We went to Donegal and lost our camera. That’s why there have been no blog posts for the past many months. Without a camera there are no pictures, without pictures there is no blog. The pictures we post on the blog are few and far between but the pictures we take on the camera are many and act as aide memoir for the blog. So I’m here writing this blog trying to think of everything we’ve got up to in the last 6 months. Well there was lots of planting, and a whole lot of digging, everything else is a bit of a blur. It has been an excellent summer, we saw sunshine on numerous occasions and as I write this we’re enjoying a balmy September. We’ve had house extension planning granted and then we changed our mind about it so we’re back to the planning permission stage. We’re just about to finish installing the central heating and moving into the 20^th century (the 21^st century will have to wait for a while). We’ve acquired more cats, they breed like rabbits. We’ve attended the village vintage field day in a vintage vehicle. We’ve thrown the odd BBQ. We’ve reconditioned the mobile home (it’s almost weather proof). We cut and saved hay, then TJ our neighbour with the tractor took a second cut for haylage with our blessing (we’re just glad to keep the grass down). We went camping in a camper van, there was even surfing, yes we surfed and I’ve lost none of my style I tell you, I still look just as awkward and out of control on a surfboard as I ever looked.

D is thriving and is usually good. She’s now really picking up the few words of Irish from the play school we send her to. This combined with her baby voice pronunciation and my complete lack of understanding for the Irish language is causing occasional difficulties. The other day for instance while being installed in a car seat she got quite upset and started complaining about her “browah”. “browah?” I said “what is browah?, you mean brother? You don’t have a brother, whose brother are you talking about?” “browah Daddy ma broawah!” she wailed, waving her legs and now quite upset. Thankfully F was there to translate browah into bróga into shoes. How the hell am I supposed to cope with a bilingual daughter?

Did I mention the chicks? After sever failed attempts to hatch eggs with an incubator we finally gave mother nature a shot and having acquired a broody bantam and some fertile eggs (obviously our own hen eggs are no longer fertile since I had the falling out with Chuckey the killer cockerel),we duly acquired 4 now additions to the flock. SUCESS! Clever chicken. Now my hope is that one of them will turn out to be a rooster of a reasonably docile nature and we can get right back to the breeding program.

OK that’s my lot for now; we’ve bought a new camera so hopefully there’ll be a bit more blog.