school and a pretty walk

The boys gave school a try today, Rowan went in straight away with Jenny, Callum's cold was very runny over the weekend but he is a lot better today and with a few hesitations he eventually decided to go in himself. The other children were very excited and they seem to have settled in fairly well.

We found a lovely walk at San Sadurnino about 6 miles from here but yet again the rain only relented long enough to grab a couple of photos.A lot of the walks have wooden or gravel walkways and it can seem a bit artificial but there are many wild walks to be found too apparantly.

The weather is set to improve as the week progresses and we are really looking forward to a sunny weekend although there is plenty of time for the forecast to deteriorate. We had a pheasant in the garden again this afternoon and Wildmite is getting very friendly with Jenny rubbing against legs and allowing the occasional stroke but not so keen on me - we think as it is usually me who shouts and chases the other cats away and I do a lot of chopping of wood near where his den is too....ah well time will fix that I hope and maybe we will have a house cat eventually.

All seems well with gingi

Gingi seem to be OK, she survived the night and seems quite perky today although the hens have all decided to stay inside their house today. I have strung a network of white polypropolene string across their enclosure, hopefully enough to discourage any more airborn predators from coming down.

There was a rather sad looking apple treee struggling to survive near one of the front gates, I dug it up today and found it had been tied to a stake with nylon cord that had become deeply embedded in the bark, it was also planted in a mix of builder's rubble and gravel so I would imagine was bone dry for much of the spring and summer - no wonder it was struggling. It has now joined the huerta or orchard that we are planting in the rich soil down the West side of the garden between the house and the eucalyptus.

Weather is still on and off wet and windy but quite comfortable as far as temperature goes. When we moved to Cornwall I met the word 'mizzle' for that sort of rain that is somewhere between thick mist and drizzle...out here we ahve met another word that works really well - they call heavy showers 'tormentias' and inded they are a torment.

As we get our ear in to Galego we are starting to catch on to what one of the local old ladies says, it is always pretty much the same line of conversation something along the lines of "What fettle canny lad, ahm eyty two years ald ye naa, look me hair all fell out cos of me medication and ah hev te gan te hospital te have an operation soon." We wonder if one day we will be able to differentiate between regional dialects here - at the moment we are struggling to get more than about 20% of what they say and cant really tell if its Galego or Castilian....poco a poco.

Its getting dark I had better go and baricade the hens in for the night.

hen problems

The hens were out and about doing what hens do when out of the sky came a buzzardy eagly thing accompanied by a host of crows and pinned one of the hens down, Jen managed to scare it off and they are all locked away now. There was a few drops of blood on the grass but apart from a lot of ruffled feathers I can't see much damage but time will tell. I guess that is the end of our hens roaming round the garden and we will have to string something across the top of their enclosure to discourage marauders too. Some days are good some less so.

Mising the mist and other musings.

The rain cleared overnight and we had a lovely misty start this morning, that usually means a hot day ahead and it turned out that way. We seem to just be perched above the mist, it often covers the houses below us but rarely touches us. Sometimes it looks like a Japanese painting with layers of trees in hundreds of shades of grey. We ended up on Vilarrube beach again and decided it felt as warm as a good May or June day in Cornwall. We gathered some figs and a couple of lemons from the trees on the way down to the beach, there used to be a whole village down there but I think it was removed as it had been built without planning permission however the garden trees still remain. The boys stripped off and went swimming, we found a huge kind of periwinkle thing about 25 cms long, I thought it was just a shell but it turned out to be inhabited. We gathered a load of shells and other beach bits and bobs for the museum the boys want to build in the attic.
Callum has discovered the cupboard in the guest bedroom and calls it his office.

Rowan found a picture of his sister Poppy when she was a toddler and thought she looked cute and gorgeous, Jenny says she still does :-) ...Hiya Poppy.
We are getting on really well with two new friends we met at Stanley's birthday at Rioforcadas - Liz and Graham, the boys have really taken to them and decided Graham is golden Graham. They have a lovely fairytale house near Samozas about 15 mins from us, I hope to put some photos of their house and garden on here soon. Bill and Jackie two other friends we met at Stanley's party are coming round tommorow and I also hope to get some photos of their house on too. It is a small world really; Graham was brought up just over the other side of the river Tyne from where I spent my early years, he and Liz were living in Cornwall, not so far from where we were, for many years before they moved out here. Jackie spends a fair bit of time in Chelmsford where the University I work for is. I hear rumour that there is a couple from Porthleven now living near Pantin about ten mins from here too. Ruan, Stanley's dad went to Sennen school when I was doing my teacher training there and I knew his mum well too. Geraldine, Stanley's mum's mum was familiar as well I am sure we met in Cornwall too.

If anyone out there is short of eggs we have a fridge full of them now please come and have an eggfest... five hens = 4 eggs a day= too many for a family like ours and one of the hens has not started laying yet. Wildmite/Ronnie is thriving but still keeps a little distance off, I don't think he will ever be a house cat. It is time to go and watch Arthur and the Invisibles in bed with the boys, my daughter Kate and her boyfriend Luke sent it and Goblet of Fire over and they arrived today along with some lovely late birthday cards...you have really got some design sense Luke get enrolled on that degree matey.
Night night.

marrow lanterns,a new stove and a walk by the river

We neither had pumpkins nor turnips so settled on marrow lanterns this year, camera batteries ran out again so we have no photos of the boys dressed up unfortunately. Thats the laundry basket in the background - my great photography :-(

The new woodburner works much better than the last one, so much so that the chimney pipe was glowing red hot yesterday, you can see in the photo that the pipe is blue-gold-silver like a motorbike exhaust now...it is much smaller than the Chinese one but far more efficient and we really have to be careful about how much wood we put on. We decided to move it to the corner of the room to get it further away from the sofa as Rowan nearly landed on the last one a few times doing sofa gymnastics. We now have two holes in our end wall and it is mostly raining too hard to cement them up just now so the old one is covered with choco-cracks cardboard and the new chimney pipe is bordered by thicker cardboard to close the hole up a bit. We bought an Hergom stove, according to the manual "To have an Hergom Lebena stove is the manifestation of an exeptional sense of quality." ... we have gone up in the world.The rain stopped for a few hours today and we had a lovely walk by the river at Porto do Cabo the Consello have spent a fair whack building a new walk with wood and gravel paths over the marshy ground and Billy goat Gruff style bridges here and there.