Step by step

The Christmas tree that delayed this post.
I have the Christmas tree rash to prove
it too. This tree was growing in my
garden and it was starting to get a bit
big for being in a herb bed.

We used to sing a song at a kids clubs that I used to help run, "Step by step we're moving forward, little by little we're gaining ground". Politically it doesn't seem like it and I was appalled that the UK British Government can go into recess having delayed any decision on Brexit. Less than a 100 days to go and they go on holiday after putting on the most awful pantomime first. I was not impressed to say the least. Fortunately apart from that, this week seems to be one of going forward.

As you can see though, Christmas trees grow like weeds
around here and we won't miss the odd one or two.

The view of a graveyard from the bus. Always with trees
and well kept plots - well they are well kept under the snow 

Tuesday of last week was spent getting ready for my trip up to Tartu and then in the evening travelling to another village to pay the final instalment on our new chimney. I have to say the guy is persistent in trying to communicate to us in Latvian. I got the gist of what he was trying to say and we managed to explain that we would email our friend who recommended him to clarify the details. Even if we had understood what he'd said, I think we would do the same, so we were sure.

Amanda

Valeria

I set off to Tartu on the early bus as usual. It takes a while to get up there and lots of changes of buses but I get a little extra lie in that way. It is also more scenic than going through Riga and hanging around there for hours. Due to the connection timings there is always somewhere I have to hang around, no matter which bus I actually catch. I lost count of the number of permutations I have tried and in nearly each case the buses or trains miss each other by a matter of minutes. It is quite frustrating really.

The oak tree on our land always looks more dramatic in winter

Ian has been getting the wood chopped and stacked ready
for burning next winter. We are getting an idea of how
much we need, now that we are in the apartment full time.
Still at least this is a lot cheaper than paying the heating bills
that we were paying last year.

There were two changes to my journey this time around though. As usual I arrive Valka in Latvia and walk over the border to Valga in Estonia. My usual watering hole though was shut for the day for a function, which was rather disappointing as there are not many places to eat in Valga or at least there didn't used to be. However to my surprise about three doors up there was a new coffee shop. I only really wanted a drink and not something to eat anyway and it was a bright friendly place to have a cup of chai. My usual place has good priced food, but the service is a little dour, although efficient enough.

This will not be a Christmas tree for
the house, but it looks pretty with its
dusting of snow

George with his dusting of snow. Shows the insulation
qualities of alpaca fleece anyway

After my chai and a cup of tea, I raced up to the bus station to catch my bus. I had more time than I thought though. Eventually the bus turned up and I got on, I told the driver where I was heading to and he pushed some buttons on his ticket machine and the ticket was printed. The strange part was that he didn't take the money I was brandishing and he had his hands folded as he said something to me. I was perplexed. The lady behind tried to tell me something and I apologised and said I only speak English. She shouted something up the bus and someone shouted back "Free." She then told me in English that the ticket was free. The penny dropped. I knew this was something that the Estonian government had planned but didn't know when. Not all of the buses are free, but at least this one was. Pity that the only way back on a Saturday morning was by train and those definitely are not free. Still it saved me about €5, so not too bad. I felt a bit of a nana (rhymes with banana) though as I explained in a message to my friend who met me in Tartu.

Is that a wistful look Mr. P?

The view from the boys paddock. I should have gone skiing
but I didn't. 

On the way up I had a nice early Christmas present, I finally got an official acceptance for my second academic paper. I had been told unofficially a short while ago and was actually close to sending a message to find out what had happened to the official email when this one came in. That takes me a step closer to finishing off my PhD. I need three papers, so two down, one to go. My supervisor jokingly said "Is it really true?" because it has been a strange and rather convoluted way of getting it through the process.

Ian had to get the snow blower out this week to clear some
paths. He also managed to fix the handbrake on the tractor
which got broken while he was away. 

Walking into work

It was a bit weird on the way up to the university from my friend's house this week. It is one I have walked a many times before, but this time I was actually going into work. The only time I have actually walked into work before is at conferences when I was heading for the children's venue, as I used to be a children's worker at Christian or church conferences. I did have a small cleaning job once when I was short of money, but that was a long time ago. Usually work for me is on my computer or on our farm.  So heading into a room to sit down with colleagues to discuss a project was rather novel. Quite nice for a change. I was still a little unsure about the project details, as I have never worked on a joint university project before and so I was encouraged to find out that neither were my colleagues and that it is common at this stage of the project. So even though I joined in a little late, I wasn't as behind as I thought I was. We managed to make quite a bit of headway and have a plan for the new year, so all's well.

The view from the room where we were working

Vanessa's crew have been outside a lot using the outdoor
feeder. They are the only ones that do. It is not so bad in
the cold as the snow shakes off rather than wets it. This
one is Silla 

One of the suggestions by the university HR department was to apply for Estonian residence. It took a little while for this to sink in that it is actually possible to have residence in more than one country. It is just if I am in the country for more than 90 days, which would be unusual, I would need a residence permit, so it is better to apply now and have the permission, even if I don't need it exactly. Seems daft having two formal places of residence but it just means I can work in Estonia without having to watch the number of days spent there. I'll still be resident in Latvia though. Not sure what happens in the event of Brexit, but not even the UK government can make up its mind on that, so we just keep on hanging on waiting for a final decision (I'll stop there now, promise!) I got as far as making an appointment to meet with the border police anyway, but that isn't until the end of January. Not a quick process obviously.

Vanessa's crew all outside

Vanessa looks really pretty in this photo. You wouldn't think
she was 10 years old and the boss of her crew.

Tartu square in festive array

My friend whose house I was staying in, asked if I wanted to eat in or out, so I suggested out, since I haven't been out for a meal in ages - eating on journeys do not count. She invited some other friends and we headed into town. My friend and I arrived first in the square and had a wander around the stalls and looked at the decorations. All quite festive. The decorations are up in our village too, but they stay up for ages to offset the winter gloom and so I don't tend to think of them as festive. It's one of the reasons that Christmas tends to sneak up on me, as I am not surrounded by all the reminders of the date. After a bit of dithering around by all of us, we settled on an Italian place. It was a nice way to round off my first day at work and a present to myself.

Chanel also in wistful mood

Eyre warming up on the radiator. She doesn't look like she
appreciates the privilege of being allowed in. She is usually
evicted pretty soon, once she has warmed through she goes
investigating for bread and cakes.

On Saturday I set off back home. I had to go through Valmeira for definite as I had managed to leave a new pair of gloves on the bus on the way up. Thanks to bus Wifis I was able to contact the bus company who managed to locate my gloves and they were left at the bus terminal for me to collect on the way home. I ended up in Cesis for rather longer than normal in the process though, so I went and did a little shopping for the kinds of things that you cannot get in a small village like cornflour and large bags of dried fruit to make a Christmas cake. After that with still about three hours to kill I went to the cafe where I can get cheap cups of tea, but they shut at 4pm despite the fact it said 8pm on the door. I was asked to leave. I felt like one of those homeless people as I had to go back to the station to wait another hour and half. It wouldn't have been so bad but a bus that could have got me within half an hour of home where Ian could have collected me left two minutes before my bus got in. Oh well!

Freddie has been eating the snow

I love the splash of red of the car in this otherwise
monochrome picture

When I got to the bus station the only people there were work folk. It looked like the whole place was going to shut down early too. Fortunately that was not the case. At one point a young guy came in who was well and truly drunk. He struck up a conversation with me, or at least tried to in Latvian, but switched to English when I told him I only spoke English - not quite true but true enough when it comes to a conversation. His opening words in English were "I'm f*ed up!" Not what I would consider an acceptable conversation starter for me, but I had to agree it certainly looked that way. We had an amiable conversation before he asked me for 50c, which I refused, then he asked for €1 - the logic escaped me. He said he needed it for the bus. I said "No!" He laughed and said, "You know I'm lying don't you!" I smiled and said "Yes!" He said "You are a good woman" gave me a buddy handshake and toddled off.

Mari

Mari's son, Jakobs. Oh he's looking cute and cuddly. He's also
turning into a friendly little soul too

A rather nice shot of Sofie. Our neighbour was telling us how
she turns up to her place and often sleeps in her cow barn.

The next day was the day before Christmas eve and so I thought I had better go out with Ian to the land and cut our Christmas tree. It had been growing in the garden and was getting too big and so we had already planned to use this one for Christmas. Of course it was covered in snow though, so spent the night in the bathroom to thaw before I could put it up. The first job for Christmas Eve was to tidy the apartment. Of course I had brought home all the seeds that needed cleaning up as they had got dusty and they needed sorting out into a couple of robust boxes rather than falling apart ones before I could even start on the other unsorted boxes in our living room. Eventually I managed to get some order into the place and shunted boxes around so that we had places to store them.

It amused me that the boys decided to all go outside when
Ian was around with the snowblower, trying out the paths
he had just cut.

Out for a stroll on the freshly cut paths

The only problem with the paths is that you can guarantee
that Turbjørn will stand in the middle and not let anyone
else get past

I love the startled look on George's face. Caught in the act?

Which brings me to the reason the blog is late. I was still decorating the tree in the evening, preparing some baking and so on. There was no big rush though, as we didn't have company for Christmas day and it would just be the two of us, but it was nice to finally get the living room in some sort of order and get rid of the boxes that had been lying around for too long because I was too busy. I get there eventually!

Keep it simple

Our Christmas tree, complete with the
parcel I tried to post before Christmas

Christmas is an emotionally challenging time as everyone knows and such was the case in our household. The first challenging time was the christmas tree! Not sure why this is an annual ritual for minor irritations, but it is. First there is finding one, not so hard now we have our own land and plenty of weed seedlings to choose from of various sizes. The challenge this year was finding one that was not too big. Isn't it funny how they look much smaller out in the field than they do in the house. I remember once earmarking the tree that was growing in the middle of our hedge outside our house one year in Denmark. It was part of a bush where it seemed like it was starting to revert to a different type of tree - hard to explain, but there it was growing out of the middle of a bush and I cut it out and brought it inside, only then did I realise how tall it actually was and it touched the ceiling. Fortunately in this case we had more than enough room for it and it looked rather splendid in our large Danish lounge. Now we live in an apartment the room is smaller and not so much room for a tree, not without blocking the light from the window anyway and that is too close to the radiator anyway. This year we got it just about right and hauled the thing home. Our white and very cold start to winter though meant the tree was covered in a thick layer of ice and there began our troubles. Ian was stood in the hallway with a now dripping tree and we couldn't think where to put it for it to melt. We have a basement, but didn't really want a puddle down there and so in the end we decide the shower cubicle would make the perfect place to put it, only the tree was wider than we thought - well something had to be wrong with the size didn't it! After removing the shower doors and much huffing and puffing from a certain someone we had the tree in the shower and I mopped up the floor from ice that had already melted.

Made by some ladies from our Danish Church

Another Danish Christmas ornament

A Latvian walking stick and a wooden ornament from the UK

One of the angels I bought whilst in America

Oh yes and he makes an appearance
every year too now. A freebie
from Denmark during a shopping spree

Well the saga continues, we had intended putting up the decorations on Christmas Eve, as I mentioned in last week's blog and my traditional day for putting up the tree, but as it was a Monday I decided my blog came first and got that done and dusted, then the problems started. As I mentioned before our electric supply has had one or two issues just lately and this day was another such day. I had just started to finish off making some croissants from the dough I had started during the day when the electric went off and I ended up finishing them off by candlelight and putting the ones I wanted to freeze outside on the balcony under a box as we didn't want to open the freezer while the electric was off. At least there wasn't a huge amount of difference in temperatures to a freezer at the time. It took a little longer than anticipated as it is not easy working in candlelight and there was no way we were going to be able to sort the tree out in the dark and so abandoned the job and went to bed a bit earlier. On Christmas morning we gave each other our presents and when I gave Ian his, he opened it and said "Oh a toaster!" My first thought was, "oh he doesn't seem to appreciate it as much as I thought he would" and I was a little disappointed. He continued to open the box and he exclaimed "Oh it really is a toaster!" and then the penny dropped. He thought I had done a common trick in our household of wrapping something small up in a lots of wrapping inside another box. Not sure if he was secretly disappointed that it wasn't a Tupla bar (chocolate bar) though. At least when we get electricity out on the land, he can have some warm toast to eat. Still waiting for that, but it is Christmas after all.

No Christmas is complete without a nativity scene is it,
with of course a few onlookers like Dally Llama, some
rather oversized fluffy sheep and Bagpuss

We also had a poorly pussy cat! Mind you she deserved it entirely. She is in the habit of eating too fast, if you put something down it hardly even touches her lips as she hoovers it up. We resorted to giving her the largest dried cat food we could find in order that she doesn't wolf it down in three scoops and actually has to crunch at least some of it. Well she got in the kitchen and wolfed down half a small margarine tub of turkey fat. A little later she was a bit antsy and then proceeded to do a projectile vomit, narrowly missing the embroidery I have been working on, on and off, for the last year for my parents. It was all cleared up but the sofa cushions needed a wash as she puked on one of them and then walked through the greasy patches and onto the furniture - or she had it on her feet anyway not sure which. It wouldn't come out with sponging and so I had to resort to putting the covers through the washing machine with the worst cushion taking two attempts to wash it out. The floor needed two further washes as I could see little greasy marks all over it! Not what I planned to do with my day. Question is, will she learn her lesson? I doubt it, although she didn't eat anything in the morning - guess she didn't need any extra calories after all that. Whilst cleaning the furniture though I also managed to spill half a pint of cleaning fluid over the area with Ian's computer on and to say I was panicking would be putting it mildly. Fortunately nothing actually got to the essential components and it was fine, but not my heart I think! Oh boy! I can do without shocks like that.

The embroidery that the cat narrowly missed. This includes
all sorts of textile memories from grandmothers. There is
even an unfinished bit of hairpin lace, still on the hairpin

I mentioned last week that the post office was shut for longer than I anticipated but finally this week some books I had ordered had finally turned up, but the one ordered at the end of November didn't. We are still waiting for for my Mum's present to us as well, although that might have turned up Friday but guess what! The post office is shut until Wednesday. One of the books that turned up and was ordered from The Book Depository was not in perfect condition when it arrived. It had four loose pages in it and yet no other obvious signs of damage. I decided to email them right away and see what they would do and, to give credit where credit is due, within hours we had an apology and promise of refund. Pity I can't say the same for the book ordered from Eurospan, I haven't had a reply from them as to where the book is from my November order, despite sending two emails now. I have tried again today using a different way of contacting them, so hopefully I will get a response soon.

This close up shows the hairpin lace (top right), a crinoline
lady, one of many to grace tablecloths and mats as well as
a reminder of the crinoline lady cakes my Nan used to make.
There are also some bits of embroidery done by me at the
age of 16 and some of the multitudes of lace crocheted by
my Gran (or at least I think they were done by my Gran)

We did get a little Christmas present from the wild boar again, fortunately not as bad as the last time and the hunters have been notified but since the wild boar haven't been back and it is Christmas we haven't hassled them. We weren't really wanting to receive presents from the wild boar but I don't think the melting snow has helped. Deep snow keeps them in the forest but the receding snow due to the increasing temperatures tempts them out. We went from  a nice but chilly -15C during the day on Christmas Eve to a rather horrid wet rain hovering up and down around zero for Christmas Day. Not nice at all and that has been the pattern for the week and means we now have some rather slick conditions.

A gift winging its way to the UK for the arrival of a
grandchild due ever so soon!

Well our Christmas was quiet and wasn't without incident, but really it wasn't too bad at all and we can laugh about it. In fact it went rather well, not only was our Christmas meal rather tasty and mostly local grown from the free range turkey from one of our good friends, to the sprouts we unearthed from under the snow during our extreme gardening expedition last week, to the parsnips, carrots and potatoes from our stores. All went down rather well with our Yorkshire puddings followed by a sticky toffee pudding. We got to talk to friends and family over the Christmas period too, thanks to the wonders of Skype but best of all we got to hear of our youngest's engagement to his lovely partner.

With a teddy in a knitted cocoon. Well every child should
have a teddy

So what do I hope for in the next year? One of the issues I picked up on this week on the internet was the issue of healthy farms. The answer is not necessarily to go to a meat free diet, although a reduction on the amount might not be a bad thing, but to get back to grass fed meat, where the animals are part of an integrated system on the farm. Animals are an important part of the ecosystem on a farm and reduce the need for bought in fertilisers that then pollute the water table. Animals in large industrial units lead to their own problems of waste, which would be far better utilised if they were spreading the waste themselves evenly over the grass land they were feeding on. A study by Iowa State University has shown the value of a more integrated system, not necessarily a return to old fashioned farming, but close. Farming that integrates animals is not a step back if used intelligently

The results were stunning: The longer rotations produced better yields of both corn and soy, reduced the need for nitrogen fertilizer and herbicides by up to 88 percent, reduced the amounts of toxins in groundwater 200-fold and didn’t reduce profits by a single cent.

Another blog argues that animals are needed not just for our emotional well being, but also our spiritual well being. Well we have introduced animals into our ecosystem this last year and it has meant some huge changes, but not the sort of changes that we would want to do without as we have observed and laughed at their antics. Hopefully our animals will also improve the fertility of the land with their waste as well as the chickens providing us with meat and eggs and the alpacas with wool. We are already planning on increasing our chicken stock for next year and seeing where we are going to go with the alpacas. We have much to think and plan for next year, that's for sure. At least we had progress on the egg front, we got another egg this week, the first since our debacle of managing to cull the only productive hen we had.

Close up of teddy made from an old
woolly scarf

What else do I see in the year ahead generally? Well I see more things coming to light that people have tried to keep hidden, but beyond that - not much! We have made life too complicated, something that seems to be a recurring theme amongst a few bloggers (Paul, Liz, Diane and here, Steve). We have looked to celebrity pastors/prophets etc., we have looked to them for words for us, looked to them for guidance. Jesus came to break down the divide between us and God, not institute a new hierarchy. If I have one word for any of you it is this, seek the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and love others as yourself. Unpack that and listen to the voice within. God has given us his Holy Spirit to listen to, he is closer than anything we will ever know, we don't need constant words from others to know what God wants us to do, although he may use others to speak to us, and sometimes he surprises us by the people he uses. Just as Elijah was surprised that God would feed him using crows to carry his food, don't despise the way God chooses to speak to us, it may not be as glamourous as we would wish but it will sustain us.

So on that note I wish you all a very Happy New Year, and my God bless you richly in love, and peace.