Slowing down?

Mari enjoying the wooded area on the hill

Slowing down? No not really, as you may have guessed, if you follow the blog. It is just over two months since I last blogged. I only wrote this blog because it was raining and had been since the early hours of the night. It was also forecast to rain for much of the day as a slow moving depression passed over. An ideal time to sit and write some reflections over the last couple of months. Unfortunately it wasn't enough time to add pictures due to our terribly slow internet and so a week later I am adding photos.

Hard to believe the alpacas were still fluffy less 
than two months ago. Shearing seems such a long
time ago now. Josefs has been on mating duty with
Mari and Vanessa. Vanessa maybe pregnant. 

A cloudy summery sky. Sometimes we need rain
and sometimes we don't. At the moment we don't
no matter how gentle it is. 

In early July we went to collect a Ukrainian family from the nearest train station. There were lots of young people waiting to board and it seemed unbelievable to us that they were mainly in shorts. It was far too chilly for that, but that was before a heatwave. Unfortunately for our Ukrainian guests they thought the same about the weather on their arrival as they had travelled from southern Ukraine, where temperatures were already much, much higher. They came from a desert region (no I didn't know there were deserts in Ukraine either) so humidity was also lower there. They were feeling distinctly chilly. They are still with us while they wait for UK visas and so they've had much sorting out of documentation, but apart from that, they've been resting from their arduous journey. The parents now have their visas but they are still waiting for their son's, which seems to happen on an all too regular basis, i.e., some family members get their's quickly and then they have to wait for others. They have also been occasionally helping us with some of the farm work, from helping to move the winter wood into the cellar, stacking hay, building a construction for an outdoor vine and picking our berries. They've also fed us with Ukrainian borscht, plovs, perogies and pastries.

We spend our late evenings after putting the animals
away in our old caravan and sleep in our new one.
How decadent is that? At least we don't have to
put the bed away each day and Ian can get up 
early and get his breakfast. I get to lie in!

The chicks were doing well in the cage and got
transferred to the bigger ark. 

Whatever troubles we face pale into comparison to the journey of the Ukrainian family. They went via Crimea, through Russia, to St. Petersburg, then through Estonia and into Latvia. A journey of around 3000km. A journey filled with uncertainty and aided by volunteers along the way - brave people helping, and risking much. The family carrying their life in a single bag each. What do you take? What do you leave? They are just a regular family, like many here in Latvia. An apartment, a summer home in the countryside (nothing grand, just somewhere to relax, built by a parent), working more than one job to make ends meet in the unstable economy of Ukraine since the first invasions, but doing the best they can. Warm, thoughtful people. Not Nazis, not political, not anything really out of the ordinary, but now with their lives in tatters, dependent and grateful for the help they've been given along the way. Whatever they had worked for, taken away on the whim of what and by whom?

These are all the older hens. We put 
them together and the bigger grey hens
proceeded to attack the black ones and 
the white one. It was pitiful. Since
they black ones and the white one were so
small comparatively and timid I thought
they would be fine with the little ones,
so we put the little ones in and moved the
big grey ones out. Bad move! The bigger
ones picked off one chick - the one that
Ian helped out and had thrived. I thought it 
might have been got by an animal after
putting its head through the netting. The 
next day I found the older hens in the process
of eating another one. Not a pleasant experience.
The older ones are now back together 
and they are beginning to settle down
- a bit. 

At least the chicks are safer on their own now. 
Although, one of them was picking on another.
Sigh!

Karla in the foreground is growing. She is the
spitting image of her dad Brencis at the same
age, although he was much taller.

Encountering such problems sometimes makes writing about everyday life on our farm seem irrelevant and yet the continuity of life has to go on, albeit in a different way maybe. Like the farmers in the Ukraine who still go out and plough their fields and tend to their animals for as long as they are able. I sometimes wonder if people think they can do without farmers and are happy for everything to grow in a resource intensive lab. Okay that might replace some of the resource intensive agriculture that is not good for the environment but replacing it with something else that might not be good for the environment or our bodies. Not all agriculture is like that though and many farmers are looking for ways to farm more in keeping with environmental practices if they can. Agricultural practices though go on and the seasons follow a regular pattern the same as every year, except they are also changing. Our seasons are more unpredictable, we have a longer growing season here in the north of Europe - sort of! If the rain and dark don't cause everything to rot later on in the year that is. Sometimes life just feels very complicated!

First time I had seen such a strange
colouration on a frog. Apparently
normal though for a common frog.

More glorious sunsets. Now it is dark when we
go between the two caravans.

I sometimes feel paralysed by the list of choices to make to face a future of change. I'm sure I'm not the only one and sometimes it is easier to bury our heads in the sand and pretend it is not happening. I'm supposed to go to Spain for a conference in September - do I fly? Trains across Europe are still not connected but at least they are thinking about that - however that is too late for a conference in September. For now I think I will focus on the remaining time I have on holiday from the university. Focus on getting on with farm and garden chores and think about travel later. At least I would do but I have an email from the conference organisers sitting in my inbox waiting to know if I need a connection from a larger town to the smaller one where the conference is located. Heh ho!

Intriguing cloud formations

So what's new and what's the same?

So strong!! Our intern helping direct
the delivery of our summer house
to the right spot.

New: We have a tourism intern who is an absolute godsend. She can speak three languages, Latvian (of course), Russian and English, even a little Ukrainian. She is used to farm chores and is interested in rural tourism, so she mucks in with the various farm jobs that are not so pleasant, as well as the interesting ones. As she says, the alpacas are cleaner than cows and so mucking out isn't such a problem to her. She has also rapidly adjusted to our British style sense of humour and usually gets it. We've had many discussions on Slow Tourism and what that might look like, as well as some felting of a scarf and some alpacas - a talented lady.

The base and foundations for our summer house. The last picture shows our attempt at trying to 
organise the planks in the right places to make assembly quicker. It worked to a point.

Ian on the other end of the package

Our new summerhouse was delivered and built up to gable height. It has mainly been quite good fun, rather like a giant lego set. It has gone up quite rapidly after Ian dug out and flattened an area for it and then guys from the company laid the foundation.  Ian, our intern and I have spent most of one week on the rest of it, in between our regular jobs of course. The first rows were simple but later there was one point Ian had to get the tractor out to give a gentle push to the side so a long piece would slot in. On another occasion ratchet straps were used to pull another section a bit closer together due to being a couple of centimetres out for a roof beam. Sometimes more than a gentle tap was needed but nothing major and nothing we (or rather Ian) couldn't deal with. 

What every tourism intern should learn! How to build a summer house. The first few rows were
easy but then it started to get more difficult. The tarp is to cover the house during rainy days.

A beautiful mutant campanula

Rain stopped play of course and one evening was spent covering the roof as best we could with a tarp for the main part and bits of plastic for where it wouldn't reach in preparation for the expected deluge. The bits of plastic have blown loose a few times and had to be reattached as the winds picked up a little, but fortunately it has just been mainly rainy rather than gusty weather. The tarp was covering a trailer load of hay, as we didn't have plastic large enough to cover the roof, so the trailer ended up being parked in the barn along with the tractor. However, the tractor would only go in with the front loader raised so it would fit in, which is not ideal. The bales have now been stacked under cover and the trailer out of the barn, ready for the next baling session - just as soon as everything dries out again.

Lolly will you get off the roof of the alpaca house!

Alpacas down! Or sunbathing?

Marvin

We also have two new cria (baby alpacas), Marvin and Norman. Marvin's birth was super fast but later on we realised he had a crick in his neck - not sure if that was due to the birth or due to him staggering around in the alpaca house finding his feet after the birth and crashing into a wall. Our neighbour came and looked at him and she put a neck brace on him. After a couple of days, we took it off when he seemed to be struggling a bit with feeding and making some weird noises in the process. The neck seemed to have righted itself though, so we decided it wasn't needed. He needed the attention of the vet later on too as he got constipated. This might have been due to the issues with feeding on a hot day and possibly getting a bit dehydrated. Anyway, that was sorted. I'll not go into too many details, but oil, a squeezy bulb thingy and some calcium and phosphorous fluid was also involved. After that problematic start, he's been fine since and running around and putting on weight.

Marvin just after birth and then with his neck brace and coated up against the cold. Marvin has put
on plenty of weight and is getting pretty strong.

Norman looks a lot like his dad, George
at the same age.

Norman's birth wasn't so straightforward. It was Ilvija's first and she has an overprotective mother (even though Ilvija is now three years old). At first everything was going fine and then Ilvija started to panic at this strange thing emerging from her behind, at this point pandemonium ensued. Ilvija was dashing around the alpaca house and there was a serious danger of her banging the head of the baby on the wall, so Ian got hold of the baby and followed her around. Meanwhile Chanel, her mother, decided that she needed to step in to protect her baby (Ilvija) and started spitting and trying to stand between her and the perceived danger.

This is a very large block of chocolate. Ian left
a bulk bag of chocolate in the car. He had to slice
some off to eat it.

Such a sweet face, but such a pain to deal with
at times.

At this point it was decided that Chanel had to go outside but she sat down in the doorway. So our intern was trying to hold onto Ilvija, Ian was hanging onto the baby and I was pinning Chanel down so she couldn't get in the way. We then realised that the birth was not progressing properly and the baby seemed to be stuck at the hips. The intern and I managed to slide Chanel out of the door and I then went to get our neighbour, again! Fortunately she was able to help and the baby was born. Mother and baby bonded well and now the poor little soul has got two over-protective adults in his life. 

Freddie, although sweet in character, will not
be joining the mating programme since he was
castrated earlier this year. Too many skin,
joint and fibre issues. His sweet character has 
returned and he's not in the midst of the fights so
often - just occasionally he joins in or is caught
up in a fight.

Have you been spitting Brencis?

Unfortunately Norman seemed to have problems with one of his legs and he was limping. The limping got worse and so we took him to the vets. There were several startled customers before we actually got to see the vet. Nothing seemed to be broken though and after three lots of daily painkiller injections he's started using his foot more and his tendons seemed to be tightening. Although he can run pretty quick on three legs it is good to see him starting to use his fourth leg more. Not sure if he gets tired more quickly or not, as we are still not sure if his leg is better or not. We have so much work to do with haymaking and the like there isn't time to stand and watch for long. Sometimes he seems fine and then other times he seems to be limping.

Norman after his birth and in the first few hours. Pleased to say his back leg is starting to get
stronger now and he can run well anyway.

Vanessa looks more and more like her mother
and might be pregnant - we hope so anyway.

The shearing season is finished with Ian doing lots of travelling without me and the mating season is drawing to a close soon too. The younger boys are now being used and we found out that Jakobs has a very distinctive orgling sound whilst mating. It's hilarious but at least seems to have had a very positive effect on the matriarch of the herd. Instead of spitting at him through the wire fence as he mated with another female, she sat down - a sign she is receptive. Two of the other older females have been given hormone injections to see if they will let a male mate with them. It seems to have worked - so first stage over - now they just need to get pregnant. 

Jakobs - our orgling wonder boy!

After the hay is in we will start back on the 
washing programme for Chanel to deal with
this skin before winter.

Chanel our over protective alpaca has bad skin issues and so this year we have tried washing her to get rid of the crusty skin. It was working quite well but then with haymaking, birthing and building work we haven't been able to do so much. We will resume later before applying cream. It would be a much simpler job though if she wouldn't insist on sitting down where some of the worst bits are.

Ian hard at work! Well the guy does
need a rest from time to time

As usual Ian has to do quite a bit of fixing. He's managed to fix the compressor and the two wheel-tractor - well at least they seem to be working properly now. Unfortunately he wasn't able to fix Robbie, aka the halogen oven. Ian thought it was the bulbs at first and so he got some more, only it turned out that parts had gone rusty. I think a new solution is needed, but that will have to wait until we get the summer house completed and we set up a kitchen in there

Norman and Ian in the car on the way to the vets. Ian building the summer house. Ian making sure
that Marvin is feeding, despite his neck brace.

The swallows are finally nesting in one of the
alpaca houses. We hope to see the chicks soon.

So what's the same? There has been less student work and more gardening, although my garden is a mess again. There's not been enough time for Ian to mow the paths and me to keep the weeds under control. However, fat hen - a prolific weed in my garden is tasty and so declared a vegetable - maybe it isn't such a mess then? Looks it though. I finally got some beans planted out and spent part of a day finally constructing something for them to climb up. I've also planted up the cabbages about a month ago, along with the squashes, at least they didn't cook rather than grow in the short heatwave we had. We had gone from cool northerly breezes to hot southerly ones and the temperatures climbed quickly. No longer sweatshirt weather, or even coat weather, but t-shirt weather and even then I was absolutely dripping like a tap. However, it didn't last long and we've been swinging between some hot sticky days and some cooler sweatshirt days to coat-weather kind of days.

Fortunately, Ilvija doesn't seem quite so possessive
as Chanel now and hopefully we won't have such
strong separation anxiety when we have to separate them
in several months time. Some people think it is cruel
to separate, but if we don't then it is possible he would
try and mate with his mum and that is not a good idea.

I have yellow day lillies and so no 
idea where this bright, reddy-orange
one came from

At least my cabbages are finally growing but they are so slow this year and the cabbage whites found them. I've removed loads of eggs. However, it has been too cold, too hot, sometimes just about right. Squashes are finally beginning to take off and I hope they produce in time before the cold weather sets in, at least we might get some squash flowers to eat. I had to take up the peas as the grubs had started eating them. I will try another batch as they might provide pea flavoured greens if nothing else. Cooler weather also suits them. Potatoes are coming up all over the place and becoming a bit of a nuisance really, but at least they provide tasty new potatoes when I weed them out. I have managed to keep on top of the Colorado beetle who are intent on demolishing my potatoes although there have been times when I wondered if I would. Now I see that blight is beginning to set in and so that will mean I will need to remove all the potato leafy bits this next week while we wait for the main crop potatoes to swell. 

Morning Latvian lesson and morning coffee.

Turned hay

We now have half the hay bales we need in and we hope this week to get the rest done. So there is still a lot of weather watching to do before we get the hay in and the roof on our summerhouse done. This is one of the most stressful parts of the year, especially when there is a chance of rain but not a certainty.  As mentioned the Ukrainian family helped in collecting and stacking the hay but so did my pregnant work colleague who was staying overnight. She was warned that we might be haymaking when she arranged the visit but said she was still welcome. It had been going fine and we would have finished in time but Norman's appearance that morning meant we got a late start to collecting the hay. Mind you she and her boyfriend also got to do some alpaca babysitting as we needed someone to watch the baby when we let him out for the first time while we finished the collecting and stacking.

Baling

Poor GT! Such a sweetie.

So apart from dipping into a project that is still ongoing and doing what is needed there and some proofreading for a media organisation, selling hay bales for decoration, showing visitors around, culling the cockerels, that about sums up the last couple of months, apart from some sad news. Ginger Tom has disappeared. We haven't seen him for a few weeks now. He was quite nervous just before he disappeared. We weren't sure if something had frightened him, like a large tabby that has been seen around here, or whether he had picked up a virus or a bug - possibly from tic bites, or something else. Maybe he's found somewhere else, but unlikely as he was quite a timid cat, or he was sick, frightened off or worse, since there are plenty of wild animals around here of course. Rather sad as he was a lovely cat. 

How's your Irish?

10:30pm and still a lot of light left in the sky

You can never say that my life is boring just lately. On the one hand I have been able to relate to a post on the Ploughs and stars project blog, where the author is pictured lying in the field exhausted, just resting his aching back and gazing up at the sky and on the other hand I needed to rest my aching brain, after translating from Irish English to Latvian English. Our neighbours who own a wood products company were a little nervous at the prospect of a meeting with an Irishman about some business and discussing everything in English. I usually take the phone calls, as it is always pretty difficult to speak another language over the phone with no visual clues as to whether you are being understood or not and usually face to face meetings are easier. No disrespect to the Irish, but they do love a good "crack" (translation talk) and at quite a pace too.  I think it is quite a while since I have had to keep up with talking in English at quite that speed, even though I did have a lovely chat with an Irish lady, a friend of my daughter's, whilst in Australia. I'm not really sure if the meeting was successful or not, our neighbours will have a lot to discuss, but at least the actual meeting went smoothly enough and I think the translation went well.

I haven't really been lying in the fields, but it is tempting. The problem is I am always afraid of the multiple varieties of insect life we have in our grassland to actually just lie down in it and that is from previous experience. Ian has continued to cut down a lot of the grass to try and reduce the problems of the flying biting ones that we have a lot of in the early summer and the hope is that it will make life more pleasant for the alpacas this year. We have already started with the mosquitoes, but fortunately they are more of an evening insect and hot weather or windy weather keeps them at bay and makes for a more pleasant time. Everything is growing at such a pace now and of course the grass is no sooner cut than it looks like it might need doing again. I have got quite a bit more gardening done as well as managing to end up with sunburn on my lower back - note to self, where a longer t-shirt of put suncream on there. I also took advantage of a couple of rainy days to work in the greenhouse, a job that has become almost impossible on the sunnier days, consequently all our tomatoes are now in and most of the melons. We are trying two new varieties of melons this year, to see how they fare - Lada and Vidzeme.

That rather thick custard is an absurdly yellow colour, not
from food colourings but due to the eggs our chickens lay.
We have had bright yellow cakes and intensely yellow
boiled eggs too, all because our chickens get access to grass

We have eaten well this last week, asparagus has been featuring widely in the diet - don't worry not too often, especially with its rather embarrassing consequences. One evening I prepared an asparagus, onion leaves, and pea-top omelette, served on a bed of lettuce that had grown from seeds leftover from feeding chickens with gone to seed lettuces and carrots that had been stored over winter. The only items not grown ourselves was the salt and oil and even the oil was a cold-pressed rapeseed oil from Latvia. Other treats were the scotch pancakes served with dandelion syrup that I made last week. That syrup worked rather well, so well in fact that Ian helped me pick a bucketful of dandelion flowers so that I can make some more of it. It is a long time since I have had any maple syrup, but that is what comes to mind when I taste the dandelion syrup. We have had dried apple slices, as we tried out the solar dryer that Ian made last year and that failed due to the lack of sun, or solars as we keep saying. This year a day in the solar drier and the apple has been just about successfully dried. We have so many eggs that we are having difficulty keeping up, but I'm guessing we will have plenty of help soon as our new chicks are ready for hatching out in about 10 days time and about that time we start with the influx of family visitors. We candled the eggs (shone a really bright light through them to see if there is life) and found that three definitely have not been fertilised and two are suspect, but the rest seem to be developing well. So keep watching this space for lots of cute chick pictures soon.

Our eggs in the incubator

I have had to balance the gardening with my uni work though, as I have a few rather close deadlines for things that need completing. One of them is a study plan, that has taken far too long to sort out, but it is now acceptable and ready for sending off. I also have an academic paper to write for a conference that had to be fitted into two pages and not the normal length of a paper which seems to be around 12 pages. It is my first attempt at writing one of these and there were a few new things to learn along the way, such as having to look up "corresponding" in the dictionary for a new version of the word, as in a person who deals with written communication. I had just never used the word that way. When I told Ian, he looked at me in surprise that I didn't know that. Okay I know you have correspondents who write articles for newspapers but corresponding to me was always used in terms of something matching something else, like someone's views corresponding with someone else's views. I am quite pleased that it didn't take too long to write and didn't require a lot of amendments. That is always helpful. There are times I can completely miss the point and fortunately this wasn't one of them.

The prodigal returned, looking a little dishevelled

I forgot to mention our cat went missing for a couple of days last week, she returned on the night we were shearing Herkules our alpaca. I don't know why she gets wanderlust, but it seems to be a regular thing with her. Last year she disappeared about three times, sometimes up to a week at a time. That was usually after a telling off or after she was given tablets which seem to traumatise her. This year, there didn't seem to be any reason at all, unless she was doing a thorough sweep of our forest for tics - she is an absolute tic magnet. Hopefully though the tic medicine will soon sort her out and keep the wee beasties at bay.

It is often said that "there is nothing new under the sun," in fact it is a saying from the time of Solomon, so it has been around a looooong looooong time. The quote below could have been taken from yesterday's paper, the subject matter is so relevant, although perhaps nowadays it is not just Continental farm-produce but worldwide produce.

The fact, however, that Continental and other farm-produce of all kinds can be sold in our own markets at less than would be its cost of production in this country, while the quality is often superior, goes far to prove that there is something in their knowledge of the subject and that it is not all the result of cheap labour or a better climate. "Stephen's Book of the Farm"(1888)

Ian has been reading this book in his downtimes in the caravan and finding it fascinating. The book was used in the programme Victorian Farm as a reference book for most of their activities. It helps to know what some of the more primitive implements were used in the smaller scale farms and how some things were harvested or stored in a less technological age. Sometimes it is good to revisit the past and see if there is anything that has been forgotten about that might actually be relevant for today, it is also good to find out the things that are best forgotten about for good. Not all old practices were bad and not all old practices were good.

Still waiting to go out in the garden, more squash plants.
Let's hope they fare better than one lot, which is being
inundated with snails.

Well I have nearly finished waffling on, but just want to finish off by one of the low points of this week. Having flown all the way to Australia, we had been hoping for a nice lot of points put on our Eurobonus airmiles card, but no! Between Scandinavian airlines, Singapore airlines and Star Alliance the partnership they operate under we find we are not going to get the points. When you book you are allocated a booking class and for some reason the ones we were booked onto, was for booking class Y that does not accrue any points. The problem I have with it, is no one books to get a particular class of ticket, you just book the cheapest on the day, whatever that might be. It seems therefore an utter lottery as to whether the flights are due to get points or not. It doesn't exactly make me feel inclined to be loyal to either airline either now. I think I will be looking at other loyalty cards then, as I will be doing a lot of travelling over the next four years.

Happy discoveries

Updated so the text is now visible! Goodness only knows what happened there, I almost lost the post in the first place and then it messed the settings! Such is life! Sorry I didn't fix this sooner but we have not been on the internet much this last week as I warned in the blog - if you had been able to read it that is.

So meet Tellus, Herkules and Turbjörn, our three alpacas

We finally did it! We got the alpacas this week. We had a long epic journey to Ventspils, a round trip of around 650km, but it is getting bigger in the telling, like a fisherman's tale, I think we are up to 3500km now. The roads were atrocious due to the rain we had last week and so the going was rather slow in places, until we got to tarmac roads. Going back was even worse as we didn't want to damage the alpacas in the process of course. From what we saw of Ventspils it looked a nice clean and tidy place with some interesting features like ladybirds in flowers, a cow made out of flowers and one cow sculpture looking at itself in the mirror next to the ferry office building, unfortunately we hadn't had the time to look around much as we hadn't long to wait before the alpacas arrived on the ferry  They were there waving on the deck as they came in - no not really! We waited for the horse delivery company to come off the ferry and Ian flagged it down so he could direct it to the car park where we had plenty of room to exchange the animals. It was at this point that we found out one of the pins to hold up the back door had moved and we couldn't get it back in place, leaving it only hinged on one side. Fortunately Ian had his tool box with him and his large screwdriver made a temporary fix to the hinge which I kept secure as the alpacas were lead into our horse box. They weren't terribly happy about that but heh we got them in. Before we set back off we had a strong coffee and something to eat because we were rather tired as we had been up since 3 that morning. As we drove back we drove through a moving front of rain, which seemed to follow us the whole way. One the one hand it was annoying but on the other hand at least the alpacas were kept cool. 

Tellus our stallion alpaca.

The alpacas have settled in reasonably well. We had a minor panic as we thought they were coming with food to help them settle in, but it was all put on the floor of the horse box they were transported in from Sweden so they could eat along the way  and none was left for us to take home. Fortunately a friend of ours was going to the shops where they sold the sheep concentrate, which is what they eat and bought us a couple of bags, and of course our friends had to come out and see the alpacas too. One of them, Herkules, rewarded her efforts by eating from her hands. He's obviously the greedy one as he is the only one that will do that at the moment. Alpacas are normally quite quiet but these have been humming to each other most of the day. Alpacas are normally outside animals but since we put a deep layer of hay down in the old workshop that is now their home, they spent much of the day in there. Only one of the alpacas is halter trained, Tellus, and we are hoping that the others get used to their halters as we would like to use them to lead them to different areas of the land so they are not eating only from one small paddock. Not sure if one of them, Tjorbjörn though is going to take to it at all as  he is a much shyer creature and is much harder to catch even just to put the rein on him and eventually the halter will have to come off, it can't stop on all the time. Still we hope that little by little as they get used to us and we get used to them then we can come to some agreements on how things will go.

Here I am removing horsetails from their paddock.

Horsetails are not really good for any animal and the wet

weather has really brought them out. The alpacas were quite

intrigued with what I was doing

Our cat went missing again this week. She seems to be quite sensitive by nature. The first time she disappeared we had had a traumatic time giving her the worming cream. The second time we decided to give it her the night before and not the morning before taking her out with us to the land and she seemed happy enough, until I told her off for traipsing through my leeks. Unfortunately that was the last we saw of her for 6 days. She did come back though and she is thinner than ever and very clingy. Wonder if she has learnt not to run off this time? 

Horsetails shimmering in the morning sun

We haven't had a good time with tyres just lately and the tractor tyre has been a bit of an issue, as I mentioned last week. It got damaged the other week and we wanted to replace it with another good quality one, which we had ordered. The problem was that when we came to arrange the day to pick it up, someone along the supply chain announced that the company had been on holiday and they were only just starting to make them again and it wouldn't be ready until the middle of this coming week. Not much good when the forecast was for dry days Monday - Wednesday and possibly beyond. So the cheaper option was taken and we went to pick it up on Friday, along with getting the two wheel tractor cutter bar fixed. Of course it all took longer than we wanted but it did lead to one of those happy discoveries, we discovered an Armenian restaurant by chance and was the only place to eat that we saw near enough to where we were. It seemed like it was just a little house with the garden full of tables and on the menu was lamb. It is not often that lamb is on the menu here in Latvia and so we ordered it, but as the waitress was collecting the menus from us I noticed the price, whoops a tad expensive for here. We waited to see what would turn up, half expecting a half sheep to appear on a plate or a great big rack of lamb that would take hours to eat. As it was it turned out to be four large lamb chops, beautifully grilled and absolutely delicious.

Setting off from our land at 4am. Twas rather early

Other happy discoveries were blackcurrant and strawberry cordial with black pepper which seemed to have gone down a treat, an experiment that really worked. I layered up layers of blackcurrants and strawberries with 6oz of sugar per 1lb of fruit, plus 1tsp of ground black pepper per 1lb in a steamer. I then cooked it all for an hour and filled hot sterilised jars with the resulting juice. Done! It got the approval of one American family and Ian - not bad going! Another happy discovery is a sort of blackcurrant toffee, it was meant to be a sort of blackcurrant raisin but didn't turn out like that at all. I boiled up two cups of water with one cup of sugar and one cup of honey and added 750 g of blackcurrants to the boiling mixture. The recipe said to boil for 10 mins but I wasn't so sure that would work but tried it anyway, hence the toffee rather than raisins. One final happy discovery is that the horse box makes a very discrete place to have a wee. Ian told me he doesn't mind admitting that finding a loo or somewhere to stop can be a nightmare at times, he likes to be discrete about these things, not like some folks we see. Well one bottle and a horse box and no one needs to know why we've stopped. He did refrain on the way back, he didn't want to embarrass the poor alpacas of course. 

Spider's web in the early morning sunshine

I shan't be around a lot this week at home, as we are sleeping out in the caravan, it means we can keep more of an eye on the alpacas for a little while and get going on the land jobs earlier as well. It is quite fun sleeping out in the caravan, although it was a tad cold last night. Extra clothes tonight I think. It is nice to have just a small area to live in once in a while, not sure if I could do that on a more permanent basis but for now it is like real camping, only we don't have to go anywhere and the view is still nice.

Finally one comment from my internet trawl (there probably won't be much of that next week) I am always amazed when the EU issues a rebuke to a national government to set its house in order regarding corruption as happened last week to Romania. Does the EU not realise that to root out corruption you need to educate the public on what they can do about it? It is no good telling a corrupt government to sort themselves out and give them a smack on the hand. They need to help the population to mobilise against instances of corruption and explain how they can deal with it. They have been a population under a communist yoke for a long time with long standing practices and attitudes, they do not turn around in one night.

Animals

Sofie in the barn

Sorry it has been a rough week again this week, so sorry if this is not too upbeat. Sofie our cat has been missing for five days now. Not sure where she may have gone to. We would take both our cats out to the land and they would go off and return every now and again, as if they were checking we were still there. Sometimes they would make a dint in the furry population around us - which is what we need as the moles and shrews make massive tracks all over the land and they are sometimes as bad as the wild boar - not quite, but nearly. However this week our cats have been making a dint in the feathered population, which we are not happy about. Both the cats found a little nest amongst the wood shaving pile with oak bark making a roof for it. There were perhaps six little chicks, but alas they are no more. We tried to rescue them, but we just couldn't do it. Our cats got the taste for them! That night Sofie came home with us but we didn't manage to bring Bella in. The next day Ian took Sofie back out to the land as normal and as usual Bella appeared soon after his arrival. Sofie took off and came back about lunch time and that was the last we saw her. No idea whether she had had enough of us trying to get worming medication down her and coupled with our disapproval of her new found delicacy maybe she took off and is sulking somewhere. I have never had a problem getting worming medication down a cat but Sofie seemed to test our experience somewhat. She was foaming at the mouth trying to get rid of the stuff, even the tasty cream we had. What is worse is to think of her suffering somewhere though, if she has been hurt or injured, but if she is, she is nowhere nearby as she has not responded to our calls.

A comfy place to sit

Meanwhile Bella has been further depleting the feathered population. This time it was a small bird that first flew into the barn window and stunned itself. Ian could see it was woozy and thought the cat might get it, so he picked it up and tried to find a safe place for it. He stuck it in the chicken cage (we realise in hindsight that was perhaps not a good thing to do with the diseases they can carry but it was an instinctive response). Of course the bird was not happy at being confined and tried to get out and it got as far as sticking it's head out from between the netting - that was enough for Bella and she whipped it out of the cage. In disgrace once again! The problem is that she has a tendency to hover around areas where she knows there is an easy snack and suddenly taken a lot more interest in the chicks. They are still small and can get their heads through the netting - but only just and is getting more difficult all the time for them. Well needless to say Bella has been at home the last few days, as we would not have been around during the day to supervise, just there to let the chicks out and put them away again at night. She doesn't seem to be missing Bella either, although she is trying to lick us more, which was a distinctive trait of Sofie.

Cornflower

At least the ferocious crocodiles that were spotted this week in our living room were more the sort to make us smile than get us worried or warrant our disapproval. We had visitors this week, our two friends who we have known since our first trip to Latvia and their three young boys, all back from Canada for two months. The older two boys were having a great time, taking the cushions off our chairs and scattering them on the floor and pretending that they were ferocious crocodiles, or were they to save them from the ferocious crocodiles? I'm not sure now but it was very funny to walk into the room where they were laughing and giggling to see the cushions strewn around. Perhaps they should have asked before doing that in someone else's house, but it just took me right back to when my kids were small and cushions would be on the floor because they were part of some grand imaginative play and that's the way it should be. Give me kids with an active imagination any day, rather than kids who whine because they want to watch the telly.

A gorgeous sunset

Our next visitor has arrived and she is a real blessing too as she is coming to help in the garden. Bliss! Our other guests have been a blessing too but in different ways, I am just amazed that a teenager wants to come and help in the garden and eat fresh healthy food picked straight from the garden for tea, amazing. She's lovely. I also got to see her mum for the first time, so that was nice and made looking after our neighbour's little girl a lot easier with lots of people to watch out for her and play with her. Mind you the little one gave me a bit of a fright as she sleeps outside in the pushchair, very common here and in Denmark, and the first time I looked out it was obvious that she was asleep, but the next time I looked she was standing up in the pushchair and I am two floors up from ground floor. Well you should have seen the speed I got down those stairs. Anyway she didn't sleep for me after that.

Hoppy seems happy enough and getting around
on it's one good leg

It's been a wet week this last week, not all the time and certainly not as bad as in the UK by any stretch of the imagination, but it is rather inconvenient and allowing the weeds to take over. One day I participated rather reluctantly in the sport of speed planting. i.e. trying to plant some plants in the gradually increasing rain. I am grateful though that it hasn't been that bad really, as some of my friends and family are facing. The hot weather in Colorado and the resulting wild fires has meant that some of my friends had had to be evacuated, the hailstones the size of very large marbles punctured holes in the old porch roof where my son lives, and the rain flooded roads causing more big potholes where my parents live and folks taking hours to get home where Ian's family live. Been quite quiet on the weather front really here by comparison, maybe I should be grateful that the worst I had was trying to plant in the rain.

The others seem happy enough with their new abode too

And going back to the animals we have been so near and yet so far as regards the alpacas. By yesterday we had paid the deposit and we had a date. The first date the lady doing the transporting was told she could book the ferry though was the 19th July which we said was fine, unfortunately by the time she came to book the tickets the space must have gone and she can only get a space in August and she is busy then. It is so frustrating. We have the transport and could have gone for them back in May or June, instead we have been going through all sorts of problems trying to work out how to get them here. I am truly fed up now. At least the chickens are happy in their arks, some consolation anyway.

The middle section of the roof lifts up so we can put in feed
etc. They don't have as much room as in the big arks but
that is fine as they still have plenty for the five of them.

One of the dangers that someone mentioned just lately is when the going gets tough it is easy to step back into what is comfortable and well known and I have been resisting the urge to seek the comfortable points, but I realised today that sometimes you have to go back to go forward. You have to go back to what you know, to remind yourself of your journey so far, to take a look back at where you have been. Remind yourself of your escape from captivity and the route into the promised land so to speak. I realise that is not really going back to what your comfortable with, it is taking stock of where you are. Going back over the process of where you have come from, to get to where you are now. To remind myself of where God has been all that time, to realise he never left me and he isn't about to now. I think that kind of going back is okay, it is sometimes necessary to remind yourself of the truths of your walk with God to be able to face the future with some kind of confidence. Not the sort of confidence that says "you can move mountains" but the sort that says "if the mountain has to move it will be moved and if we have to walk around it or over it then so be it, but whatever happens God will still be there."

Fairly certain this is a male, as well as the one peeping out
 behind, in which case we have three males and one female of the broiler chickens.

Had a lesson in reading comments before making judgements this week with Hilary Clinton's call for restitution for Jews - not quite what I thought at first!!!!!!! I thought it was a case of individuals being given back land that their family had owned in the past and my first thought was "Oh no! Not more ex-pats getting land and doing nothing with it!" However the call was to restore property to organisations that are still present in Latvia and that is a different issue altogether. It did, though, set me thinking once again about the issue of owning land! I recognise that there should be a way for people to recover what is rightfully theirs, but there is another issue at stake, neglected land! I see many examples around us of land owned by people living in America, Australia or even Sweden etc. abandoned and neglected but owned! Some have been driven away by the war, or ideology and some by the recent economic crisis. The problem is that Latvia cannot be productive on land that is not managed and keeping it just for romantic reasons of ownership is not good. Some people would live here if they could make farming work and that is one issue, but to just simply own land because it belonged to Granny without taking care of it is wrong! To own that land and bring the next generation into farming, supporting them and helping them to do so would be a step forward. Owing land with special natural ecosystems within it is possible, but it still needs at least a modicum of management just to ensure that one aspect is not getting out of hand like wild boar, or other successful species that can ruin a habitat as well as contribute to it. Owning land without putting investment into it, whether that be time, effort or money is not helpful to Latvia right now. For more recent migrants, economic hardship is one reason they cannot manage their land and I can understand that problem, but for migrants from a long time ago, then I think it is about time they thought about what they invest in Latvia and how they go about it. Not forcing people into their new ways as sometimes happens, but working with the population that is here to build something better and something that benefits the communities who live and work here, rather than hold onto what is theirs simply because they can.