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For no particular reason, other than that we have lots of snow, I’ve decided to write an irritating ‘top ten’ style list of music vaguely related to snow. This might be annoying, but I couldn’t just say it was snowing and leave it at that, because I did that last year. Don’t despair though, because I think it’s actually quite an interesting list, and I’ll try and make it even more interesting by rambling on about things as I go along. So, without any further ado, on with the list:
For some reason last weekend seemed to be nicer than any we had over the so-called summer, so it was a perfect opportunity to get started on cutting the hedges. I have a crappy electric hedge trimmer that gets stuck on a hawthorn branch every 30 seconds, and I’ve also sliced through the cable three times previously, so it’s all done by hand these days.
Mia had to help out of course, and yes that’s her pictured right, two years old and up a wobbly stepladder with a pair of scissors. And yes, that’s a plaster on her finger, but she didn’t do it with the scissors – that was the day before with the kitchen knife. I guess that when Mia gets to the age where she can use the internet, she might read this blog and then head on over to Wikipedia to find that most other children have ten whole fingers. If so, Mia, however many fingers you have now, that’s how many you were born with and I can produce photoshopped evidence if necessary.
More seriously, I don’t advocate that anyone lets their toddlers use knives and scissors or climb ladders. On the other hand, I don’t recommend that anyone tries to tell me what my toddler should and shouldn’t do when under my close supervision.
Another weekend task was rot-proofing the chicken house, slightly too late but better that than never. Unfortunately, when I bought the ‘stuff’ I failed to notice something quite important and at no point during the transaction did the shopkeeper helpfully say “you do know that stuff is bright chuffing orange don’t you sir?” Therefore, due to the shopkeeper’s neglect, we have a glow-in-the-dark chicken house that people will probably use as a landmark when giving directions.
Unfortunately there’s still quite a lot of hedge left to cut (I assume that people who call it trimming have a totally different kind of hedge) but in the meantime I can take pictures that only include the bits that are straight-ish and pretend it’s all like that.
Finally sunshine is upon us. This means gardening, and during the week the ability to work in the garden, at least when it’s possible to angle the laptop away from the sun so the screen is still visible. The orchard is a mass of blossom at the moment. The apple tree pictured right is probably the best apple tree in the world. When they’re ready, which will be around mid-September, they’re enormous, deep red, and pink in the middle. The picture below is a close-up of the blossom from the same tree, hacked about with using qtpfsgui to make it look arty farty. For once I’m quite pleased with the results.
It turns out I was wrong about the annual day of snow, as we had some proper snow today complete with snowballs and a snowman. Only the chickens failed to get into the spirit of things, refusing to come out of their house.
If the image looks odd, it’s a result of me inexpertly playing with multiple exposures to create an HDR image using qtpfsgui.
Wind is probably my least favourite kind of weather, and moreso when we’ve had what seems to be weeks of it. What’s normally an easy journey up and down the A1 on Friday was made a lot less pleasant by various obstacles in the way, ranging from lorries lying on their sides to bits of signage that had become detached and blown into the road.
We had what seems to have become our annual day of snow last week. Sadly I spent all of it working, so here’s a picture of it from my office window to commemorate the non-event. As it turns out, I didn’t miss much as there wasn’t even enough to build a snowman.
Also in the picture you can see that my anti-chicken/turkey fence which I cleverly made out of untreated wood hasn’t rotted away yet, and perhaps even more miraculously the hastily constructed shed hasn’t blown away in the perpetual gales.
It occurred to me that I haven’t posted anything here for a while, and strangely I haven’t received any complaints. If it wasn’t obvious, I posted this purely for the sake of it.
