour at which noises should be kept to a minimum) to which I replied yes it was as pleasantly as possible. I was completely amazed that the music was then turned down and stopped low - perhaps he hadn't realised that his music can carry all the way up so many floors and thought since the neighbours above him were away it wouldn't matter if his music was loud.

Sad really! But had to be done.

Christmas seemed to come early or late this week, as we had lots of parcels all turn up at once, a book, a load of seeds, two phones and a packet of plasterboard raw plugs. An eclectic mix of things to be sure. We can get raw plugs here very easily but not plasterboard raw plugs so when our daughter-in-law sent us some phones to replace our fast dying ones I asked if she could put a few of the them in the post at the same time. My mobile phone is a very ancient beast as we bought it shortly after we moved to Denmark and so was close to 8 years old. Ian's phone was bought in America and the battery didn't seem to hold the charge, especially at low temperatures, which is not terribly useful when he works out on the land in winter, and we couldn't seem to get a replacement for it although we have tried. The replacements, therefore, came just in time to keep us connected with the world. Ian is happy now as he has the theme tune from Spike Milligan's Q8 series on his phone, think it might drive me nutty but fortunately we don't get too many phone calls. One thing I did learn with my new phone is that I need my glasses to input numbers I added * instead of + for all the international codes which didn't help when I wanted to send a text to one of my sons in England, took me ages to work out why it wouldn't send. Senior moment I think they call it!

See the snow is going, honest! Check back with last week's
blog if you don't believe me.

I wondered if the Latvian remembrance marches by those who belonged to the Waffen SS would make it into the news again this year, with all its dilemmas and problematic viewpoints; they didn't exactly, the news from Libya and Japan drowned out the yearly roasting the Latvians get from the march, however it is a play about the marches that has made the news. It may not solve the dilemma of whether it is is right to march in remembrance of fallen comrades of the SS, after all the Germans have remembrance parades too, but it does at least open people's eyes to the complexity of the issue, as to what is being remembered. Many of the soldiers fighting on behalf of the Nazis were co-opted and even if they weren't, they were fighting against the Russians who they feared would take away their sovereignty, which had oh so recently been won and indeed was lost when the Russians invaded. Don't think I am justifying the marches, I am not, as sometimes they are just an excuse to stir up racism against the sizeable Russian speaking minority but I do wish that the media were not so quick to condemn as they usually are, especially when only a few days later the Latvians remember so many who were rounded up and deported to Siberia, many of whom never came back, including children too.

Yes we have gorgeous piles of mucky looking snow, well
actually they look like great heaps of soil but really it is
more snow than soil. 

I had a bit of a shock last week in our English lessons. We were having a bit of a rest between topics and I asked one of the ladies when she was next going to Ireland to see her husband, only to be informed she was going next week and she was going for two months. I wasn't the only one to be shocked as her friends didn't know either, but it means that lessons are cancelled now until September as that would have reduced the class down to just two ladies and it is bit of a way to get there. By the time the lady returns back from Ireland it will be the summer holidays, hence the long gap. I shall be sad in one way not to be going, but in another it actually makes my life a little simpler as I have quite a few assignments due over the next 8 weeks before I finish the taught bit of my Masters; next year I start on the thesis proper. It was also good as our printer decided to act very strange last week and would only print out two sheets at a time before flashing an error message at me, which meant printing out the lessons for the next section a pain in the neck as I needed four copies of about 8 pages and doing them two at a time was not funny. I managed to print out enough for last week and then gave up, and now they will not be needed until September anyway.

I was going to post a picture to show you that finally our
snow was going, but it snowed again and instead of a
broad patch of grass we have pristine snow again.

Came across an interesting idea this last week called guerilla funding, a bit like guerilla gardening but planting money in strategic places instead of seeds. The idea is to plant money in places where money doesn't often get to and doesn't feed the glowing virtuous feeling that sometimes comes with giving to charity and doesn't have the hang ups of micro-loans and the problems that can come with that. It is just using money to bless people without them having to be eternally grateful to the giver. Love it! Another interesting idea is from a young man who set up a website called Save Latvia. His premise is that if enough people would give at least a symbolic 1€ then Latvia's debt to the IMF could be paid for or at least a good proportion of it. It is a brave and novel idea and I don't know if the guy is kosher but you have to applaud him for his initiative and so far I haven't found anything to doubt he is anything other than just a young student with a deceptively, creative idea. Still wondering whether to donate or not but then again I shall be contributing my own little contribution to the Latvian Government - I have to pay my taxes for this last year, while Ian gets a rebate for his work at the hospital. Jammy dog, as our family would say.

An ordinary life

I think by next week this will look very different with the
start of the thaw. The tracks in the middle are a lynx

It's hard to write about ordinary life just after reading of such devastation in Japan, but ordinary life does go on and I am grateful for the ordinariness of life carrying on around me. I am grateful for the smiles and enthusiastic waves from neighbours (not really quite sure why the greetings were so enthusiastic, but still grateful nonetheless), I am also grateful for a warm house and food on the table. All perfectly ordinary, nothing remarkable until you realise how precious they are, how precarious it could be, how in an instant it could all be swept away by some quirk of nature, or by some revolution. In most earthquakes we read about, there is a concentration on the rescue stories, on the triumphs and the tragedies of ordinary people, but no not this time the media appear to have moved on to the threat of the nuclear reactor meltdown, or is that just the BBC? Or they are concentrating on the effects on the economy I to be honest I do not really care what speculators think of the economy of Japan, they should not be distracting the Japanese's Government from the mammoth task of clearing up and putting things to right, I think they have enough on their plate. I want to hear the stories, I want to hear how the Japanese people are? How are they doing, not the flippin' economy.

Ian dug out the drainage ditch for the
barn so the water can flow. He needed
me to give it a little perspective

So what has our ordinary life been like this week? Actually it hasn't felt that ordinary at all, things are changing - the sounds of Spring have rushed in upon us. For the first time in ages we hear the steady drip drip of the snow melting off our roofs,  we find out once again which roads are the dirt roads and which ones are actually tarmac and which ones are in desperate need of repair after the winter, it all seems so long ago since we saw them. We also discover there really is still grass under the snow and it still amazes us that it has managed to survive under its winter blanket and only needs a few rays of light to change from a dark murky green to the vibrant hue of spring. It was so warm the other day ie about 6C that we sat outside our workshop on the land on our patio chairs, Ian had to sink his chair into the snow, up to the seat, as there was not enough room outside our workshop for us both to put our chairs, but it was so good just to be soaking up the rays. I would have taken a photo but it was a long walk to get the camera along a path that was only half solid enough to walk on, part of it was still soft and meant sinking in up to my knees. After two days of warm temperatures there is still a lot of snow to melt and lots of puddles everywhere.

Not quite as deep as by the barn but a
pretty good indication of how deep the
snow has been

Post winter slush and dripping roofs seems a small price to pay for the return of the warmth of Spring. It is the promise of warmer days ahead that means I don't notice the pain of having to walk in the wet slippy slush, or the fact our car is not nice and clean now but the usual two tone colour it normally is. It is part of the process of transition, not entirely pleasant maybe in some ways, but the promise of the future is enough and the rays of sunshine help to make the slush bearable. As I said there is still a lot of snow to go, as there are mountains of it piled up all over the place; the snowploughs this year ran out of room to push the snow and had to have additional vehicles just to scoop up the snow to get it off the road. Of course a lot of buildings suffered damage with the weight of snow, not just our polytunnel and we see many collapsed buildings around. Ironically though buildings are still coming down as the snow melts off them, it is almost as if the only thing left holding them together was the ice and as that melts it all comes crashing down. We were round at our friends farm to see the new baby goats and we had a look at one of their buildings that had slowly been coming down over the winter, and Ian stepped in with our friend to have a look at the bent beams, only to find out that later that afternoon it finally gave up the ghost and fell down. Scary!

Cute heh! One of friends' new baby goat

Talking of our polytunnel we have finally made a decision on what to do. We have pulled the guys off building the barn to build the polytunel instead, as right now that is far more important to us. They can't really get going on the barn yet anyway as there is far more snow down there as you can see from the pictures, than on top of the hill where the polytunnel is. They are going to start off with beams left over from the barn and try to re-use what they can from the polytunnel and then we shall see what is still needed. They said it was going to be far quicker to take down the old framework still standing and start from scratch and so will build it using a different shape. They are also going to use sturdier beams in the corners and in the middle than use the same sized timber, so hopefully it will be far more robust. Well here's hoping anyway.

Here is the other baby, obviously otherwise engaged. Mum
is not much older as she is the one that escaped to go to the
boy goat when she wasn't supposed to.

It seems like its been a week of preparation for the coming year, from finally making a decision on the polytunnel to planting seeds. It seems the promise of Spring is all that is needed to spur us into action. One of the things that crossed my mind is that if we are going to have alpacas then I really need to get up to speed on the knitting as the hope is to have some gorgeous alpaca wool from them. I have never really been a great knitter, as Ian's mother was a prolific knitter, but I do have a go from time to time and made a couple of jumpers (sweaters) for Ian and myself and knitted a few baby clothes. I decided that since I have wool stored I would start off with knitting baby clothes (no pressure kids!) and so I pulled out a pattern I have kept from years ago and got started. Well I thought I understood the pattern but as I knitted I realised I had forgotten a few techniques like how to increase stitches in a pattern, I had also never come across the instructions K1B before, I have come across KB1 and thought it was the same. KB1 means knit into the back of the stitch but it didn't give me the nice chunky fisherman's rib as the picture showed me in the pattern. I pulled that piece out four times, checked on the internet three times before I got the hang of what I am supposed to be doing ie knitting into the row below but the good news is that it is flowing nicely now.

Trying it out for size! Ian decided to move the tractor to
higher ground and it is a good job he did as this will be
very muddy by now. When it has its roof on and a concrete
floor it obviously won't be so bad.

Ian also has done a few finishing off jobs on our other apartment, like put up a coat rack. We are quite pleased with it as we used a piece of wood which was heading for firewood but we liked the design of it so put it to one side, added some hooks, and voila! Easy and very cheap. A lot cheaper than the nice coat racks in the DIY shop. He also used panelling from the apartment we live in for a bath panel. We ripped it off the walls  because someone in their infinite wisdom had cut into them to put a radiator in and there was no chance of matching it up again. The bath looks pretty smart now and so we decided to christen it. Well actually we thought we had best test it out, to make sure it didn't leak, as it hasn't been tested since it was put in and we may have a visitor sometime in the next week. So we had our first bath in ages! Bliss! A bath that is long enough to lie down in and one which is deep enough to be submerged in - our American baths were so shallow they were almost pointless.

Makes our ponds look like they have sunk but we think
that it is the sides that are so deep with snow. Not sure
if they have reappeared from under their blankets yet.

It hasn't all been sweetness and light this week for me as this last week I was quite poorly for about 24 hours. I started to feel a bit achy one afternoon but by the evening I was really bad, so bad I went to bed before Ian which is errrrr very bad! I was so cold and I just couldn't get warm, so I was tucked up with the old hot water bottle trying to get some heat into myself.  I was very achy the next morning too and felt really unwell when I woke about 7am, so one cup of tea and a couple of paracetamols and I went back to sleep. I slept till 12pm and that is not like me either. I don't do sleeping in! I think I could count on my hand how many times I have slept in past 9am and that is even as a teenager. Just can't do it. No idea what it was but after my sleep I felt much better and apart from the odd bout of tiredness I am fine now.

Lynx tracks. Two large paws at the front and two smaller
paws at the back. Lack of claws means it is not a dog or fox

I posted a picture of a possible lynx track the other week but we weren't sure if it really was a lynx or not. Now we are pretty certain it is a lynx and it is a regular visitor to our land. Its also probably male as our polytunnel ruins has a slight whiff of "Essence de Tomcat!". Down by our lowest pond are lots of very characteristic cat tracks and, as someone commented, the only other cat besides lynx with a similar gait and foot pattern is a leopard, and there are not many of those in Latvia, so we go with lynx. Funnily enough since the lynx tracks appeared we don't seem to have as many deer tracks, can't think why. Some of the tracks are quite incredible as there is a huge distance between each set of tracks. The lynx must have been on the run but what a colossal stride it has, certainly would not like to meet one on the run.

Confession time

Yes this is Robbie the halogen cooker, cooking pie, chips
and sweetcorn. Still need to fiddle about with the timings
but at least it didn't burn the bottom of the pie like my
ordinary oven - mind you it didn't cook the bottom very well
at all. The top was cooked. I am sure I will get used
to it though.

Okay I have a confession to make, we bought another kitchen gadget. Have we got room for yet another kitchen gadget? No! Do we need another kitchen gadget? Errrr! Welllllll! Yes! Honestly we have a very good reason or two for buying our recent addition to the paraphernalia we have in our kitchen and in our dump room (I said we don't have room). You see, it's like this, all this week our heating has not been sufficient to heat our apartment to sensible temperatures ie it has been between 13C to 15C, as the heating company hasn't been sending warm enough water around our communal heating system. We have resorted to our wood stove rather earlier in the year than we would like, our wood stove is really for when the communal heating is turned off, which is usually before we would turn it off; anyway I think that maybe our neighbour downstairs has probably had to turn his heating up to compensate for all the cold apartments around him as he runs his heating off gas and not the communal heating like most of us, and I wonder if all of us have been turning on the ovens more than usual to provide hot nourishing meals and warm our apartments up in the process, in short our apartment block ran out of gas. Not sure who is responsible for making sure there is enough gas in the apartment gas tanks or if there is a set delivery date but yesterday we went to fry up some fish fingers for fish finger sandwiches (cor more confessions) or should I say gently saute (is that healthier?) and lo and behold there was no gas, in fact there was no gas all day. We had been humming and hahhing over getting a halogen oven, partly so we wouldn't have to buy a cooker for the other apartment and yet folks still be able to cook and also to use ourselves the rest of the time, we had seen one in our local Aladdin's cave shop but decided against it, but when the gas went off and having to rely on a kettle, slow cooker and an ancient microwave we decided that maybe it would be a good investment after all. So please welcome Robbie our new gadget, I don't normally name our gadgets but this one looks so like a robot from the 60s it has to have a name.

The cleared roadway

As is usual for this time of the year our week has been dominated by the snow and clearing it away. Since the fiasco with our tractor window last week our tractor went up to our neighbours so that Ian could do a temporary fix to it before using it to clear an access road to get onto the land to start work on the other fiasco, our collapsed polytunnel. With the piece of plastic from the polytunnel and good old duck tape the hole was sealed and the tractor serviceable again. As a thank you to our neighbours and while he was up there anyway, Ian cleared away the snow from their yard to make it easier for them, something they didn't feel should go unrewarded either and so Ian was treated to a meat feast of a dinner (lunch), three slices of karbonade (for all you who have not visited Latvia it is battered pork in an egg and flour batter and fried -sorry sauteed), and a couple of thick slices of smoked bacon, and I was at home wondering what he had taken to eat!

Not as much as last year but still a lot of snow.

The next job was to try and find the road. Ian had tracked our road and various things on our land, like the polytunnel, barn, orchard and bushes, last year with a hand held GPS (yes I know another gadget) and this meant he was able to roughly retrace his route and mark out a path with his snowshoes which he could then follow with the tractor. Next year I think we mark out the track before it snows with sticks to make things easier as a GPS is only accurate down to about 3-5m which could land us in a hole unless we fill it in, or we could end up running over stones that are on the edge of the road. There is not as much snow as last year but it is much heavier with a distinct layer of ice from an ice storm. Once the road way was cleared it meant we could then get on with the job of clearing snow from the polytunnel. The first clear day was rather chilly at -21C in the morning but it was a beautiful day and a joy to be outside working, well it was for most of the day. Ian used the tractor to clear around the polytunnel and I freed up various parts of the structure with a good old fashioned shovel. The problem is at that temperature it is really important not to stop moving or you freeze. I had on leggings, ski pants and waterproof trousers, a t-shirt, a base layer, thin fleece, outer fleece and my coat but had to take that off when working as I was getting too warm; it is also really important not to sweat or you get into a lot of trouble when that freezes. So I worked steadily and slowly all day, apart from huddling around the fire to have some fried egg sandwiches for lunch, and that worked well, but towards the end of the day I was getting very tired but I didn't dare stop as the temperatures were dipping low again. I was so glad when we decided to call it a day. Fortunately the following day was not as cold so less danger of freezing to death, literally, but it took two days to dig away the snow. Snow and wind stopped any further work until today when we started to dismantle the collapsed pieces to try and salvage what we can. It would appear that the OSB (composite board) joints failed in most places but there were also some solid pieces of timber that had cracked. There won't be any OSB joints when we rebuild that is for sure!

After one windy day this end piece
needed stabilising. 

If you follow this blog you will know that we have been away over Christmas in Australia and our daughter cooked us a lovely Christmas dinner but it didn't feel like Christmas at all as it was 40C outside and not cold like Christmas should be, well at least for a Northern Hemisphere lass. Fortunately our friends saved us a turkey they had reared and they brought it around this week and we decided to have another Christmas dinner complete with fairy lights and a few other decorations. We couldn't have Christmas dinner alone of course and so we invited our friends around too for a traditional English roast and I even bought them some little presents just for the fun of it. It was a great time, even if it still didn't really feel like Christmas - after all they had finished with all the Christmas songs on the radio.

Somewhere under there are current bushes

It has been a topsy turvey time for many of us thanks to the banking crisis of a couple of years ago. We have had a house on the market for over a year and this last week we arranged for another estate agent to have a go at selling it. So if anyone wants a house in Sheffield, England here is the link, the original estate agent is completely flummoxed as to why it has not sold, it is not as if there is anything wrong with it, it is actually quite a nice house. It is incredible to think though that it would seem that the bankers have learnt nothing from the debacle they helped to create. It seems that the bankers just sighed with relief that the worse is over and now carry on as before, they seem to think that's it, nothing else to worry about, but I am afraid they didn't heed the call. The foundations are rotten and I believe there will be more revelations of where their money comes from and the harm it does. I really wished they had changed their greedy ways, they had the perfect opportunity but decided that greed was the better option. How wrong they are!

There was a track there once down to our workshop

It is not just high street banks that are the problem though, it is the whole financial set up from the IMF, who the Latvian Prime Minister describes as the unpredictable partner, to those who lend microloans to the poor. I had my doubts about microloans, and I wrote about them in October 2008, as the interest rates are so high. It would seem that the Institute of Development Studies have reservations too pointing out that loans have a habit of encouraging more debt and loans do nothing to address the imbalance of power that keeps the poor poor. What is even more incredible is they point out that the World Bank endorse microloans as a means of helping the poor out of poverty and yet have not done any follow up research to see if this is really the case. Is this more evidence of the rotten core of the financial powers? The core that puts ideology before the real needs of the poor?

More snow! 

The rotten core of the financial markets have now also turned their eyes to the food markets leading to volatile prices of food, even when there is no cause for it. Speculation hinders proper pricing of foods. So who else thought that the hike in price of wheat was due to Russian wheat shortages? The fact is there is enough wheat in store to ride out a year or even two years of shortages but big grain companies and derivative speculators made a killing from the fear of shortage. There was no shortage of wheat in the grand scheme of things. So what is the answer? One answer is to enable small farmers to move beyond subsistence farming into the marketplace and ending the power of large agro-companies. It is not the large agro-companies that feed the world, small farmers are much better at it than we are lead to believe. And if you believe speculators should be regulated in the food markets then check this link out and maybe sign the e-petition. 

I love the contrast of our neighbours truck with the
white snowy world. A bit of snow doesn't stop him
from getting on with his job.

You've gotta smile...

Bit of a change from two weeks ago when we were sat in Oz!

You've gotta smile, otherwise you might cry. Laughter has been our safety valve and our help just lately. No we are not in denial, yes it was irritating at the time but it's life, it's tough sometimes. Things happen and if we can laugh and realise it is not the end of the world then we will get through it and get on. So what travesties have we endured this week?

The unfinished barn. Snow stopped play!

We arrived back in Latvia to rain, not pleasant when there is a lot of snow about, but useful for reducing huge piles of snow everywhere from mountains of snow to hills of it. Apparently while we were away there has been a lot of snow in Latvia which has resulted in utter chaos at times, places were cut off of course which is only to be expected, but also whole swathes of rural Eastern Latvia, Latgale, were without electricity for two weeks over Christmas and early January. Foreign crews from Sweden and Finland had to be called in to get areas reconnected as the local Latvian electric company were unable to cope with the scale of the problem. Latvia knows about snow and is usually well prepared but the type of heavy snow and the scale of it, overwhelmed this sparsely populated country. It also overwhelmed our polytunnel. Yes the very same polytunnel that took 5 months to get built and was built late in the season, which set us back last year right at the start of the rather short growing season. As you can just about see, two sections only are still standing and Ian managed to get in and knock the inches thick ice off the roof to try and save it. Much of the wood is salvageable we think, but until we can get in properly we can't be sure. It looks likes joints have failed rather than the plastic, which is what we thought may fail. We aim to rebuild it but next time we are going to try and put some more internal structure into it, using some of the leftover wood from the barn. At least we don't need the space for the tractor anymore as we have the barn - or will do when its finished (yes the snow stopped play there too) and we now have the two wheeled tractor to turn over the ground in the polytunnel.

A sad and sorry sight, our collapsed polytunnel

So, the polytunnel is down and to get to it we have been hiking across the snow in our snow shoes but to actually work on it and determine what can be saved we needed to get the tractor back to the land and clear space to work in. It would appear that is easier said than done too. The tractor just got back to the land and in the process of clearing space to get onto it when the rear window shattered, scaring the living daylights out of the driver, we got there just after it happened and I thought the driver was going to have a heart attack as he was white with shock. The driver was distraught but these things happen, like the glass on our oven door that would have to shatter while a friend was stood in front of it, this would have to shatter on someone driving the tractor as a favour as Ian cannot drive on the roads in a tractor here in Latvia. We laughed, we joked, we made silly comments and Ian went to get some plastic from our polytunel to cover the gaping hole at the back of the tractor. Well there had to be some use for the plastic now. Well our tractor is now parked up at our neighbours farm and Ian will make a temporary repair on it tomorrow before sorting out digging his way onto the land tomorrow. While he was parking the tractor up and sorting it out for the night, I was scraping the road of glass so it didn't get into people's tyres and cause an even bigger mess. Sheesh! The day started off so quietly too.

The tunnel created which protected our
vines which are all snuggly wrapped up
on the right

Other things have been niggly too, like the new four slice toaster we bought in England in October that was working when we left is now a two slice toaster, which in our household is a disaster. The internet keeps playing up - or rather our airport or wireless connection keeps playing up but in the grand scheme of things these are not important. While we have been sunning ourselves in Australia, our poor neighbours and friends have been struggling with snow, struggling with heat or lack of it, struggling without electric or intermittent electric and generally having a hard time and so who are we to get down with some inconveniences? Polytunnels can be rebuilt and thank God no one was in it when it came down, tractor windows can be fixed and an extra toaster was bought and we swapped the two slice toaster from our other apartment with our should be four slice toaster, so all is good! 

The view from the other side of the polytunnel. As you can
just about see both ends are still standing and it is the
middle that has collapsed forming a tunnel on one side.

The present left by our neighbours who
were keeping our apartment heated while
we were away.

We have many things to be grateful for, such as our neighbours that made sure our other apartment was heated when our friends who were going to do it got stranded when the snow reached chest height, our neighbours even left us a picture, a candle and fridge magnet as a little Christmas present. We knew that our apartments were in good hands while we were away and that is something to be very grateful for. Also amazingly when our polytunnel came down it didn't flatten the vines, the table and chairs, the small plastic greenhouse, the roof panels for the barn that had been stored in the polytunnel or the cement mixer. It has flattened the plants that were in there as an experiment but they were already killed off with cold when he who shall remain nameless left the door open when it was -10C outside, so no problem about that. It is bad, but not the end of the world, we shall learn, we shall start again only better and we move on, we won't dwell on it - well perhaps we will but only for the comic value we can get out of it.

Happy Birthday Latvia

Kuldiga bridge in the West of Latvia, recently restored 

This week was Latvia's Independence day to celebrate the first time they achieved independence on November 18th 1918. It was a short lived independence and was lost to the Soviet steam roller in 1940 before being re-established again in 1991. This is why November 18th is celebrated as the birthday of Latvia and not August 21st when the second period of independence of Latvia was declared. Would have loved to have gone to the celebrations in the local culture house on the eve of the birthday but I was just heading into the village when everyone was starting to gather, and I was on my way back from Kuldiga, a four and half hour drive away so I just wanted to get home and have a nice cup of tea. One of these days we must get to the celebrations and imbibe a bit of Latvian culture. As the holiday fell on a Thursday people took the Friday off too but only after working the Saturday beforehand. Seemed strange last Saturday to go around our village and see children at school and office workers in their offices. 

A log fire in the house of a guy who was a
playwright and author and sent to
Siberia but did return and when he returned
he built a rock garden

As I mentioned I have been on my own to Kuldiga, a really pretty old town in the West of Latvia, it was for work towards my course honest! The fact I got to stay in a really quaint place with a log fire for heating, called Sauleskalns or Sunny hill and taken on a tour of Kuldiga by someone who lives there was just a bonus. I was there to have a meeting with a forest consultant and the head of forestry for a large region around the Kuldiga area and beyond, mainly because they were willing to have me there and spoke good English and I am trying to find out what a new forest owner needs to know. They sure made my task easy and by late afternoon I had enough information to head back home. I found out about all sorts of things like pre-commercial thinning, commercial thinning, when clear felling is allowed and the requirements for regeneration following felling or a storm. There are lots of regulations which were probably necessary originally as there was little knowledge of forestry except amongst the older generation at the time of independence. These rules though are beginning to be relaxed but as is usual there is also a danger in relaxation of rules of abuse and not taking care of a forest. I also saw a newly planted pine forest about 3 years old all topped with some blue paste (wish I had thought to take a photo when I was there), turns out it is to stop the deer from eating the tops of the trees in the spring, something that happened to the owner when replanting another part of the forest and not something he wanted to repeat. I also spent time in school as the forest consultant showed a video and talked about the job she did to 18 year olds, watched a short consultation in progress and still found time to have a whistle stop tour of Kuldiga (it is small) and eat. I have to mention that the forest consultant was very gracious as I made a complete hash of trying to reverse 400m back down a single track after taking a look at the blue topped trees and she ended up guiding my steering wheel, but she did it with such sweetness, still felt like a fool though. In my defence it is hard to reverse just on mirrors in our truck as the visibility is not good. 

It has been rather wet, this was supposed
to be a walk way by the side of the river

One thing that does keep coming up in my meetings is the issue of trust. Latvians do not trust each other, they tend to trust us, although why on earth the English should be trusted any more than a Latvian is beyond me, we are not really a trustworthy nation - trying leaving something outside a shop and it is not likely to be there when you get back in England, let's be honest! The English do not always have scruples about taking something home from the office for use at home either, so no we are not a trustworthy nation on the whole but we still exhibit more trust of our nationals than the Latvians do. It is such a shame and restricts the way that Latvians help each other out or don't as the case maybe. A discussion on trust though did help the forest consultant to see how much progress she has made as people do trust her and want to join an organisation she has set up to purchase trees. This is something I would love to see more of as small holders of forests or land can do so much more when they work together and pool resources but it does require trust.

The famous falls of Kuldiga, normally a fall of 2-3m. A
channel was built alongside to get around these falls by
 tsarist Russia but failed due to economic reasons. Some
things don't change

Talking of land we have been continuing to get ready for winter before we go away. Our orchard now looks to be full of ghostly apparitions as the trees are all covered in bubble wrap. I wanted to find something a bit more environmentally friendly but we just haven't had the time to look and it has been so wet that anything like hessian or jute would just get saturated and freeze anyway and we weren't paying a fortune on some of the coir products they produce for covering trees. We have also finished covering what we can with fir branches to protect from the snow and cold that we are expecting on Wednesday, as the temperatures start to slip from the current 5C during the day to possibly around -10C daytime by Sunday. The wet weather is also set to continue, but turning of course to the white fluffy stuff. It has been so wet here that everything is completely and utterly saturated with puddles everywhere that seeing the white stuff will be a relief of sorts - I say of sorts as we are due to leave soon and we are hoping the white stuff does not throw our plans into complete disarray.

Our ghostly apparitions in our orchard

We are still harvesting from our polytunnel and we picked the last chillies from the plants, trouble is that somewhere in the meantime they turned from very mild green chillies to rather hot green chillies. I thought the last lot of green chillies were very mild and we even had three in a meal without really noticing but a green chilli and tomato soup with two and half chillies from the recently picked chillies was too hot for us to eat. I should have taken more notice as I tasted one of the seeds  just to test how hot they were and it was hot, but I thought it would be fine in the cooking as the last lot were - big mistake! In the end I bought a kilogramme of minced pork (ground pork) and added that with a load of grated carrot to the green chilli and tomato soup and we ended up with enough meals for five days out of it and we could still taste the heat. Still it was a good excuse to have some of Ian's Bill Gate's ice-cream, so named because it wasn't just rich as in the recipe it was super rich with lots of added chocolate, in fact he had upped the name to World Bank ice-cream today. We bought the ice-cream maker back with us from England as a certain someone was getting through so much ice-cream I thought it would be better to make our own and there were moans emanating about the lack of chocolate ice-cream from time to time, at least this way we should always be able to make it.

Progress! We now have a roof structure on and I will not
tell you how they put those structures up apart from
to say that it involved a tractor.

Well where have my trundles taken me this week on the internet? One was to an Irish paper talking about the recent capitulation to the axis of bankers as they put it. Suppressed anger emanates from the article and yet a resignation to the inevitable. It is interesting to see how the journalist highlights the bankers stealth in the take over, knowing they had won and yet willing to wait rather than force the hand of the Irish so that it appears like an agreement. It is also interesting using the word axis as it means enemy and taken from the second world war where you had the axis of Germany, Japan etc and the allies. Bankers have a hard PR job to do if they are ever to convince people they are respectable organisations and not vultures. 

As you can see it is wet here too. The tractor didn't help, the
channel got blocked but we cleared it. Oh we love digging
in the mud

Another was to Steve Lowton's musings on silence and waiting and the difficulties he has with it. I in turn began to muse on why I don't find waiting so hard and silence is okay. I did spend around 5 years when my children were at school in a wonderful routine of housework, followed by reading my bible, then a walk and in the afternoon doing something creative, most of the time anyway. It was a time of getting to know God deeply and walking out of many things which held me back and a development in being able to listen to God and hearing his voice. That in someways still doesn't explain why I was able to drop into silence and waiting  where my thoughts would wander, but in a good way not just aimlessly, and I could switch off from the world around. I remembered after a while that I had learnt the art at my Grandfather's knee, Ian likewise learnt it in the presence of his Dad. My Grandad and I could watch a fire for ages and not talk as could Ian and his Dad, with no need to talk, we were just enjoying the company of our Grandfather/Father. Little did we realise what a valuable lesson that would be in a busy world full of distractions that we have today. I remember as well the open fire in our family home was a draw on a winter's evening when  all five of us would be sat around reading or doing something quietly, enjoying the warmth and no telly on in the corner blaring away. Wonder if my kids have learnt the art of waiting and silence? 

As you can see it is not so pretty as earlier on in the year.
Rather dark and muddy, nothing a good bit of snow can't
sort out!!!

My last trundle was an article on the BBC about the deserving and the undeserving poor. One aspect covered how people could lose their benefits for up to three years for refusing training or job opportunities. Now I know some folks are lazy and take the easy way out and would rather sit on the dole (for my American friends this is a phrase we use for claiming unemployment benefit) than work, but I am not sure how significant a number that really is but it makes for a good scapegoat when things are bad; what I want to know though is it a real job if the wage on offer is not sufficient to live off? Why should the tax payer subsidise employers who refuse to pay a living wage through the benefits system because its not economical in their eyes of the employers to do so? No one seems to be looking at that aspect of it. There is probably more money spent on benefits for those in work being offered pitiful wages than there are those sponging off the state on the dole, so who are the bigger spongers? Those who are lazy or those who exploit the welfare system to not pay their employees properly? The tax payer ends up paying in both cases anyway.