Highlight of the week was going to the pizza place for Xmas lunch with book club -- this is the Xmas pizza with turkey, pigs in blankets, Brussels sprouts, and cranberry sauce -- yum yum yum!

Got another swim on Saturday so that is 64 for the year thus far -- should be able to make 65 I think although weather for the next week is looking not swim-able (and also like we may not be able to have a fire for solstice...)

Collected some more surplus windows from various people on the island for the future poly-tunnel project -- if anybody on Sanday is reading this and has any old windows/glass that you want rid of, LMK and we will come fetch...

And of course various cooking/baking -- I've made a goose stew (from a wild Greylag goose, shot by somebody else and gifted to us) and a lemon drizzle cake (practising for next summer's show!)

My boring life... :)

 ...just the way I like it...  :)

And herein lies the problem with doing more frequent blog posts -- is that I have nothing of note to report...

It's winter, so not much is going on outdoors.  I've been doing plenty of cooking & baking & endless cleaning in a futile attempt to keep the mud out of the house.  (Never mind summer, autumn, etc -- we have two seasons here -- the mud season and the dry season...  The mud is everywhere and it's totally unavoidable.  The car skids on the mud when you drive down the driveway now...)

And that's all my news for now!  :)

Tupping time

Weather here has been appalling for days now -- windy from the North which brings the arctic air, interspersed with snow and hail showers/downpours...  Just as well then that Shetlands are more likely to come into season when it's colder because the boys went in on Monday!  :)

Here's Horatio with his girls -- just goes to show the difference between breeds -- he is not even a year old yet and already he's bigger than my three year old girls!

And here's Raymond with his lot.  Yes, the boys ALWAYS have their head in the feed bucket -- they seem even greedier than the girls -- then again, all that sex is hard work!  :)

And here's Eyebrows, photo-bombing my attempt at photographing Raymond nicely!

The boys will stay in until 30th December, and then we wait with bated breath for April and little lambs!

New from Old

Now that the nights are drawing in, there's more time to do inside tasks.  

This is a dresser that was in the house when we came (can't find a before photo) -- it was covered in many many layers of paint and the legs were held together with baling twine.  

I found a great product called Home Strip which is a non-toxic paint remover -- and it actually works amazingly well!  Then there was the sanding, by hand at first, and then aided by an electric sander I picked up second hand at Restart.  And then I refinished it in Hard Wax Oil. 

The original handles were destroyed in the process of removing them, so these new handles were handmade by Danny from scrap bits of wood!

And just like that, I have a brand new dresser for my office!

I had this LL Bean Boat & Tote bag new for the start of 8th grade (1985!!!!).  It's still going strong and I use it regularly for my grocery shopping.

The handles had started to fray quite badly (again, no before photo), so using some trim that I saved from an old bath towel and a bit of old flannel bed sheet, I've made myself new handles -- I think there's easily another 39 years of life left in this bag now!

Lesson learned: shopping & buying new stuff is totally overrated...!  :)

Cockerel Update

On Tuesday we harvested one of the new big black cockerels as well as our older white one.  The black one was dead-weight of 6 lbs 1 oz (2.75kg) -- this is the biggest by far!  Looking back through the blog, I see that the last time I went on about how amazingly big a cockerel was, it was one that was only 1.6kg -- not even on the same planet really!  

Just to give you a better sense of scale as no bananas here, here's the brother of the one we harvested along with some hens -- truly massive...

The white one was pretty impressive as well at 4 lbs 8 oz (2kg).  Fingers crossed for giant chicks next year!

And of course, the thing that makes all the horribleness of harvesting chickens worthwhile -- the most yummy chicken dinner ever!

1.  Again, for scale, this is a normal sized dinner plate -- about 10 inches in diameter -- and that drumstick barely fits on it!

2.  I am particularly pleased with this dinner as nearly everything on the plate is something that we had a hand in producing.  Bought in items involved in dinner prep: salt & pepper, butter, garlic, white wine.  Everything else is ours!

Animals update

Tons going on here lately it seems, and I realised it's been a while since I photographed the animals, so time for an update....

The main thing that's keeping me busy at the moment is putting up the new fence so that we've got a field for Raymond (more about him later) and his girls and another field for Horatio and his girls...

This is Lucky duckie (the big one, right centre) who seems to have recovered fully from Danny's emergency superglue surgery its neck.  The one just behind Lucky was given to us by a neighbour so Lucky wouldn't be alone, and the other three are eggs we hatched under this hen (also from the same neighbour -- the eggs that is, not the hen).  We've tried to get the hen to stop hanging out with them but even though the ducks get locked up separately at night and she is back in the big house with the rest of the hens, she still hangs around with them in the day...

These are most of the ewes that we will be breeding from this year -- have you ever tried photographing sheep?  Either they run away from me or they all come towards me -- but getting them to stand still at a reasonable distance from me doesn't happen!  :)  

These are some more ducklings (and their Mummy) -- from the same neighbour -- who just has too many...  We will give them Mummy back when the ducklings are bigger...

This is Raymond, our other new tup lamb.  He's a Shetland, and he'll be mated with the four ewe lambs we had last year -- Doggie, Eyebrows, Shy Lamb, and Dolly (formerly No Name).  He's got some really lovely colouring so watch this space to see what colours his lambs are in the spring!

In non-animal related news -- I've seen plenty of photos of wonky veg, but I've never seen a Siamese cucumber before!  :)

This is all 24 of our existing chickens -- 13 older ones and 11 that are this year's.  Oldest once are 5 months old now, and the others not far behind -- and none of them have shown signs of being male yet.  Seems pretty unlikely that we've had 11 hens from 11 chicks, but then again, stranger things have happened...  :)

White hen may be dead, but it seems like we managed to hatch an egg from her before she died and we now have a very close replica!

These two cockerels were given to us yesterday by somebody who has too many (common thing with male animals...) so we will be eating one and the other will be next year's breeding cockerel.  Hard to tell in this photo, but they are HUGE.  Will take another photo of the remaining one once he's with the rest of the flock so you can see just how big.  Will make for quite a few chicken dinners!  :)

This is the one of the biggest of the chicks -- but still not showing any signs of being male -- which in a way, I am sort of happy about, because I think the colouring is quite pretty, so it would be nice if it was a girl and we kept her...

And to finish up, this year's ewe lambs.  Titchy is the black one -- she's recovered from being poorly, but she's just not putting on weight like the other four.  She eats, she seems happy enough -- but it's like she's off in a little world of her own.  Have I got a brain-damaged sheep?  Possibly...

3 years at Sparrowhall!

We had a fire on Sunday night -- both for Equinox -- although as you can see, there was NO SUNSHINE on that day, so we didn't get to say goodbye to it -- and also to mark three years that we have now been at Sparrowhall!  Long may we last here!