Swimming

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

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

The morning sun

I love the sepia tones this picture

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

 Delicate rose pink frosted trees

Lots of icicles around over winter

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

Not an elegant solution

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

The ice structures are always so incredible

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

A thoughtful lookin Jakobs

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

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

Winter evening chores. He's pretty good

The snow is still getting deep though. We've known more, but
this is the snowiest winter in a while

Vanessa 

Our fairytale orchard

Winter hats

Just a few tracks across the snow at this end of the land 

We won't lose Mr. P in the snow

Clearing snow off our balcony

A sunny morning after a few overcast days

Oh so quiet!

Always the nosy one. Brencis first and then Freddie. Mind
you, at least Freddie doesn't barge in like Brencis, he just
comes up very shyly with a sweet, inquisitive look on his
face.

So a whole week with no noise from grandchildren playing, no noise of traffic, not much noise from anything really and even then I wouldn't hear so much. My coughing has just about subsided but my hearing is still bad. One ear refuses to pop, although it is giving mini pops now so hopefully it will clear soon. Ian has to face me so I can see his lips moving for me to be certain what he has said. Good job I can lip read -well in a good light and if people speak clearly. Oh the joys! Not as if it is the joys of getting old, because I've always had hearing issues and borderline needing a hearing aid for ages. No point in sorting that out yet though until my hearing is back to normal - well normal to me. Hahaha!

Hmmm! Now is that Amanda or Valeria? I'm never quite sure.
Ian tells me after consulting his photo album that it is Valeria.
Even he can't tell them apart all the time. He is better up close
now though

George looking rather weird after the rain. He looks so
different without his mop of hair.

It has been a weird week trying to find all of our stuff and gradually moving more things back from the greenhouse and caravan into the already cramped apartment. I'm getting there slowly and been sorting some things out along the way. Another weird thing is getting used to the heat. Last year we were lucky if the apartment got above 16C most of the winter, but with our own heating it has been much warmer without even really trying. We have a woodstove that I light about 4pm. We keep it going as low as we can but even so we get rather warm. We do not let it run much past 10 pm and it is still hovering around 17C during the day. Admittedly it is a relatively warm November, but the walls are retaining the heat nicely.

This is Silla, still obviously enjoying the grass and looks like
she's having a good chat about it in the process.

Silla in more contemplative mood. She is a feisty one though

Brencis looking suave with his savvy hair do

I have also been making some scarves. I have been experimenting with using Veronica's raw fleece for two of them and her carded fleece for the other two. One of the reasons it was the last of that particular year's fleece and there was lots of bits in it, which will took a lot of cleaning, so I thought it would be easier to card it first for the second two scarves. Cleaning it was just taking me ages. It is amazing to see how they perform. The raw fleece gives an interesting texture but the carded fleece is smoother. I still have some work to do on them but it's getting there.

Is that George looking for an escape route? Or more grass.
The grass is getting pretty brown now and they are starting
to attack the hay. George has stopped his escape routine
now though, a little electric obviously worked wonders

I have also been getting back to academic work. I looked again through the reviews of the rejected paper and some of the comments are fair enough and can be fairly easily rectified, but some of them I do not agree with at all. It is interesting to see that one reviewer liked to see all the quotes and the other reviewer most certainly did not. I have also been asked to do a presentation at the University and so need to get myself up to Tartu for that.

The welcome and not so welcome visitors. The couple
walking the alpacas were very welcome and we enjoyed
their visit as much as they seemed to. The disturbed ground
shows the not so welcome visitors - the wild boar have been
back again.

We had some fantastic visitors the other day. They emailed the day before to ask if they could take a couple of alpacas for a walk. I decided to tag along. They earned the title of the alpaca visitors who have stayed the longest, we even had to put the light on to keep talking and they joined us for a cuppa to warm up. They said they were going to come back in the spring before they are sheared, which is rather sweet.

They've made quite a mess

And more damage here

Before they came we managed to get the new girls' toe nails cut. It went better than we anticipated but it gave us a sense of who are the feisty ones - the smallest one of course! We are having difficulty what to call the group, as it seems silly to keep calling them the new girls when most of them are older than the other group. We think it will probably be Vanessa's lot and Veronica's lot, since they are the matriarchs of those groups.

This is Josefs looking unusually lazy. Normally he's haring
around like in the video below

We heard about the costs of the chimney and it seems like a reasonable price, so that's good. At least the quote was slightly lower than he said, but we still expect there to be some additional costs in there and budgeting for that - or rather anticipating that, rather than budgeting for it.

The video shows Josefs and Jakobs playfighting. It is best to click on enter full screen to see it properly.   Well that is just about it on this rather quiet week. I'm probably working my way up to some pondering as there is a lot swirling around in my head at the moment.