It happens

A foggy snowy day

It's not been too bad this week, but just some of those things happened that you can do without. The weather has been iffy all week with snow coming and going, so we have no huge build up but it is wet and slushy with an expected freeze from tomorrow. That will be fun! Not! I can cope with snow, but ice not so much! I'm hopeless on ice as many who follow this blog will attest to. To-date I have seriously hurt two arms and one knee from slipping on ice and had a few more minor slips along the way. Oh well! Out with the spiked walking sticks next week to keep me upright along with the ice grips on the boots, or just not reappear until spring.

Slushy stuff. Ian has had to clear the drains to keep the water
flowing and stop it all icing up when it does freeze. Some of
the rivers are quite high due to blockages from ice build up

At least the snow falls off the roof but it is starting to push
against the plastic of the greenhosue

On Wednesday I had a good chat with a friend about how to move forward on helping the refugees. We tossed around a few ideas and ways forward and we hope to see where that goes. The youth at his church are good at meeting people from different cultures and so that maybe a good start. We hope to slowly include refugees in different events, so that everyone has time to adjust. The youth maybe used to different European and American cultures but of course it is a bit different when it involves Arabic cultures and so slowly, slowly is always a good move, but we think there is still potential to learn from other cultures. The Lebanese lady I met last week knew a thing or two about hospitality, which many of us in the West could learn from.

When you have an itch

You just have to get in there and give it a good scratch

Don't ask!

Somebody has a damp, mucky hairstyle

I have been working on the next two articles for journals. I only need one more to count towards a PhD but it is better to have two out there in case one is delayed in the process. The more the better as far as a future career is concerned, apparently. We'll see. I still have more ideas to put forward based on the research I've done that could do with testing, so I haven't run out of steam yet. Some days though it feels never ending, as if the end is still so far away and yet tantalisingly close. To use Sir Winston Churchill's words again:

“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”

Well I'm not writing the book just yet, maybe next year but writing articles and a thesis seem to go through the same process.

Some frosty alpacas

It hasn't all been writing articles for me, I managed a little felting too. I have been playing around with felted cuffs and a small landscape picture. I have been experimenting with ways to include embroidery into the felting without having the back of the embroidery on show. They still need working on and I was a bit disappointed with the result from embroidering onto dissolvable plastic. The embroidery didn't attach to the felting well and went a bit hard. It might need more washing and I might have to resort to some embroidery stitches to hold it in place. Still it was fun to try.

A white halo of frost

And this was as far as he got with the snow shovelling on
the day he hurt his back. Good job he wasn't heading for
the alpaca house

One of the things we could do without was Ian hurting his back. He was non too chuffed as he hurt it doing some snow shovelling. If he had shifted heavy slushy snow, he would have understood. If he had shifted a large shovel full, he would have understood. But no! He was shifting a half shovel full of very light stuff when it suddenly went. He was shuffling around like an old man the next day and I had to go out with him to help with clearing the alpaca poo. We also gave Lady V and George some vitamin D injections since I was out there anyway. Freddie will get his in tablet form when we give everyone else theirs, but George is still not into eating the grain yet and so we thought we would take the precaution of giving him an injection, so we know he has had a boost.

Before Ian hurt his back, he had been cutting wood in the
forest when he heard this tree creak. Good job, he heard it
otherwise it could have come down on him when he wasn't
expecting it. 

The tree was obviously diseased

But it does make an interesting pattern

Some wood clearing

Tracks in the wet snow

We also needed to go to the big town to get a forestry form filled in, but when we got there, there was a notice on the door. We weren't sure what it meant - mind you, in retrospect we could have photographed it and put it through Google translate. Doh! It might have saved us a trip. Ian thought that it might mean the office had moved, so we set off to travel another 10 minutes up the road to the central office only to find that everyone was in a meeting. It wasn't until later that we put two and two together and realised that the note on the door was probably to say that everyone was at a meeting. Still it was a bit of a wasted trip. We did manage to get some cash receipt books and get the details to the bookkeeper so she can register them for tax purposes and dropped off a whole load of receipts for her to sort out.

George doesn't look like he's sure of the white stuff outside

Freddie knows what to do with it, eat it!

Unfortunately the lack of success at the forestry office meant that Ian had to go today to sort it out. At least he managed this time and he also took a handful of forms for future use.  Why it is not available online and easy to fill in we don't know. Latvia is getting there with getting official forms online but it is not always easy as I have mentioned before. While Ian was on his travels he also went to get some new switches for the electric heater. They don't seem to be rated high enough for the heater, even though they should be. It is no wonder that heaters often end up with faults as they overheat the switch. It as if the manufacturers don't expect people to have them on full power for long at all, but what else do you expect when it is cold?

Outside with a thick warm coat. HIs inner fleece though is
much darker

Chanel, Freddie's mum with a smile on her face

My adventure for the day that I could do without was to go for a mammogramme. This is my first time and to give the authorities due credit, even though I live in a small rural village (or town if you are Latvian) miles away from any large hospital we still have travelling clinics such as a mobile x-ray machine. However, winter is not a good time to go to a mobile clinic. It wouldn't have been so bad if the doctor had printed out the form for me beforehand. I was told to go to the clinic after 2pm, which I did and after standing outside in the drizzle and melting snow for an hour I eventually got in. Why they didn't park the other way around so we could stand under the shelter I have no idea.

The bottom pond seemed to have shrunk lately, but the recent
melting snow has filled it back up again

One scruffy, damp looking sheep. This ewe is now nearly
a year old.

Anyway it was when I got in that I found out that I was missing this crucial piece of paper. I trundled off to the doctor, who I had tried to see earlier but couldn't find her at the time. Fortunately she was there this time. I got the paper and went back to the clinic. In the meantime the queue had lengthened and it was another 3/4 hour wait before I got in. I was a tad cold. It is a good job that it wasn't windy and I was dressed for the cold. I thought I deserved a hot chocolate and a piece of cake after that and so met Ian who was just finishing his day out on the land at the bakery before heading home.

The older ewe doesn't look nearly as scruffy as her daughter
does

The boys have taken to doing a lot of chewing on the alpaca
house.

One of the things we made progress on this week was getting a date to go and start the legal work on selling the apartment we are currently living in. We hope to get that started in mid-February. We won't be out until mid-April but getting the paperwork sorted and payments made means we can start to plan the next phase - whatever that is.

Close up arty shot

I think Herkules is looking so perky these days

Eyre doing her grumpy cat impression

More snow

Oh dear!

Bear Lake, Colorado, a site that Ian paid for with a sore
back the next day

It was turning out to be a pretty mundane week and was wondering what I was going to write about this week about life in Latvia, until today that is. I was just enjoying the peace and quiet in the other apartment and working well on my assignment, when Ian rang to say he was coming home he had hurt his back. Now he is having difficulty moving about and in quite a bit of pain which is worrying. He assures me he wasn't doing anything he shouldn't, just moved wrong and it went. I think that personally he just doesn't want to put any more potatoes in as he was up at 8am this morning planting some in the garden outside our apartment. It is not the first time Ian's back has gone in a major way. The last time was my fault as we were out for a walk with some friends in the Rocky mountains and because we were at high altitude about 10,000ft (3000m) I was having difficulty breathing, so Ian was helping me by pulling me up the hills - bad move! The next day he was the one who could hardly move and he ended up taking a trip to the chiropractors, the first of many visits. The time before that he was mixing concrete many years ago for our kitchen floor back in England and when I got back from the weekly shopping trip I could see there was something wrong as he was trying to mix concrete with a straight back. I ended up mixing the rest of the concrete and wheeling it in the house in the wheelbarrow. Boy did I ache the next day but at least my back didn't go. The good news is that we have a great friend who knows how to do massage for sports injuries so he came to massage Ian's back, so hopefully that will do the trick.

Losing our view

A similar view in February of this year

I can't get out in the garden this week to plant potatoes or anything else as I need to get my work finished on my course before we finish next week for summer, then I shall be out catching up with all our neighbours and getting seeds in. Mind you it has been cold this week so I don't think it matters to wait a week anyway, the wind has been bitter at times. One thing we will probably not be doing though is planting potatoes on the land, we have been told by many people the wild boar love potatoes and so we are just asking for trouble if we do. If we do plant some just to see if how they do then we will probably fence it off somehow. We were at a bbq the other day and we got chatting about the wild boar and the explosion of numbers and problems farmers have with them. The wild boar are fed over winter to keep their numbers up for hunting and one of our friends has seen the feeding troughs 10m away from the boundary of his property but for some reason the local authorities that deal with that sort of thing don't seem to be anxious to deal with farmers' concerns. The wild boar cause many problems through what they eat and how they go about it. They eat the eggs of ground nesting birds, many of which are protected, they root up the ground for different roots and tubers which can destroy vulnerable species of plants and these areas then can become infested with invasive ground elder. The digging that they do also means the ground is so uneven that it is uncuttable, reducing the amount of land that farmers can utilise fully. Uncut fields quickly turn to forest in Latvia which is fine in some ways but does mean that the numbers of birds adapted to meadowland are further reduced, the Corncrake being one of them, a protected species. It also means that farming is increasingly not viable when farmers are already struggling to make a living. I think it is about time the authorities take notice of this problem as these problems are occurring in protected sites designated by the European Union. I think there will be some letters heading in certain directions and I shall be finding out how to get the attention of those who need to take attention. Busy summer I think! 

So much green after so much white

So different to February

The rest of the week has consisted of trying to work out what trees we have on the land and it is getting easier and easier to identify trees as we get to know them either by their bark , by their buds and now the leaves that are unfurling. We are also beginning to find out what uses the trees have, which hopefully will be useful in the future. I find it is incredible though how much attention to detail that God has put into the design of trees, it never ceases to amaze me. How can anyone think all this arrived by accident? Aspen has diamond shape marks on its bark and the leaves appear to flutter all the time, Norwegian Maple has yellow flowers that make it look frothy in Spring with a sweet scent that you catch on the breeze at times, the Rowan leaves have unfurled revealing their charm so gradually. Did you know there are two types of birch with peeling bark, downy birch and silver birch? Silver birch has weeping branches whereas downy birch is more upright but they can also hybridise. So many differences, so many uses, God is not boring at all, otherwise he could have produced one multi-functional tree that does everything but then the world would have been far more boring.

If you look to the bottom of the flag pole you can see a
greenhouse covered in plastic and finished!!!! Not worked
out why it is covered in yellow plastic though. Any ideas?

The same greenhouse started three weeks ago!!!!! Okay
ours is much bigger but I don't think that explains why
ours has taken 6 months.

Our poly tunnel is nearly finished amazingly. Only the doors need finishing now, they are up just not fitted properly, but at least both layers of plastic are up. It is still frustrating the way the workers disappear for days or even weeks at a time without telling us what they are doing and what the problem is but at least we have got this far and we can put plants in it now. Our workshop is nearly finished too- the poor guy is fed up with it now, he just wants it finished. 






On a completely different note, times taken for post to arrive has been interesting. We had one piece of post from America to tell us the IRS have lost a piece of paper from a filing for 2008 (of course they didn't say that they had lost it, but since they had one sheet and not the other I somehow think it was they that had lost it and not us; after all they did not shout earlier and it is over a year since it was filed), it did, however, require a response within 30 days and since it was dated 1st April and didn't arrive until the 3rd May that was not going to be possible? I think a delay due to some far flung volcano  on some out of the way piece of rock had something to do with it. In contrast our son sent his wedding invitations off on the 5th May and our daughter got hers today (10th), the same as we did, only we are in Latvia and she is in Australia and our son is in England. So that seems to mean that if you are going to post something somewhere you may as well post it to Australia it doesn't take long at all.

Cowslips

My course Managing Sustainable Rural Development is very informative and certainly in the early days excited me greatly as I read through the literature but a lot is repeated and crosses over a bit with a previous course on Development Management and so has become more routine in places but one academic writer in particular does excite me, he has a sense of humour and a humility which is commendable and he also writes some interesting articles, his name is Robert Chambers. This is what he writes in his paper 'Reflecting Forwards"

"We have agency, the ability to act and change the world, and this brings with it responsibility for the effects of actions and inactions. Responsibility is an unsmiling word, often used critically – ‘That is your responsibility’, ‘Who is responsible for this?’ and ‘Who can we pin responsibility on?’ meaning who can we blame."

Snails anyone? Unfortunately not the beginning of our
snail farm. 

How true that is, and yet he advocates that for those who have money, who have privileges and that includes most who read this blog no matter how small you feel, should be taking responsibility for the state the world is in with all its inequalities. We do have the power to act, no matter how small those actions, we also have the power not to act and to ignore the injustices. Take the example of this film student who put together a simple yet profound video, an anthem for the youth of today perhaps. A rallying call to put the destructive practices of this world into reverse. A call to action!

A proposed design for our business. What do you think?

One thing I have liked to do ever since I was a kid was to play about with figures from time to time and the recent sale of the Picasso nude for a record sum of $106m reminded me of the song "Nothing ever happens" by Delamitri where it talks about a painting going for the price of a hospital wing and wondered how much of Latvia's debt would it have paid for had the money been put towards that and not a painting and found it is a small but not insignificant amount of 1.4%. Also if each Latvian owed $3260 - (that is the IMF loan divided per person and is equivalent to 5-7 months teachers wages- all figures are approximate by the way) then it would pay off the debt for 32,515 people which is a rather large number of people, instead it paid for a painting!