Chilly times

A bit dark and dreich today. As you can see the
snow came and went from last week, but we had
another dusting today.

My seeds are still sunning themselves in Portugal apparently. Obviously not in a hurry to move on to the frozen wasteland up north. It has been rather chilly just lately and not sure it has been above freezing all week. At least the wind dropped at the weekend and it meant I could get on with some jobs in the garden, albeit no digging. That would have been impossible as the ground is now rock solid. 

Chanel on look out

Mari's okay with her nice thick fleece to keep out 
the cold

I spent one day over the weekend at our apartment, just trying to straighten up - it's like semi-moving house twice a year for us. I sorted out some cabbages I had cut, so they are now sautéed and added to the freezer. Some wine that didn't work out from a couple of years back and hasn't matured well has been added to large jars with extra sugar and cloth covers to hopefully make vinegar. I guess it might be a while before I find out how that experiment worked. I managed to squeeze in the stores of flour and oil that were brought back from the land into my already stuffed cupboards. Prepper! Yup! Having said that I always was the kind of person who had large stores of dried and frozen food even before a pandemic, although I had been a lapsed prepper in more recent years. Not now though.

I love Aggie's curly hair

Frozen viburnum berries

On Sunday I went out to the land with Ian and, together with our neighbours who came to help, we got Brencis' toe nails cut and gave him his injection of vitamin D. He wasn't perfectly well behaved but we got the job done. Our neighbour rather liked giving Brencis a hug.... err I mean hanging onto him to keep him still. I'm so grateful for good neighbours who will do this sort of thing. Ian helped them with some shopping during the week as their car was in for a service and we got help with our alpaca - seems like a good trade. 

A glorious sunrise.

Having help these days though is fraught with decisions we would not be thinking about over a year ago. We are still in an area with very little Covid19, so relatively insulated from the virus. We are not entirely clear of the disease, under 5 people have it somewhere in our municipality, but areas not far from us have had rapidly increasing numbers. The country as a whole had a bad week for Covid19 numbers and the hospitals went into emergency mode as they are officially full. Latvia has patchy medical care, some parts are excellent and some are pretty poor - particularly in the more rural areas. Of course that meant that restrictions were imposed everywhere and we have to remember that only food shopping is allowed at the weekend. Of course there are all sorts of other regulations but generally they don't affect us in our day to day life and one of the advantages of living in a rural area.

Lady V poor lass with her wonky legs. She still
gets about though. Ian says she's been a bit
hungry just lately and perhaps her teeth are not
so good at grinding up the hay. She's been 
getting extra helpings to help out.

The other major job for the Sunday was pruning. Our blackcurrant bushes got rather straggly this last year and lots of berries were wasted as they ended up on the floor. We might not get so many berries next year, but at least we should be able to get to the bushes properly to pick them and slugs and snails won't be feasting on them. I also cut back the asparagus, marshmallow plants and tidied up my herb bed. After that I redistributed the mulch that Ian had added during the week - well I say redistributed, some of it was in clumps as it was fairly well rotted bark peelings that had frozen. I will have to wait until it defrosts before I can spread it out more evenly. I helped Ian to move the chicken ark that had been abandoned in the field after the chicken massacre earlier in the year. Ian had put it up on some logs to stop it freezing to the ground, which sort of worked as it was easier to dislodge it off the logs than it would have done if it had been left on the ground. 

A sign appeared on our oak tree one day this
week

Ian had a frustrating evening when he got back tonight, he went to do the five minute job of swapping the home water filter, only it started to leak when he tried to fasten it back up. Of course one shop was shut and the other had the wrong fittings. It's sorted for now, but he wasn't happy. He has also been finishing off some carding of fleece in the evenings and now onto the final spinning of a project that has been ongoing for a while. It is a winter job and spinning isn't good on the back - well not with the chairs we have and so he can only do a bit at a time. I do hope I get to see the finished product as one of our neighbours is having it knitted up into a jumper by his mum.

An officially recognised tree

You want to photograph me? Hahaha so funny!

I was pleased to hear the other day that I will get a pay rise next year. I'm going down to four days a week, which will give me some flexibility in my time, so the pay rise will offset that to some extent. I will have to think carefully what I do with my time so I don't just fritter away the opportunity. There's so much I could fill my time with, such as Latvian lessons, dealing with the mountains of fleece, creative crafts, reading and.... and..... and..... Boredom is not something I struggle with. Procrastination, perhaps! But not boredom. 

I'm not looking

I'm still not looking

Ilvija sporting the minimalist hairpiece

I did have a hiccup with work today. I needed access to google drive today for work files only to find they wouldn't open and I couldn't send a google email. So yes I was a casualty of the Google outage. Fortunately there were other things I could do in the meantime, but just shows the precariousness of relying on it. Backups of online material is needed too apparently. No good pretending the cloud is the answer to all our storage problems. We definitely need more flexibility in what we do and cannot rely on just one platform.

They've spotted something

One of Ian's little followers

We're watching you

It's still there, we are watching! Apparently GT 
aka Ginger Tom went for a walk with Ian and 
Brencis the other day, they are getting quite
adventurous.