Improving

Freddie venturing out in the snow. Mind you, he seems to
be the only one from this group, the others have largely
remained inside

I think that kind of sums up the week. I'm improving. My leg is getting better, the next paper is coming along and my PhD is progressing into its final stages, although there is still a while to go yet but at least the end is in sight.

Off for a wander on his own

Yes! Quite warm and toasty here, I think we will stay in

I have been hobbling along for most of the week, but I have progressed from using two walking sticks to one and then none most of the time. My leg still aches a bit but I found liniment seems to help a lot. The first half of the week I was at home and only went out to go to our other apartment to do some sorting out, a nice 10 minute walk on a good day but a bit nerve wracking with ice on the ground but I took it slowly and there were no incidents.

Well Brencis doesn't mind sitting outside

A very blue scene

The reason for going up to our other apartment is because it needed heating now that winter is truly upon us and I needed to organise my fabrics that were lying on the floor. I no longer have a rainbow assortment on the floor, it is all stacked neatly on shelves so I can actually get to them and see what I have. That really feels like progress to me. We had decided to that since I was at the other apartment and had been heating it all day we may as well have a bath night. I thought it would be nice to soak in a nice warm bath, it would certainly help to ease the aches.

Mr. P

Ian came round after finishing on the farm and at some point he spotted a mouse, looking like it was having a good sleep on the floor next to the stove. One of the issues we have had at that apartment is evidence of a mouse. It had eaten some of my seeds, fortunately just the squash ones which I have quite a few of anyway and of course left little tell-tale signs in places. I was fortunate it hadn't chewed through my fabric stash. We put it on the fire since we knew it would have died from the poison we had put out for it and didn't want the neighbourhood cats getting sick by eating it if we threw it outside. Ian decided to check to see if there was evidence of any more mice and got the torch out to look under the sink next to the stove. He found that the floor was wet and one of the pipes was leaking. Sigh! We are often having issues with pipes leaking, whether it is ours or our upstairs neighbours. The components are not good that we can buy here and Ian said he will plan on renewing the plumbing before we move in. For now the water is turned off.

This is Lady V and the photo was taken at the end of
November.

The following day I had to go out with Ian to the farm as he needed to give Lady V some injections of vitamin D and some minerals to help her with dodgy legs. I went back there today to put some liniment on her legs too. I managed to find one with arnica in it and another one with the deep heat effect which is what I have been using. I made her some treats with comfrey, turmeric and plantain - all good anti-infammatory stuff. She gobbled those down. Hopefully it will help her feel more comfortable. I don't think we will cure her dodgy legs but if we can stop it getting worse then that will be good.

Tellus sporting the jaunty red-neck look

More blue tinged scenes

I haven't been buying meat from out butchers just lately, we have more than enough for us at the moment from our own sheep and chickens. What we have missed though is bacon sandwiches, so I had a go at using the mutton to make bacon. It does not look like pork bacon but a deep red colour and it wasn't cut quite thin enough as it was more difficult to cut than the pork I would normally use, but it worked. It made a passable bacon and that's all I ask.

The boys making it out of their alpaca house, well just

The sheep in their winter paddock. They have finally started
eating the hay and stopped digging through the snow for the
grass underneath it

On Thursday I had to head up to Tartu to present my work in a seminar to my supervisors and colleagues on the Friday. I decided to take a different route to normal as it meant less walking, but it did mean sitting around in a little cafe for three hours. Fortunately it is just a supermarket cafe and so not expensive and one drink an hour suffices. In fact I had an early lunch there too and it only cost me €2.90 including a cup of tea. Originally the plan was to take the early bus to Riga and take the train up to Valga and then the bus, but the meeting that was booked in Riga was cancelled due to the lady having treatment at the dentist, which was worse than she anticipated. At least it meant a 15 minute lie in, which is nice at that time in the morning. A 6:55am bus always seems better than a 6:40am bus. That got me into Cesis at 8:55am and the train left at 12:30pm.

Mr. Tellus again

Looking a little forlorn and lost in the fog

I got into Valga station and noticed the Estonian train on the opposite side and even better it was going to Tartu. I hadn't realised one of their few link trains would be there- it no longer works for me the other way around rather annoyingly. So instead of getting into Tartu just before 5pm, I was there just after 3pm. My friend came and picked me up from the train station too. I had meant to work on my presentation slides on the way up but I had to sort out some questions to send ahead as they had a new format for the PhD seminars and I wasn't aware of it. It was all good preparation for my thoughts though.

Still not exactly venturing far

Well at least the fog lifted sometimes

The presentation went surprisingly well considering there was only one other PhD student there besides me and the supervisors. It meant I could skip through the background and we had some really good discussions. It was even better that they felt I had identified areas of research that were still needed. I was not sure if it was an area that had been covered somewhere within the discipline already but it hadn't, so that is exciting. They were also quite excited that my paper has had two citations already. The problem is there are so many papers written in the academic field that getting a citation, where someone quotes from your work, can sometimes be rare, unless you are very well-known and I am definitely not.

No it is not the greenhouse on fire but the lights on in the
caravan, which is inside the greenhouse and taken early in
the morning 

My friend, Edith Chenault took this photo as she was on the
right side to take it. It looks so ethereal on this snowy,
foggy day.

My trip back was easy, well it was for me. My friend who I stayed with for a couple of nights decided on an adventure to drive me home and then head back on her own. She has driven to Latvia before and came down for the felting course in August, but this was winter and she hadn't done the trip alone before. There was also the issue that the last time she came down a rock hit her oil sump and she broke down. We decided on a route that had tarmac and not a dirt road, as the roads have not been good and we found a very pretty snow covered route through Nitare. It would have been even prettier if it hadn't been foggy. My friend stayed overnight and headed back the next day. The trip didn't go quite to plan but she made it back okay, so an accomplishment.

Frosted car badge