We get there eventually

Frederiks looking all fluffy. He looks like he is going to be a
good fleece producer, at least in quantity.

Well here I am again posting a late blog. The reasons for yesterdays non-post was an unplanned journey to the outskirts of Riga, but I need to back up a bit to explain how that came about. We had offered to take in a refugee family for a few days sometime over the summer, only time was ticking on and nothing had got organised. Finally I was given a contact and arrangements made. A friend of ours was in Riga and she kindly agreed to bring them, since she had a seven seater car. The refugee family came on the Sunday evening and I cooked an evening meal and we tried to chat as much as we were able, with their limited English and our non-existent Arabic. Still we managed, thanks to  some laughter and gestures and in part to the wonderful world of the internet and Google voice recognition Only in part though, how Google translate arrived at "Batman wallpaper" for one attempt, we have no idea.

Feeding dandelion leaves to Brencis

I had agreed to borrow our friend's car for a couple of days to ferry the family about and then she agreed to take them back on the Tuesday evening; so the next day I picked the family up from our apartment where they were staying and brought them out to see our alpacas. The family from Syria consisted of a man, his wife, their seven year old son, their six year old daughter with cerebral palsy and their little ten month old baby girl born in Turkey. The wife was a little nervous of the animals, even the cat and so was her son at first, but gradually he became bolder and was hunting for dandelion leaves to feed the alpacas. Our alpaca love the dandelions and they are far too abundant, so that works well.

It's a bit worrying as all the alpacas are eating all day, that
is usually a sign that autumnal weather is on its way. They
don't really need to eat all day, well the boys don't, they are
getting podgy

It was a bit tricky to know what to do when it was hard to chat with them, but we were managing. After lunch I got the young lad to help me dig potatoes and he counted them in English as he found them. He then helped me pick beans and carrots. The next job was to wash the carrots and potatoes. We had a bucketful of potatoes but I only asked him to wash six of them, he didn't stop there though he carried on. In the end I had to get a stool for him to sit down on, so he could finish them off. A good little worker anyway and I won't have to wash any potatoes for a week. We still had a few hours to kill and so I rang to see if we could go to the nearby camp because I knew they had some playground equipment there. The folks at the camp have adopted a little chap and very soon he and the young Syrian boy were playing around with each other like good friends.

Even the youngsters seem to sense the changing season,
when they are not dealing with irritating itches

The six year old girl was getting rather tired and started crying. She loved the trampoline earlier when her brother and the little local lad were bouncing around on it, so I took her back on. She calmed down and seemed to enjoy the bouncing and then eventually fell asleep in the middle of the trampoline. I covered her up and let her sleep, especially as the sun had finally made an appearance and it had now warmed up enough to snooze in the sun. Her mum joined us at one point and once the little girl had woken up, mum started bouncing. She loved it and she joined in with her son and his young friend. I was just getting ready to gather everyone together to go back to the farm to eat when the father tried to explain they had to go back because they had forgotten to pack one of the medications for the little six year old. The explanation was not quite clear and I wasn't sure what they intended so we had to ring to get an Arabic translator. The refugee centre must have a rota for translators and so they organised a translator to phone me.

The mulch on the roadway into the barn has built up over
the years and was creating a problem in heavy rain with
water running into the barn. The ditch was not working either,
so Ian did a little remodelling and scraped away the hump

Firstly the translator thanked me on behalf of the family as they had really appreciated our hospitality but then explained they had to go back for this medication, otherwise they feared that she would get more and more upset without it. They also explained they had a doctor's appointment the next day - something had obviously not been explained when we agreed to take them. Something to be expected when there is a communication problem. Anyway it meant that instead of going back to eat, I had to drive them back into Riga to the refugee centre. They have an invitation to come back again if they want to and we shall see if they do. I think they genuinely enjoyed the time here and certainly the little boy did. Both he and the Latvian lad were nearly in tears when it was time to go. At least I was able to tell the young chap what a super friend he had been and could thank him in Latvian.

A more level roadway with a depression before it gets to the
barn to lead the water away into the forest

Mr. P has still been to see his ladies this week, but came back
a little green. A good sign for us, but Chanel went back to
being compliant, so may not be pregnant after all

So how about the rest of the week? As I mentioned last week we got two new cockerels and last Monday night we put each one in a separate ark with his own bunch of females. When we let them out in the morning, one immediately stamped his authority and got his ladies in order. The second one turned out to be too timid and the girls spotted his weakness and picked on him. Eventually we decided that we had to put him in with the chicks, despite being three times their size. He seems a lot more content there, but he hasn't got the hang of going away by himself yet. I have had to catch him each night to put him in the box. The other one just follows his ladies inside, thank goodness.

Slowly filling up again

Other fairly mundane jobs were also done, such as trying to catch up with the weeding, sorting out peas and beans after the storms, cutting alpaca toe nails (a job long overdue), strimming and flail mowing grass (Ian's job not mine, I can't handle that sort of equipment, I'm too small and not strong enough). Ian also sorted out the well again, this time he was able to pump the water out without stirring up the mud. It is a relief to see the well filling up at a much better rate of around 80 litres a day and certainly enough to keep the animals watered and much better than the 7 litres a day we were getting, so that is progress.

George also looks cuddly, just not as much fleece as
Frederiks

We were also showing visitors around, but like buses, you don't see any for a while and then they all turn up at once. Two cars drove on with a family group. Apparently some of them had been before, but not when I have been around. As they were standing around a car drove past and then reversed back. The visitors who turned up earlier had a short discussion with new group and we ended up taking the groups around together. It worked and everyone seemed happy enough.

Chanel is also munching a lot

Not our first visit to Gančauskas because the tent and the
climbing tower hadn't been built in those days

One of the highlights of the week though was re-visting our past. In 2000 we made our first visit to Latvia to teach English in a camp near Sigulda and within a couple of years really felt like God was calling us here, but the timing was not right. It wasn't until 2008 we actually moved to Latvia, but the roots of that move were definitely in those camps. This year the camp celebrated its 20th anniversary and held a party for those connected to the camps over the years, so we decided to join in. It was well organised with plenty of time to meet others and reconnect, it was just a shame we couldn't really spend longer there but had to return to put the animals away. One of our favourite moments was sitting in the chapel that had been revamped over the years, but they still had space for the swallows to fly in and out. Somethings change and somethings don't.

Gančauskas in the early days

Gančauskas today. Compare the cars here to the ones below

The barn with the chapel entrance

The chapel entrance today

The campfire then

and now! It was good to see the lady in charge again, she always
wore a white sunhat

We met up with this young lass again, she
now lives in Spain

And reconnected with this young lady
too, all the way from Canada. It was
her family that started off the camps
and have put a lot of hard physical work
into it too.

Also the young chaps in the blue t-shirt and front row red t-shirt
were also there. A little older now of course, but so are we. 

A tasty Christmas

Our Christmas cake - dark chocolate sponge, layered with
blackcurrants and soaked with rum and orange juice. The
toppring is sour cream dusted with cocoa and coffee. As
you can see it was close to a disaster as the sour cream
nearly ran over the plate but fortunately stopped at the
edge

After last week's debate over what to eat for Christmas dinner it was decided by friends when they invited us to dine with them and so we had a very British Christmas dinner with turkey, stuffing, gravy and plenty of veg, followed by Christmas pudding and mince pies. It was lovely and shows the advantage of having a flexible diary. Tim's bro, the chicken in our freezer that I mentioned last week was cooked the day before though. There wasn't a huge amount of meat on him compared to supermarket chickens in the UK, but it more than made up for it in taste and so a little goes a long way. The meat of our chickens is dark and not pale and even when boiled for a while in the slow cooker the meat retains its taste and gives lots of wonderful stock with just the addition of a few herbs and a bit of seasoning.

The temperatures dropped yesterday and we have had frosts
but escaped the snow in other parts of the country

The advantage of sunrises at this time of the year, is they
don't require getting up at an unearthly hour

Our Christmas decorations did finally go up on Christmas Eve, which is fairly normal for us. We chose a tree off our land the day before and we were going to bring it home but it was bucketing it down with rain when it was time to go home, we would have got wet just trying to get it into the car. Most of the week has been very dark and the ground is saturated - at least we haven't had the floods like elsewhere, but then again we are on high ground. Our ponds were overflowing though and our temporary lake keeps appearing and then disappearing. Surprisingly the water table is still low and so the water must be running off and not yet made it down into the ground to recharge the underground water levels.

I love the rosy glow of crisp winter mornings

A little Christmas and New Year greeting

Ian likes to follow Santa on NORAD and around 9.30pm Christmas Eve he told me that Santa was ahead of schedule. Well sure enough shortly afterwards our doorbell went, obviously Santa was not going to tackle our rather narrow chimney. As Ian had disappeared out of the room, I thought for a minute that he was playing games with me and maybe he had gone to fetch something from the car. I went to the door and instead of it being Ian it was actually a friend of ours with the most humungous box of chocolates, a bottle of wine and a candle with crocheted cover that his wife had made. He wished us Merry Christmas and all God's blessings for the following year. Such a surprise! Oh yes! Ian was actually just having a shower, so he missed the fleeting visit.

A golden glow

Brencis is starting his halter training. It was amusing to see
him come up to Ian a little while later as if to say "Please
take this thing off now!" We need him halter trained to take
him down to join the boys when he is old enough, which
won't be much longer now. We just need to know he has
been fully weaned off his Mum.

We didn't buy each other presents this year. I will be getting my new glasses soon and Ian has got new winter tyres for the car. If there is anything we need, we buy it and we are not really into buying things for the sake of it, so when I say "need", I mean "need" and not just a want. Having a nice Christmas Eve meal together, then the home-made croissants for breakfast on Christmas Day itself was present enough for us. Even so we had a few presents each to open on the day, Ian got socks from my Mum and Dad (he was very pleased with them, a good pair of socks for Ian are obligatory and Smartwool socks are some of the few he has found to be comfortable to wear), he also got some cycling clothes from our son and his family, along with a box of biscuits - all his favourite ones too. I got a book about the Duddon Valley from my Mum and Dad. I have mentioned the Duddon Valley a few times on my blog and it is one of my favourite places in the UK to visit, as well as being a place I visited often as a child because my godmother lived on a hill farm there. I also got wool to knit a hat from my son and family. Our daughter and her husband came up with a very thoughtful gift for the both of us, they have given us money, but on the proviso we go to the local hotel once a month - something we haven't been in the habit of doing as we were trying to save our money, so it will be greatly appreciated.

Eyre, our kitten, kitten likes to follow us wherever we go.
The alpacas are curious about her and we are not sure how
safe she is when she gets in, but so far she has run off before
coming to any harm. 

Ian has been busy laying new beds in the fields using some
old hay and putting manure on the top. The idea will be to
cover them either in black garden cloth or plastic to kill
weeds and then either plant into them after the weed seeds
have been killed off in spring or maybe even the following
year. We are still at the planning stage. 

Of course our days haven't changed much because it is Christmas. The animals still needed to be let out and fed, so we have been going out to the land every day as normal. The days have been mild for much of the week and so I have dug up the last of the leeks, and cleared out many of the Jerusalem artichokes from one of the two beds we have of them, as they were getting a bit overcrowded. I covered the bed with straw and layered straw onto the other bed that I will dig up in spring - they will be some of the first fresh vegetables of the new season that way. I have used some old tyres to make a clamp in the greenhouse to put the ones I dug up in, along with some potatoes that had been grown late on in the greenhouse. They have been surrounded by soil and topped off with a thick layer of straw to stop them freezing - well hopefully. It won't matter too much as they are mainly for the chickens anyway. I found some carrots that hadn't been dug up in the garden, I think they had been too small when I dug up the rest and then forgot about them. Carrots dug up in winter are often sweeter and these certainly tasted wonderful. It has been nice to have some fresh veg and maybe next year we will leave some in the ground and mulch with a thick layer of hay to stop the ground freezing on top of them and see if that works for late winter veg.

Not the best place to get a drink, that pond is only just
frozen

Winter coat 

I have had a few days off from writing another paper. That has been so slow, but I think a few days rest will be helpful to get it processed to the next stage. Instead I have been sorting out seeds for next year's growing season, dealing with a batch of honey that was still on the comb, trying to make sure the washing got done and at least a stab at the backlog of cleaning. So nothing too exciting for the Christmas season, but definitely restful for my mind and I suppose that's a good thing and something money can't buy.

Our little kitten is not so little any more

Enjoying a new bale of hay. The feeders can be stuffed with
hay and they will still come and feed off the new bale

One of the jobs I forgot to mention last week was sweeping the chimney at our other apartment. That is usually one of those marker jobs of the year, although it is usually done earlier on in the year. Normally we would go up to the other apartment at weekends to heat it, watch a DVD and just chill. It is only worth doing this once the nights get long enough to watch a programme or film at night and so is an autumn and winter treat. This year the days have been relatively mild and so not much point in wasting wood heating the other apartment, which is one reason we haven't bothered to sweep the chimney until now, also we haven't had a huge amount of time - at least Ian hasn't. The forecast was for colder weather this next week and so we needed to get a move on and sort it out.

Not the most glamourous of poses. Hehehe. It does show
the alpacas very mobile lips though. They are able to move
the two sides of their upper lips, which enables them to
be very specific about what they eat. They can move an
undesirable plant out of the way to get to the one they want

A little hard to see, as Ian had to do a lot of cropping on this
photograph, but it looks like it could be a hazel grouse. I
was quite chuffed with myself as I thought it looked grouse
like and so it gave Ian a clue in which section of the bird book
to look at. 

Franken.......

Frankenbarrow! Cobbled together from cladding from our
kitchen to provide a much needed extension. 

Squelch! That is the sound most heard on our land at the moment. It's wet! We did have a couple of days of dry weather and it had just, and I mean just, started to dry a little when it rained heavily again. Ian still has to go out to the land to let the animals out and so he has got on with barn jobs, tidying it up and creating Franken monsters. Franken monsters? Has he gone mad? Yep probably! I explained he felt a little like Dr. Frankenstein last week, creating his monster table named Frankentable, monster sink- Frankensink, monster shelves - Frankenshelves etc. Well this week he made his monster wheelbarrow, so meet Frankenbarrow. So why Franken...... ? Well Frankenstein was really just a recycled human, made up of bits from other people and Ian's creations are reusing material usually leftover from other projects or, to use the up-to-date phrase, "repurposed" At least the rain hasn't stifled his creative streak. It might not be in a beauty parade of garden and garage products but they are functional and are at the moment costing us nothing.

It was that wet our alpacas were looking rather grubby.
They look better than this now though

As for me it has been hard work this week and I definitely felt quite depressed at times, which is not me really. There was one day there was nothing for it but to reach back into the archives and dig out my chill out songs. Singing "break the chains on this land" (from Iona The Island) with the sun appearing for the first time in days lifted my spirits immensely. I also watched some birds circling in the air and felt "yes that's where I want to be" and I let my spirit soar with them and then watched in amazement as other birds started to come, joining them from all directions, I really felt God speak deep into my soul. At least now I have strength to carry on now! Plus the giggle from watching a coal tit that kept coming to the window and occasionally tapping on it as it tries to understand why it can't get at the squashes drying on the window.

Spiders webs in the evening sunlight draped across
the fields

One reason for feeling depressed were work issues. I normally just plod along doing regular checks and chatting with students on the online student café I moderate, all ticking along nicely for a few years until something changes and for some reason more issues pop their head up and more active intervention is required; well this is one of those years. The kind that demands rapid responses and then thoughtful planning to address the issues in the long term. It means that work is not boring at the moment and definitely challenging and normally I would relish the challenge, but not now. I and a colleague relish boring now, we have other things to do too challenge us. Then again for the sake of our students we will address the issues wholeheartedly and try to work out some good solutions that are helpful for all concerned.

Ian giving a little perspective at the top of the hill. He is
stood where the house will be with a 3m stick in hand
to give some sense of scale

I also had an interview with a journalist for a hunting magazine about my Master's thesis on the conflict over wild boar management in the area I live in. It was a bit nerve wracking really. I had to explain what I had done and why without giving away confidential information, but I also wanted this issue of too many wild boar in our area wrecking agriculture to get out and be highlighted. Some of the things I recommended were also covered. It was quite hard to strike the right balance, but we both agreed that it was really stupid that no one apart from me was doing research in the Latvia on wild boar management, despite the widespread destruction they cause, at massive financial costs to farmers. It will be interesting to see what is actually written though.

Our house in situ.What it could possibly look like

So have I done much else this week? Not really. Trawled the internet for biodigesters and such things, but really I have been too busy to do much else. The good news is that a recent frost has signalled the final stages of our harvesting, it really is all downhill to winter from here. Our chickens were moved into the greenhouse now it is virtually empty, at least it will be less draughty and a lot less damp in there. Moving the arks was made a lot simpler by the visit of some friends to see our alpacas, it is easier with four to carry the arks over longer distances rather than just two. Frankentrolley made earlier in the year would have got bogged down in the mud anyway. We also spent a bit of time walking through the floorplan for our new house to see where things would be, see if it would work and Ian got to talk with our friend who is an electrician to see how we would get electric to the house - unfortunately we can't use the nearest electric cable it is too high powered and would need a rather large transformer for domestic use, we have to use a lower powered one further away. At least it all looks feasible, so far.

Frankenseedboxes. Made from some wood which had been
destined for firewood but decided they were too good
to burn and used for making these instead. Other
pieces ended up as backs for coat hooks.

Our heating is still an issue. I wrote to the company this week basically saying that we are still not paying until the issue of the quality of heat is addressed in accordance with consumer regulations and if it is not addressed we will see you in court. It didn't say that exactly of course, but that is the general gist of the matter. Well in response the boiler is on ....... only heating the other apartment block and the school and not our apartment block, because we want too much. Apparently we should not expect water 
hot enough to heat our rooms to the temperature stated in our contracts, that is unreasonable and until we drop those unreasonable requests we will not be getting any heat. Well I guess we are going to have to see what the court says about that. Sigh! I really wish they would see sense and just heat the water hot enough. It is stupid that they cannot even provide what the contract states and try and shift the blame onto everyone else except themselves. Don't really see why the courts should be the place to sort this out either, but if that is the system then we will use the system. Don't worry too much about us though if your thoughts conjure up two shivering folks, trying to keep warm. We have a wood stove, we have oil filled radiators, plenty of layers to keep us warm too and if the worse comes to the worse and the temperatures drop far too much then we have another apartment where we have wood fired central heating. And our neighbours? Well some have already come off the communal heating system anyway a few years ago - the rest of us are stuck on the system, one more off, then all off. Many have woodstoves themselves and electric radiators, so the chances are they will be fine for the time being.