A Trip Back Through Time

I was about to phone the AA and give them a piece of my mind about our exorbitant membership fees for this year (when you compare them to new members deals for both the AA and the RAC) but my phone has no service (this happens a lot in bad weather here in the valley).  So instead I sat at the computer with a cup of coffee and flashed up some of the blog posts that I did each year on or around this date

Way back on 9th November 2009 seemingly we were keeping an eye on our landlords dogs for the weekend, scrumping for apples in his garden (with permission).  We lived in Oxfordshire then, just outside the village of Great Haseley.

And I was in Christmas card production mode for my Farmers Market stall.

Here's the original post.

On this day one year later in 2010, we were awaiting the arrival of a late brood of chicks ...

... and someone was dissecting his chainsaw on my kitchen table!!

Original post.

Moving forward another year to November 2011 and we were in the midst of tough times, but animal antics helped pull us through.

Original post.

Oooh ..... exactly one year later in 2012 and I was apologising for bad language!!  What made me swear .... it was BT of course.  We were now living in Berkshire, just outside Pangbourne.

Original post.

November 9th 2013 saw me posting all about making up transportable and easily eaten food for our trips here to Wales to decorate this house.  That is a very tasty looking post ... don't travel over if you are feeling peckish!!

Original post.

In 2014 it was Remembrance Sunday, and this reminds me, we have yet to find a suitable position for Lovely Hubby's Tower Poppy.

Original post.

And then finally last year 2015, when I posted all about the grey and seemingly never ending wet days of November.

Original post.

Well there you are a quick trip back through seven years ..... and you only stopped by to see what I was up to today  ;-)

Well my phone still isn't working so I will have to put on the kettle, make another cup of coffee and do a bit of blog hoping myself ... and not one mention of the political news that we all woke up to this morning.  I'll leave that to other more daring bloggers .... 

Sue xx

Have You Vanished?

While we were away at the weekend lots of you got in touch to let me know that my Blog List on the sidebar had vanished (thank you), but from my phone there was nothing that I could do about it until I got home to check things out.  It's a problem that seems to be creeping around the Blogger blogs at the moment. 

Since I have been back I have slowly and steadily been re-instating the blogs that were on the sidebar, and adding a couple of new ones that I have found on my journey around blogland.

Some of you have noticed that you were missing from the new list and helpfully reminded me, others I think are being a bit more reticent.  So this is a shout out to anyone who's blog used to be on my sidebar that I have yet to re-add to the new list, please don't be shy ... let me know.  All you have to do is to comment on this post and I will be able to pick up your link from your name. 

Also if there is a blog similar to mine that you journey to after reading mine each day don't be shy about letting me know it's name and if I like the look of it too I can add it to my sidebar to make your journey around blogland even easier each day.  Indeed if you have a blog that is along the lines of either of mine, don't be shy,  shout out and get yourself a little bit of publicity by making it on to my blog list too.

Now I'm off to try and pick up a few more links to my favourite people  :-)

Sue xx

My Blog .... and Rat's Arses

I've purposefully taken a few days off from posting on this blog, although I have been updating the new blog to keep things up to date and accountable .... to me.  The reason for this was to have a good long think about things.

Over the last few weeks there have been an increasing number of  comments that seem to be slanted towards asking me to justify what we do, why we do it and implying that they do it better, more cost effectively and more entertainingly.

Quite frankly .... I don't give a rats arse!!

I started this blog back in January 2009 when we made our switch to this lifestyle.  It was never going to be a blog meant to be read by hundreds or thousands of people, it was to be my diary, my online diary.  I am quicker at typing than I am at writing, and it's much more legible for future reading!!  It could contain photos taken as we went about our journey towards self sufficiency to remind us of what we were achieving along the way, and it has worked out fine for this.

But what seems to be cropping up more and more at the moment are comments questioning the way we do things, telling me there are other better ways of doing them, letting me know in no uncertain terms that I am not doing this 'self sufficiency' thing properly.   Comments and emails have trickled in implying that I should be knitting myself a hair shirt, making myself sackcloth pants, living off homemade bread and water.  

Well that's not what we are about in any way shape or form.

We are now in our eighth year of this lifestyle, our first three years were spent trialing it out and having a go at things.  Learning to grow food, keep chickens and breed pigs, checking out the things we needed to do these things properly and cost effectively.  The next two were spent following on but in a greatly reduced way, as having decided that, yes this was the life for us, we needed to live as cheaply as possible so we could save like mad to fund buying our own house and land.

The first two years here have been about putting into action all that we had learnt, adapting it to this wet Welsh hillside and setting up a sustainable and workable system that will enable us to live as self sufficiently as possible using all that we have learnt and acquired along the way.  

So now for instance, we have a water harvesting system so we use less mains water, we have solar power for the house and workshop, it powers the Aga that warms the house and it also earns us money as we sell surplus electricity back to the National Grid.  We have a permanent Chicken World with fox proof fencing.  We have a log burner that burns the wood from our own woodland.  We have chickens that lay the eggs we eat and that will provide the meat for Lovely Hubby's carnivorous tendencies as we expand the flock with dual purpose birds instead of just laying hens.  

All this and more we have picked up along the way, as we educated ourselves through courses, books, programmes, speaking to well known and little known experts, through trial and error and through sheer hard work and determination.

There have been things that we have discounted along the way, I don't knit myself dishcloths (unless a ball of 10p cotton falls into my lap)  I use the stash of bargain cloths that I bought ages ago and that reside under the kitchen sink, I don't knit or crochet us jumpers or socks  ... knitting and crochet don't relax me they stress me out.   I hate sewing so I sold the second hand sewing machine that I tried making our own things with and instead we buy what we need and make things last.

What I am trying to say is that we know what we want to do and we know how we want to go about doing it.  Having a constant stream of comments slyly telling me that 'this is so much better' or that ' that is the way it should be done' or 'don't you do this' is draining, very draining.  I was so tempted to switch both blogs to private the other day ... the only thing that stopped me are the readers who are at the moment reading from the very beginning.  To cut off their reading would have been like snatching away a book, and if you did that to me I would murder you ;-) 

So this has been my little rant, I hope you understand where this has come from and I hope you understand that I can only be polite to inane comments and snide remarks for so long,  I will not justify what I do or what I say to anyone, after all it's my diary you are reading ...... expect some swearing if it continues.

 .... I still don't give one!!

Sue xx

Lets All Play Fair

Blogland is such a wonderful place when everything runs smoothly.  Bloggers blog, we read each other's posts, followers, commenters, lurkers and all those lovely people that skip in and skip out of our daily posts bring with them opinions, ideas and sometimes just plain simple encouragement when encouragement is most needed.

BUT, and yes that is a great big BUT, it has a dark side.  Every day for the past month I have had to spend five minutes skimming through tons of Spam, deleting it and clearing things away before getting down to the business of writing a post.  I could leave it to build up and have a mammoth all in one go deleting session, but every now and then in amongst all the negative dross, comments asking my readers to link back to sites where their computers would be at risk, links to sites where they would be offered viagra and other things that if they actually wanted they could find for themselves from much more legitimate places, there is a delightful comment from a new reader that I simply won't let be lost somewhere out there in cyberspace.

And there is an even darker side, there is bullying, it goes on ....  nasty people leaving comments anonymously thinking they are safe to do so, thinking that hiding behind the magic word 'Anonymous' means they can't be traced, can't be brought to task and can't be outed.  NOTHING you delete from your computer is EVER truly deleted.  If complaints are brought and legal action taken you CAN and you WILL be found.

And then there is the darkest side of all .... false accusations of bullying with no proof, just insidious hints that lead back to a person that is completely innocent of any wrongdoing, save that of standing up for their own opinions, rights and families.  Now THAT is the darkest side of all.  Innocent commenters and readers are drawn into the libel, because make no mistake that is what it is, and malicious rumours spread, making this once joyous interesting place a darker more menacing one.

Ella Woodward on her Deliciously Ella blog post today has hit the nail on the head, talking about the negative side of social media.  It has made many bloggers take a break in the last few months, some are reappearing now after a well deserved break, but others are gone for good, fed up with the negative comments and hurtful remarks.  In this country it seems so many like to help a person climb a ladder of success only to immediately join in with those  who want nothing more than to topple them right back down again.

We have a level of power as Bloggers, we can delete comments that we feel are hurtful or negative, we can block some individuals from reading our blogs, we can alter our settings to stop spam or anonymous comments appearing unannounced at the bottom of our posts.  If all that is not enough we can choose to go private or to simply stop when the going gets too tough.

I usually try to nip things in the bud if some nasty anonymous comment appears by answering back with a jokey remark.  I hold my hands up to occasionally deleting a comment that has total negative connotations, but extremely rarely.  I feel that people should have a voice, but I have always lived by the saying that 'if you have nothing nice to say you should say nothing at all', it has stood me in good stead and will hopefully continue to do so.

Like Suky the Pug at the top of this post, only if you can look someone fully and truthfully in the eyes and tell it as it is ... should you tell it at all.

Sue xx

The New Chicken World

 

The chickens have settled in well after the move, the egg laying is down to an average of five or six a day which is the lowest we have ever had, but this is caused partly by the fact that the hen that was left behind (and caught and re-homed by our neighbour) and also the one that sadly took it upon herself to die last week were both good layers.  So if we still had them that would have been a much more respectable seven or eight.

 

Angel, 'the double rescue' Hyline still lays a couple of eggs a week even though she must be getting on a bit for an ex commercial layer, but for reasons known only to herself never in the nest boxes, she hops over the fence lays her egg behind our house in a pile of leaves and then hops back over into Chicken World.  We have no problem with this, we just keep our fingers crossed that she always gets back safely.  We tried moving the leaves but she laid on a pile of stones instead, so the leaves are re-instated for her comfort ... yes, we are soft like that :-)

 

 

Caldwell II is still in charge of the flock ....

 

 

... ruling with a iron fist of tender care for his wives, until Lovely Hubby shows his face and then the aggressive little so and so charges with feathers and spurs a flying!!

 

He has a young pretender in the form of Flash ...

 

 

... who is maturing into a most magnificent specimen,.

 

We don't know what breed he actually is as he was sold along side his siblings as a Silkie .... and he definitely NOT a Silkie!!

 

Although Snowy his sister is!!

 

She's always on the go, hence what is a slightly burry photo, a bundle of Silkie fluff that runs around at the speed of sound!!

 

 

The henhouse is proving really good.  At first I had trouble adapting to a completely different style of house.  You get in your routines, any chicken keeper will know what I mean.  Cleaning them out a certain way, knowing how the birds use the house, accessing the house yourself.

 

We made some modifications to it to suit us and our birds better, we took out the first of the interior perches, our girls just couldn't manage the jump up to the perches without first landing on the board that sits under them, with the perches coming right to the edge of the board this was impossible and they spent the first few nights sleeping on the floor.  Luckily we have a lot less birds than the house is designed for so this is not too much of a problem.  We also made them a ramp that leads up to the shelf so the larger girls can climb up instead of jumping, our Black Marans are heavy birds and they found it a struggle. 

 

 

At the rear of the henhouse are the nesting boxes (accessed from inside for the birds and from outside for us), unfortunately the door for this opens downwards which just clears the incline of the hill.  It would be so much better for accessing the eggs and for cleaning out purposes if it was the lid that lifted up as it did in our last henhouse.  But for now this must remain as it is, although it is frustrating to be stood on a slope ducking down to reach in and collect eggs.

 

The only other downside to the house is that the perches are fixed in position with screws, I much prefer removable perches sat in recesses and  also the shelf under the perches is supposed to slide out for ease of cleaning but this is virtually impossible to do singlehandedly so I have worked out a way to clean it from inside the house, a bit of a bug bear but one that I can live with as long as we do a deep clean of the house every so often and remove these completely.

 

All in all it is a well thought out house and very well made, LH was impressed with the quality of the treated wood and the instructions for assembly were so easy, we could have had it assembled on site for a very reasonable cost but he wanted to do it himself so he could thoroughly check it's construction. 

 

Now I'm used to is, cleaning it out daily for a month helps considerably with this, I am getting happier .... and the main thing is the chickens are happy and safe.  And it proves that we are happy with our henhouse we have just ordered a brand new shed from the same company to house all our chicken feed and supplies ... this time it's not a Manshed .... it's a Chicken Shed!!

 

At the moment we have the electric fencing round Chicken World but hopefully in the next couple of months we will be constructing a proper fenced area with an undercover space for the rain that very occasionally falls here ...... please understand the sarcasm in that last sentence ;-)

 

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Thank you for all the comments about yesterdays Blogging post.  You left some really good links to Blogs that I don't currently read and I'm sure a lot of you will be using them, just as I am, to hop even further around Blogland.  It's also nice that we enjoy a lot of the same Blogs.  Some of the ones mentioned I do already read but are not on my sidebar.  Reading Blogs can be a wonderfully time consuming occupation, but it's so nice to belong to a crowd of like minded souls.

 

Sue xx

 

 

 

Please Help

 

I don't often beg for help on my Blog but today I am making an exception.

 

This is Mali, a beautiful Asian elephant who has spent  her entire life, over 36 years in solitary confinement in a tiny enclosure at Manila Zoo, she was taken from her Mum whilst still needing to suckle and put on public display.  She has lived in the same enclosure since then with no veterinary care whatsoever.  That she has survived this long is amazing, she needs desperately the company of other elephants.  Could you live like this for that length of time.

 

Thanks to lots of hard work mostly by Dr Dame Daphne Sheldrick she has a chance but Dr Sheldrick needs support, so if you have a couple of minutes to follow this link I would love you to sign.  I have.

 

LINK

 

If we can garner enough support the authorities will have to re-home her.  The good news is that there is a safe home waiting for her in a sanctuary.  To see more about this go to the dedicated Free Mali the Elephant Facebook page and see how many folk are getting involved already.

 

See HERE for more information on Dr Sheldrick and there is much more information on Mali at the top of the petition page.  Blogland is a wonderful place, lots of you are on Facebook, or Twitter and could help spread the word, please do, over 2,000 of you read my Blog posts each day, if just half of you follow the link and sign this petition I would be so grateful.

 

Thank you.

 

Sue xx

Blogland ..... a wonderful place.

 

Blogland a wonderful place full of wonderful people, and sometimes some of them get together and do something truly lovely, something truly remarkable.

 

This morning I clicked onto Elaine's blog Ted and Bunny, drawn over by the picture of 'Love Me Ted', and was drawn into the saddest of moments, but the saddest of moments that were made that little bit better by peoples reactions to them and the love that is found in Blogland and the artistic community that dwells here.  Go to Elaine's now and read for yourself.

 

I won't tell the tale, I don't know the lovely lady it's about so I don't feel I have the right to, but knowing I have my soul mate safe and sound and that she has lost hers I can feel her pain, I can imagine the devastation in her life at the moment, and I can put myself in her shoes. Far better for you to visit her post at The Middle of Nowhere and read it for yourself.

 

Together in Blogland we can sometimes

 

 

 

and when we pull together it's truly magical.

 

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Linking also to the 'Funds for Gretel' raffle fundraising page, where you can buy your tickets and really help.

 

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The Blog post I was going to do today will be done tomorrow instead, this is so much more important.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

Sue xx