It rained the whole time in Ireland, but we had fun despite it. We went to the boat my dad keeps with his friend on Lough Derg. We went to Bunratty castle and folk park, we played a D&D game with the kids, and we invented our own board game and played that. I taught Steph to crochet granny squares and we started work on an afghan for dad. Dad read us poems by Robert Service, Rudyard Kipling and Banjo Patterson whilst we crocheted. I practiced a new bluegrass fingerpick I was learning on the guitar until I drove everyone crazy (but they all agreed I had improved by the end of the week).
The kids played in the Irish farmland surrounding dad's house come rain or shine. They shoveled up gravel from a heap and scattered it all across the yard; on the last day Steph and I spent an hour sweeping it back into a heap. The kids furnished a "den" in the hedgerow by the lane and spent a lot of time carrying stuff up there.
We watched a clutch of swallow chicks in dad's barn get bigger and bigger - before long they'll be ready to fly. We identified most of the wild flowers we found on dad's land (ragwort, greater plantain, ribbed plantain, welted thistle, creeping thistle, creeping buttercup, herb robert, yarrow, short-fruited willowherb, selfheal and others) and we identified all the birds (goldfinches, house sparrows, dunnocks, wrens, robins, chaffinches, blue tits, great tits, greenfinches, jackdaws, hooded crows, wagtails, swallows, and others).
Tomorrow we're off on our travels again - to London this time with Ed (he didn't come to Ireland) for our main family holiday of the year. I'll resume normal regular blogging when I return.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Friday, August 15, 2008
Going to Ireland
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Thursday, August 14, 2008
Hedgerow Wine
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Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Sunday Funnies
Well, OK, he's not being very funny in this clip but he's bang on the money.
Preach it, Rob.
Cartoon from Marc Roberts at Throbgoblins
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There can be no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. Anything else is just decadent
Preach it, Rob.
Cartoon from Marc Roberts at Throbgoblins
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Monday, August 11, 2008
Weed of the Week - Rosebay Willowherb
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I think it's a very handsome plant, and apparently it was introduced as an ornamental. I'm not at all surprised, and I don't know why we don't still grow it as a flowering garden plant. I think it looks a lot better than some of the things you can buy in the garden centre. I've seen some references that say you can eat it, but it doesn't seem to be a great delicacy. You can eat anything that isn't actually poisonous, but whether it's worth the effort is a different question.
Friday, August 08, 2008
Newspaper Mirror
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them, then she stitched them onto a circle of corrugated cardboard. She cut out the hole in the centre and glued a piece of mirror behind. Then she backed the whole thing with a piece of thin card. Everything was recycled. I think it looks very effective, and it is hanging on my wall close to my computer.
Thursday, August 07, 2008
A Holiday, A Holiday
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Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Make Do and Mend Challenge
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I can do minor guitar surgery myself, and frequently do. But there were several instruments that were beyond my skills to repair. I took a variety of busted guitars to my friend's house, and he returned them all amazingly fast, and better than new. He wouldn't accept any payment, and said he enjoyed doing it. As well as a skilled craftsman he is also a keen musician - he has a beautiful tenor voice and I know he enjoys attending concerts as much as he enjoys performing music. So it gave him a buzz to help encourage a new generation of musicians. The children and their parents were delighted, too. And I was over the moon to see the new motivation my students had once their instruments were repaired - many of them had had their enthusiasm dented by having to use a damaged or borrowed instrument.
Repairing something is much better than replacing it, and not just for the obvious reasons of saving money and saving the planet's resources. When we repair things we start to see ourselves as competent and skilled. Consumerism takes that away from us. When we repair things we build up a relationship with the item we repair, it has a history for us and we respect it more than something we "just bought". When we have repaired a few things and we start to become good at it, we have a skill we can share with other people, whether for money or just for love and friendship. We can earn good will and respect from people by sharing our skill with them.
Repair something this month, and tell me how it makes you feel differently about your belongings and the world around you. Don't forget to vote in the poll in the right-hand-sidebar when you've done it.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Put a Plug in it Challenge Results
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- I put the plug in the bath when I showered! 30 votes (51%)
- I don't want to put the plug in the bath when I shower! 7 votes (12%)
- I haven't got a shower over my bath! 21 votes (35%)
I much prefer a bath - & have been telling myself for months that it really does not use much more water. So, I felt quite bad when I took up your challenge, put the plug in & had a shower. The water did not get above my ankles! A converted showerer..
Some commenters shared the inspiring ways they recycle their bath and shower water. Carol Hague keeps a bucket in the bathroom and uses bathwater to flush the loo. Linz uses a bucket to take it to the garden, and Wulf also uses it in the garden via a droughtplug. Yellow washes her whole family of four in a single bath (I think they take turns rather than all go in at the same time) and Amy likes to get in and out quickly. Rob isn't satisfied with taking just one green challenge, but he has done a whole bunch of them and wrote a roundup of the challenges he has taken in the last few months.
There will be a new challenge for August coming soon.
Monday, August 04, 2008
Bats
I sleep with my bedroom curtains open. My bedroom backs on to open fields and is not overlooked at all so I don't worry about privacy. I love to look at the stars or simply the clouds, although the moon is never visible from my bedroom window which is a bit sad. I like to be woken by the sunrise and in particular I like to watch the bats. I wish I could show you a photograph but they're incredibly fast and almost impossible to photograph on the wing, and I don't know where they roost so I can't show you a photograph of them resting. The (rather fuzzy) photo I have included is of some bats we saw roosting in a souterrain in Craggaunowen in Ireland last year.
I don't know what species they are. There are 17 species of bat in Britain, which is about a quarter of all our mammal species. The most common is the common pipistrelle, which is also the smallest at less than 2 inches long. The rarest is the greater mouse-eared bat which was thought to be extinct in this country but was recently discovered living in the south of England. The largest British bat is the noctule, but even this is only about 3 inches long and weighs less than 1 1/2 oz (40g). British bats are diddy, although their wingspans make them look bigger than that.
Sadly, like much of our native wildlife, British bats are in trouble. A combination of loss of habitat and insecticides wiping out their prey has caused their numbers to decline sharply. Now all British bats are protected by law. It is illegal to harm them or disturb them, or muck about with their roosting sites.
I've recently discovered you can get bat detectors - electronic devices which can hear the bats' sonar sounds and can identify the bat from the frequency of its squeak. They're not cheap, but maybe my local bat conservation group or wildlife trust can lend me one to identify my bats. I'll be looking into that and I'll tell you how I get on.
If you want to find out more about British bats, visit the Bat Conservation Trust.
Sunday, August 03, 2008
My Sister Visited
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I went to the farmer's market again today and all the stallholders asked me "Where is your sister? Where is her baby?" It's still fun going to the farmer's market without her, but it's not as much fun.
I'll be seeing her again in only ten days' time when all the family are gathering at my dad's house in the west of Ireland. I'm looking forward to that, but in the mean time the house seems unnaturally quiet.
Cartoon by the talented and uncannily sexy Marc Roberts of Throbgoblins. He's recently published a great cartoon about allotments, but it has too many panels to fit neatly on a Bean Sprouts blog entry.
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Friday, August 01, 2008
Recycled Mirror
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The picture frame used to be white and contained a picture of Elmer the Patchwork Elephant. All our children are too old for Elmer now, so she re
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Then Steph cut an old piece of mirror glass to fit the frame (we saved the mirror from an old wardrobe, it's been in the shed for years). And that was it, a beautiful new recycled mirror.
I was utterly delighted with it - until I found that she had cut up several drinks cans with my best dressmaking scissors.
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