The Difference between Need and want

I had a conversation the other day with my friend Nige.
He asked me if I had a hobby?....( I think he thought I had got bogged down just a little with normal ebb and flow of home life)
I was not sure what he was getting at, and sited my animals as my reply.
"No, you misunderstand me" he said
"are there things you just want to do rather than Need to do?"
I then got his drift........ most of us feel that we have to do things....It's the way our lives work. We have to go to work,we have to prepare food, he have to eat it......so many Have tos ....and so many need tos in our lives.......I need to walk the dogs several times a day, I need to feed and care for the stock appropriately.....but Also I know I want to do these things too..........but I understood Nigel's point....sometimes it's just nice  to do something because we would like to......simple as......

Tonight is a work night....so today is a bit of a nothing day....you know the sort day that you are just waiting to "get over" so to speak....Its a bit like waiting for the flight home after a rather nice holiday......
My "have to" jobs were all done.....so while Chris drove down to Prestatyn to get his hair cut....I indulged myself (lol when don't I?) in a brief moment of "would like" time.

I took myself into the Church Yard and with no dogs to watch, no birds to feed and no jobs to do....it was nice to soak up the warm day and read the headstones

A day in the life of...................

Albert stalking baby rabbits on our post dawn walk

A day ago I received an anonymous comment asking what I actually do during an average day...I suspect it was the same person who has left an unsigned and rather pedantic comment before about Comic Relief....so I thought "what the hell" why not chronicle a "day in the life of a Trelawnyd House husband"........If the commentator wanted to underline how lucky I am to spend a great deal of my time being at home".....please comment again, I will  certainly agree with you ten fold....I know I am very fortunate
Anyhow The following is a pretty normal day for me ( when the sun is shining that is!!!)- hope it gives an insight of the pace of the field

I was Up at 7.30am and let out the hysterical Runner ducks for their first drink and swim
All of the water feeders needed filling and all of the pellet feeders needed checking.
All 15 bird houses were opened and every bird counted out onto the field

The runners doing what they do best........being bloody hysterical

The dogs hate early mornings and have to be dragged down the lane for their first walk of the morning


The dogs contemplating the morning

 Then it is medical time!
One of the St Trinians is a little poorly and needs antibiotics syringing into her mouth twice a day. She is receiving a course of Baytril ( 7 quids worth of antibiotics from the vets!!!)

The sweet little hen is eating a little better today and took some cat food ( with some wormer on it) as a treat

Boris needs lifting out of his house EVERY morning (as you can see I do not look too happy so early in the morning...mind you it IS before my first coffee of the day)

I finish most of the "first thing" jobs by around 8.30am

Then the dogs get fed, my household jobs are completed (including a little bit of light dusting !)

This morning I had to change all of the bed linen...Albert had regurgitated the bloody remains of a mouse's intestines all over the quilt!

The kitchen wreck of last nights stir fry.............

.......and after a bit of bleach

 Now it is around 9.20am....and its time for my first glorious cup of coffee of the day.....and then I can enjoy two of my secret indulgences of the day.....a blog check.......and Jeremy Kyle (over breakfast!)
(To those that don't know Jeremy Kyle is an odious slime bucket who fronts a trailer trash talk show)

Then its a 2-3 mile walk with the dogs ( this morning it was the round robin Marian walk past the Gop)




Then home...and a brief moment of gayness.......nicking daffs from the building plot behind the cottage

Then the Ghost hens needed their bottoms cleaned and the bald bits creamed with antiseptic cream
Because of their weight, they spend a great deal of time sitting and less and less time walking
This is the non glamorous part of animal care!

I am never alone of the field for long, this morning Pat called down for a chat and eggs and this afternoon farmers Eirlys and John dropped by

Before lunch ( an apple, coffee and a bagel) I completed fencing in the entire main vegetable patch, which is now safe from prying beaks!

I made a "gate" to complete the enclosure....I can start planting out on Sunday

Then its more SHIT, SHIT and More SHIT.... four of the hen houses needed cleaning out and new bedding (a gift from the ever resourceful Red Faced Welsh Farmer)

After that I collected eggs, Including another giant Goose eg from Winnie

Then I prepared wormer medicated feed for the birds ( It has to be prepared in different strengths for the turkeys)
That little tub of worker cost 20£!!!!

Now its around 3.30 pm!

The dogs, who have sat out on the field all day, are bored, so all four are taken for another walk around the village. I took the chance to deliver another 6 eggs

Meg in the centre of the Village

The Chapel in the late afternoon sun (The building was converted from Market Hall to Chapel in 1701)

We returned to the cottage by 4..00pm ..The sick hen needed another shot of antibiotics, and looked brighter than she did earlier in the day, I grabbed a cup of coffee , downloaded these photos to the blog then I am off to start the process of bedding down the geese, ducks and turkeys for the evening. ( Each group need "showing" to their individual houses)

The hens can be left until later, being brighter animals they take themselves off to their own houses when the light starts to fade, then it is only a case of locking up each house in turn

Chris will be home at 6pm

I have only the fire to light,the meal to prepare and the late dog walk to complete..........

A pretty cool day eh?

What ?he f*^k do you do all day?

I was asked the above question recently
So my next blog will hopefully illustrate a "normal" day quite nicely
Watch this space

Can I Thrust By...I'm a Diabetic

I think I have stolen most of Julie Walter's one Liners over the years and all of her best ones can be heard in this priceless sketch from the 1980s........

I remembered it almost line for line when I was being served by a very lacklustre woman at the service station on my way to my brothers. As I stood waiting for her to notice my very existence (she was chatting to her friend Carol on the phone about a sports bra that didn't fit!) I very nearly said
"You've a look of Eva Braun!"
She wouldn't have understood even if I had

Hatim

You may remember that I used to work on the spinal injury unit in Sheffield.
One of my most well remembered patients was a Iraq street kid called Hatim who was accidentally shot in the Iraq war when he was only 13 years old.
I was the ward manager when Hatim arrived in Sheffield and helped to supervise his care when he was on my ward.... I do recall that the isolated and small framed pre teen had a huge cultural challenge when coping with the rehabilitative process  a paraplegic has to deal with in a rather strange, straight talking Yorkshire City!
I also remember taking him out to Hillsborough park with my welsh terrier Finlay. Fin was always tied to his wheelchair and Fin's laid back and rather sweet personality brought the little Iraqi boy out of his shell when we often "ambled" through the Victorian park.....
Hatim moved on to community rehab after many months with us, yet even today I often think of how he is doing as a grown up man in his new life over in this country....
so tonight I used the amazing google and found that he is now a member of the esteemed  sheffield steeler Wheelchair basket ball team!
I would love to see him participate in the 2012 Para Olympics.......the last tme I saw him he had the beginings of a right Yorkshire accent!


Hatim is second from right

http://www.sheffield-steelers.co.uk/

The War on Smoke

Chris' stress levels are through the roof at the moment.....research bids need to be put in, his Dad has been a little poorly and the cottage fire has been smoking too much filling the cottage with great plumes of  soot!....
I can't do too much with the research,but I can support his dad over the phone and I certainly can get to the bottom of the stove issue...so after looking through the internet DIY  self help pages, I grabbed the sweep brushes and swept the fuckling chimney YET again!
Remember it was only a few weeks ago that a professional sweep gave it a go, well since then I have got down and dirty sweeping it again, and today I repeated the disgusting job, but did so with some gusto , getting into all of those nooks and crannies I might of missed last Saturday.

After an hour with my head up a flue, I had removed another two bin bags of soot  and most of the lining of both lungs....but the job was done and the fire lit without a problem.....and all this after I paid a bloody professional chimney sweep 50 quid to do the job originally!

If I see him again, I will stick his bloody useless brushes where the sun don't shine

This afternoon it was nice to breath God's cold fresh air again. I surrounded half of my large vegetable patches with a new chicken wire protective fence, then delivered eggs around the village. It was home time for the village school children and as we waited for some of the larger kids to walk past us to their parents' cars one mother walked past with her toddler. The little  girl pointed at the dogs and pulled herself forward. and I told the mother that William would be safe to pat if she wanted to.

He stood quietly and interested as the child reached out a pudgy hand and  tapped him firmly several times on the head, then lent forward politely to take a long sniff at her nose. The child and her mother was delighted as he acted just like the teddy bear that he resembled and I,as ever was amused and rather proud of just how gentle male Welsh Terriers can be with little people,

I will end with an apology to Trelawnyd Val ....I am very sorry I flashed my "builder's arse" to you this afternoon when I was bending down to collect eggs..........not the nicest of sights when you are out for a walk eh?

blogitandscarper

I am constantly amazed with the eclectic amount of ,talent and richness of imagination that I find in blogland, it is truly a forum for individual self expression or in my case a daily habit to add to a somewhat teenage diary.
Marathon blogger Phil over at http://blogitandscarper.blogspot.com/ is well worth a visit. His blog is a meandering stream of consciousness, ideas and amusing anecdotes.....give it a look why don't you, but be sure that you have a full half an hour spare and a good cup of coffee with you

By way of an explanation of his blog content...take a look at his last posted video

Aftershock

Terrible timing , I know, but tonight  I found myself over at Theatre Clwyd  watching an Asian Earthquake disaster movie.  Aftershock is the most expensive Chinese Movie made to date, and concentrates its story on the 30 odd years AFTERMATH of a real life Earthquake, namely the Tangshan quake of 1976 which killed over 240.000 people.

Happy Chinese factory worker and mother Yung Ni (Fan Xu ) is caught outside her apartment block with her husband as the Earthquake flattens the city. Her husband is killed trying to save their twins Fang den and Fang da, who are buried under tons of rubble. As rescuers try to save the children,  Yung Ni is given the impossible decision of which child she wants saving, and which one has to be left to die...a decision that haunts her and her family for the next three decades.

Yes it's basically Sophie's Choice with special effects....and within a  few minutes the audience is literally catapulted into one of the most frightening, harrowing and "realistic" disaster scenarios ever captured on film.

Unfortunately the rest of the epic story of how mom, and the rest of the family deal with the aftershock of her terrible decision , doesn't quite live up to the first twenty five minutes.

Having said this, there are some cracking tear jerking scenes (Fan Xu is especially good) but the family drama post catastrophe, for me , just didn't work as well I hoped it would.

Which is a shame

7/10
It was lovely to get back in the cinema !

Sure sexism

Now has anyone seen the tv advert/story that centres around a rich, powerful and attractive women choosing whether to wear a designer black dress for dinner at her swanky hotel.... She undresses ( without any conversation) a male bellhop and tests her selection of deodorants on him to see if that "unsightly" black stain marks his black uniform and then can be seen showing off her unblemished evening gown to the great and the good....

I hate this advert...I hate it was a passion........would it be at all permissible in today's advertising world, to have a man in a position of power, undressing a women who resides in a more a subservient role in order to test a cosmetic out on her?
.......with the risk of being a little sexist myself..and..I can hear a whole host of knickers being twisted here....I think NOT!...so why is it acceptable for a man to be potentially humiliated in this way?.....The answer to this is hidden by the subtle insertion of sex......the bellhop seems to actually enjoy being on the receiving end of this behaviour, a fact that angers me just a little more!

So many adverts now seem to be making men either the butt of a woman's joke, her power , or else seems to be emasculating them in some way..and to me it is just not acceptable...not in this day and age.
I thought we were perhaps past all this........
I guess I was wrong

Nearer Home

Nearer Home, the badgers that live in the field borders have turned their powerful claws and jaws upon the smallest and newest member of the field community with rather devastating results.
Overnight Eric, who had been housed in one of the brooder boxes was attacked....it was a no brainer.....literally nothing was left of him and his enclosure.....

another, albeit small home grown reminder that life can be very cheap eh?

Too Much News

The human cost of the Japanese Earthquake and tidal wave is just now showing itself above the initial stunning and oh-so-not- real visuals we have become accustomed to from several days ago.
The aerial shot of the giant wave reminded me of those CGI movie special effects that we have all have enjoyed , and the camera was just far enough away for the spectacle to be more exciting than  horrific.
This morning, on CNN I watched more home videos shot by the survivors themselves after the impressive early warning system had kicked in and warned the population of the small coastal town to evacuate to higher ground.
Suddenly the disaster is all made very human.

I am not going to bang on about any more about it. What more is there to say?........except how very lucky we are 

Eric

I wasn't going to blog again today. I've had a busy old time being all manly and cutting down fallen trees,building  bonfires and repairing fences.
I have also had another visitor to the field, who appeared carrying a pet basket.. Yeap another mouth to feed I thought,and I was right as the man asked me to take his unwanted silkie bantam cockerel-apparently he was crowing a little too much!

He is a scrawny little red head with a 1980's mullet
I have called the little fella, Eric

Winnie is a woman

We went out for dinner last night......it doesn't happen too often, but the treat was much appreciated and enjoyed as the food in our local restaurant The Barrow, was beautiful!
I enjoyed too many Pinot's and retired to bed happy and well filled at 10pm ( early for me)
This morning I felt fine so bounced onto the field with a spring in my step to let the animals out only to find Winnie, the white gander, quiet and noticeably lethargic in his goose house.
I coxed him out onto the grass and gave him some water which he drank politely and then he sat down with his big blue eyes carefully watching me.
I crept forward and stroked his head and gave him the once over.........it was not long before I found out his problem.....for out of his bottom protruded "his" first and rather large goose egg

A few small grunts later, and with me lending some ineffectual morale support, out popped Winnie's egg., which she sniffed at briefly before tottering off to the pond....

And me, Mr Smart arse was convinced that she was a gander!