The Mole Invasion (by sarah)

We have been watching with interest the advancing of the Moleys - when we first arrived they were at the end of the drive but slowely made their way down towards the house. The stream and cattle grid seemed to holt the advance for a good six months but now they are this side!

This is up by the veggi plots so I'm waiting for them to dig our plants up next!

Geek exhilaration (by alaric)

Recently, a feeling has started to appear in my life that's been missing for many years...

When I was a kid, I often felt geek exhilaration. All I had to do was sit with a notepad and think for a while and I'd come up with a design for something cool. Now, the kind of thing that interests me is infrastructure - I've always been more interested in designing, say, a game engine than in writing an actual game. So I'd sit down and pluck a random problem from the air and design an infrastructure for solving it. And then I'd feel excited about the lovely potential of this infrastructure.

Alas, this happened at a much higher rate than I could ever implement these things, so I had a sources directory laden with unfinished projects. But it was still fun.

Anyway, with age and responsibility and work and bills and stress this happened less and less; I still got to invent infrastructures, since it's part of my job, but I'd only get to design one every month or so at best. Five minutes of fun, then a month of implementation. And the problems I was trying to solve were relatively boring, and the solutions required often constrained to just solve the immediate needs of the users for the next year or so, rather than a sparkling generic platform upon which anything could be built for ever more.

But recently, for some reason, it's started returning.

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Artichoke Harvest (by sarah)

I have been trying to get the artichokes harvested since the first frost but what with lots of pooing sillyness and illness and what not it obviously didnt happen as a result I got militant when I looked them up in one of our thousands of books and found that though we had missed the prime time for harvest (Nov, Dec, Jan) they can be harvested until early spring (half way through march).

I need them to a) make soup and b) to replenish the chutney stores as Alaric has seen fit to consume or give away most of our chutney and as they take several weeks to mature (about eight) I thought I'd best get started - my perants gave me a cool preserves and chutneys cookbook at christmas and it has a recipy for artichoke chutney!

So off we went on Saturday - this is our disgrace of a veggi plot though to be honest its not as bad as we were expecting.

First off we removed the rotting storks - this of course should have been done just after they turned brown in October as it increases the chance of fungi getting to the tubers (oh did I mention these are Jeruselum Artichokes rather than globe?)

Of course there was hollowing of some tubers (this is where things have eaten holes into them and eaten away some or all of the inside), my book says that this most lickly coursed by slugs - yep all the artichokes that had 'broken the surface' where covered in the little homeless molluscs. The book goes on to say that rarer is a soil dwelling catipillar which if found means oiking everything out and treating the soil.

Sigh - oh well looks like we'll have to dig the plot over and actually plant things than goiing for the self seeding technique. Some things are a blessing in disguise 😉

Not entirely sure what this feller is or weather I have to fret about him and his sisters, there was a bit of a disagrement over what a wire worm looks like so really not sure - suppose I should look it up!

Now I had got pictures of the HUGE amount of usable artichoke we got - put it this way it took me two days before I had washed them all! But unfortunatly its on the missing camera :'(

Mew Missing Camera (by sarah)

Well there was supposed to be nice posts about clearing reeds from the stream and Jeans first night at her little bluw table eating etc... but the camera has vanished 🙁 Last I saw it was Monday night when I took some photos of a shrew.

I'm really not happy I can not think where the hell it could be and am slowely having to face the realisation that perhapse its been snaffled by someone :'(

This is more than annoying as most of my projects rely on me having access to a digital camera :'(

I still live in hope that perhapse Jean's got hold of it and I'll find it in some random place whilst cleaning - in the mean time I do have several 1000 photos to go through and sort.

Sigh.

Minni’s new collar (by sarah)

We had to replace the kittens collars as I was a bit of a muppet so we decided that we should probably get one for Minni too but thought that she wouldn't like it and didnt give it a very good chance of remaining on her. I chose a sparkly silver one as I thought it would look really good against her black fur - the kittens have matching purple velvet ones.

To our suprise she didn't even complain when we put it on her! And she seems to be showing it off! This has the added advantage that you can now see her in the dark etc... this is good as she had a bit of a close shave with the postman as he's a new one and didn't see her!