The Journey: Swimming

As Ian has been rather busy these photos are some from the
previous week when the weather was glorious

Swimming? Not literally, but my head is at times. Well I now know there is a part of the Baltic Sea called the Quark and it is between Sweden and Finland, about half way up in the gulf between them, which is called the Gulf of Bothnia. I also know where the watershed of the Baltic Sea is, in other words all the areas where water flows from, which feeds into the sea. Well roughly and it is not as far as I thought it was. I also know where the Sargasso sea is, where all the European eels originate. I had heard of it but couldn't have told you where it was. How about Kattegat! Any ideas? I'll let you look it up 😀

The morning sun

I love the sepia tones this picture

So what have I been up to, besides being holed up reading papers, reports and general information? Not a lot. Short blog then! Well actually a couple of things did happen this week. We finally got a new chimney put in. Up till now our fire had been vented through the ventilation shaft, which is not exactly safe long term. It took a while to organise but finally the new chimney is in. It snakes its way through the kitchen to a flue fitted on the outside. It is not exactly pretty but it is safe. One of the downsides to it is that a cupboard had to be taken off the wall as it would be too close to the pipe. We are already struggling for space and so it took yet more rearranging to put the stuff away and we have a cupboard that we can't decide what to do with at the moment.

Delicate rose pink frosted trees

Lots of icicles around over winter

Another downside was the mess. The guy reused part of the chimney that was already up, which wouldn't have been so bad but it must have been ready for cleaning. I went in at one point and there was soot everywhere. It was a good job that I had covered everything with plastic sheeting, taping it onto the walls to act as a screen. It saved a huge amount of cleaning up, but there was still plenty to do. I was wise to the fact that it could be a problem because many years ago, Ian and our eldest son were cleaning out a fire at our home in the UK when the front came off and soot went everywhere. It is awful stuff to clean. It is oily and one of the constituents that used to be used to make ink. Well you can imagine what that meant. After he left we spent the evening cleaning up the best we could. I got Ian to bring a take away from our local bakery, as there was no way I could cook until the place was cleaned up a bit.

Not an elegant solution

The hole where the chimney used to
go through the toilet to the ventilation
shaft

The ice structures are always so incredible

The following day I did get out. I still read papers on my computer in the car though. I wasn't driving of course, because Ian was. We were off to see a lady and her son about 90km away. They had been to see us recently and are interested in having alpacas. The idea was to see her property and see if it was suitable for them. It was also an opportunity to see her other animals, such as beef cows, a couple of horses, chickens and cats. She likes to train her animals and so they were all fairly people friendly. Of course we had to be careful with the beef cows, but we were up close to them and they were fine. She has some Belgian Blue crosses and they are certainly an interesting colour. We spent the rest of the early afternoon chatting about alpacas, and eating home-made pumpkin soup, followed by ice-cream with frozen blackcurrant jam. It was a pleasant way to fill in another snowy day.

A thoughtful lookin Jakobs

I'm glad this is just the angle of the photo and not really
the fact the snow is so high

Poor Ian has spent most of the week just shifting snow, along with all his other normal animal caring duties. We had quite a bit of snow at one point, then we had a melt and then it snowed again. In fact it snowed that much today that we had to shovel the snow away for him to park so it wasn't a solid compacted mess later on in the year when it really does melt properly. There was probably about 15-20cm just today. He has also had to repair the greenhouse plastic. It is getting old and close to needing replacing and so it splits, especially with the wet heavy snow we have been getting this week.