Duck news

Been busy today.The poultry empire is growing nicely, as this afternoon I have set up the final duck and (hopefully) goose enclosure and house, ready for the potential (!!!!!) arrival of the new ducklings. Batch two , (which are due early next month) have been arranged beautifully in the smallest coop by Blanche, who has sat steady on them all day, only popping out once to stuff her face with food and have the largest and most offensive crap in the history of Trelawnyd hens.(apparently large messy craps are a sign of getting broody!)
The batch of eggs in the incubator have had their last humidification and turns, and now will be left for fate and nature to take its course.
Risking sounding like a real old poof ( or even worse a middle aged square) I have baked a flan for Peter and Tracey instead of buying the baby a fluffy bunny,- my thinking is old fashioned:- that a new baby would leave you exhausted and not bothered with home cooked food so I will deliver that tomorrow on the egg delivery and Jess walking run.
Off out now to earth up my potatoes.....

Blanche is now a woman! and I get an award

One of the hybrids Blanche has gone broody. Hormones have taken hold, her arse has cemented itself to the "A" frame's single nest box and every time you open the nest door, all you see is a very indignant face , which almost says in a very Katherine Tate- way

"How very dare YOU?"

I hadn't planned to use one of my own broody hens as a surrogate mother for some more of the newly laid duck eggs, but I thought I would capitalise on this sudden gift of maternal closeness and have sneaked 6 of the spare duck eggs underneath her this evening.

Hopefully she will do better than I did with the first clutch of eggs.

Worked last night so ignored the phone when It went this morning. A message was left one of the senior sisters on ITU who said that I had won a hospital trust award for innovations in care! Apparently staff had nominated me ( this is news to me) for the work I did with teaching and promoting excellent standards of care related to a spinally injured patient recently.......

The "award ceremony" is in May.....tee hee......I can feel a Bette Davies acceptance speech coming on....

"Kill them! kill them ALL!!!!!!!!!!"

I have mentioned this before on my blog that I am not good in the mornings and yet again this morning, Christopher "Mary Poppins" Burton bounced awake, ready to walk the dogs at 6am,loudly banging on about the cold and the fact that he was letting out the hens "yet again".Oh ....

I dream for the morning where I can doze s-l-o-w-l-y awake with pretty blue birds twittering in whispers outside the window, perhaps with the faint whiff of bacon as a bit of background colour. The most important thing I love is silence. No banter , no chatter, just quiet time. It allows the body to re charge and acclimatize to the day ahead at a pedestrian pace and if I can't get that, my anger knows no bounds!

There are strategies to maintain the status quo, I usually make breakfast (silently) with a cup of full bodied Italian blend coffee on board. I go and potter in the field, I have a bath, anything to "gradually" wake up to the day.

As a junior nurse I often picked patients who were known to be uncommunicative to sort out first, and have in the past performed a full (and intimate) bed bath completely in silence! As I climbed the nursing career ladder, I could start work later, hiding in my office until 9am when the red mist had risen enough to allow for a more normal conversational discourse to take place with staff who knew to keep out of my way until that first coffee had been downed!

When I am at friends' houses or away in Broadstairs for example I can act Dustin Hoffman off the screen with the occasional dawn performance of "Mr Geniality", but underneath I am gagging to kill a bus load of small children.

I wish I could be a nicer person but that just aint gonna happen.......

Band of Brothers

I have caught some of the episodes of this 2001 mini series on Sky and the power and beauty of it has impressed me greatly. I think it is a quality piece of film making which is a rarity in American television:-
British actor Damian Lewis is great as heroic Major Winters(interesting that a Brit bagged the best role in the all American cast),but I must also praise the special effects (excellent quality for a tv show)and the haunting score by Michael Kamen

A worried Man

I am getting worried.The six remaining runner duck eggs are due to hatch on Thursday and I am paranoid that the little beggers wont hatch. I have followed the instructions to the letter. Turned them gently,humidified them every three days and topped up the water bath on demand. Like an expectant father I keep checking the incubator temperature gauge and am waiting for that little pip-pip as the ducklings chirp their first cries from inside the egg , 48 hours before hatching...............

Snow?

I can't believe that it is going to snow tomorrow,but snow it is
and in true wartime spirit I have recovered all my potatoes with tarpaulins and have scattered haylage all over the baby broad bean seedlings and the new herb bed.
I am not sure just how effective the protection measures will be against a deep frost but at least I have done my best.
Nursing a hangover after a very nice meal out last night, I forced myself to be useful and did a spring clean of the kitchen. God it was dirty, but completing the work was as satisfying as making a huge list.
The weather has been glorious today but there is a definite chill in the air. The gorse is in flower up the Gop and the view of the valley towards the sea was lovely.
Settled down late (smelling of bleach) and watched the end of Adam's Rib (1949).
Chris is knitting.......................

obsession

I am getting obsessed with the weather.My potatoes are in and what can we expect this weekend....bloody frosts!!!!!!!!!!! I have cos lettuce ready for planting, spinach too not to mention more delicate herbs and seedlings, so everything seems to be on hold until late next week which is somewhat irritating today as the weather is fine.
I have had to content myself with general tidying, edging and clearing away the ton of haylage created by the hens, I had given them 6 melons (treats from the veg shop lady) so after stuffing every square inch of themselves, they have spent most of the afternoon heaped in a mass of overfed feathers, sleeping it all off.
Meeting Chris later in Osborns for tea which will be nice, and only 6 days to go before the next set of ducklings are due. I am getting obsessed with turning the eggs and have been findling myself checking the incubator temperature constantly, to minimise hatching problems as only the day before yesterday the core temperature was 2 degrees higher than it should be.. There seems so many variables listed in the "how to hatch ducks" literature, that I am surprised that the average Mallard can effectively raise a set of 12 ducklings without the aid of 20th Century technology!

Black Sun

Black Sun (2005)-at Theatre Clwyd tonight, is a different type of documentary, and not an easy watch. It is essentially a "talking head" first hand story of narrator Hugues de Montalembert , who was blinded in a horrific mugging in 1978 New York, and his rather dead pan thick French accent underplays the trauma and true horror, the adaptation to sudden disability (especially to a painter and film maker) must be. Accompanied by blurred, often beautifully eerie visuals of urban New York and various far eastern countries he subsequently visited, I found the whole story interesting but certainly not moving, which surprised me. De Montalembert wonderfully captures the strange way his brain bypassed his blindness and describes the visual "hallucinations" perfectly, but his unemotional voice over deadens the whole film to the point of near boredom, and in the end I wondered just what made this man tick.

Without engaging with the narrator, you loose a certain empathy for his life. Which was a pity