A potential new lady

Chris has flown up to Scotland for a couple of days work, and so I am keeping the home fires burning, so to speak.

We have two sofas in the cottage living room. One sofa is Chris' , the other , obviously is mine. Tonight I am typing out this blog on my sofa , it is a bit of a squeeze as each dog has jammed themselves into every inch of our Cole Brothers "traditional" and I have found it amusing that Chris' sofa is neat, tidy and untouched. (above)

The pack mentality of dogs never fails to fascinate me.

Their need to constantly be a part of something, to be near each other (and to you), to act as one entity, a pack, is the stuff of a David Attenborough series and I guess it won't surprise anyone that we may be having another slobbery chop addition to out cottage pack very soon.

I happened to mention to the dogs groomer Jackie, that I was thinking of getting another dog to keep the lowest-in-the-pecking-order George company. We wanted a bitch , something benign, and something a little slower than the Welsh ( George is never able to keep up with them) and she immediately told her she had a friend who was looking for a home to "retire" a 3 year old bulldog bitch called Frankie.

I spoke to Frankie's owner this evening and after looking at a few snaps of her, we need to arrange to go over to meet her for the first time.

Watch this space...............

 The fire is lit, the night is cold.....and an early night is in order........

Pass the tissues

I worked a long day shift today and the discussion in the nurses sitting room at lunch time centred around the lovely, lovely Matt Cardle and specifically his emotional tears in last night's X Factor.
This got me to thinking about a piece I read in the newspaper in the week

It stated that a recent study from Penn State University in the US suggests that  that tears are becoming more acceptable for men and less so for women.

The study, using a sample of 284 people, found that men were judged much more positively for crying than women. This, according to the study’s authors, was because men were seen as expressing honest emotion where women were seen as out of control.
This could be to do with our stereotypical view of men and women. And, says Professor Tom Lutz, of the University of California, Riverside, it is why male politicians, at least in the US, can allow themselves the occasional tear, whereas women cannot. A man is seen as strong and unemotional, so crying hints at depth. A woman politician has to portray herself as tough to succeed. So when a woman cries it reinforces stereotypes and tells us that her toughness was just a front and she has revealed herself to be weak underneath.
This is an interesting premise, and not one I actually believe in. I personally think the important factor in all this is HOW you cry rather than IF you cry.
Men cry in  a rather hidden and slightly shy way. It is disguised emotion that does not occur very often and I think that it is this rarity of occurrence that makes "male tears" so interesting.
  
In private I can cry at the drop of a hat   

Matt Cardle "The First Time"(Ever I Saw Your Face) Live Show 5 X Factor ...

sigh
and he cried at the end...........how good is that?
Couldn't you just wrap him up and take him home?
(this video will be disabled at some stage as it is not an x factor version!!)

Red Update

Before I post my usual love-fest Saturday video of Matt Cardle , I thought I would update everyone on little Red, the miracle quail.....He's a sweet calm little chap and a great deal bigger than he was (look on the right side bar for a pic of him as a baby)

The 6 quail will be set up in their own run on the field on Monday

Disaster returns

 Now I make it no secret that I love disaster movies.......now...... the disaster genre does not only cover such end-of-the-world scenarios as burning skyscrapers and capsized passenger liners...it basically also covers any "motley group of individuals " under threat scenario!
So some of the best disaster movies have been the likes of  Independence day or The Mist ( where there has been no natural catastrophe in sight)....so I watched with some interest the Frank  (The Mist) Darabout first tv episode of The Walking Dead

Of course the whole episode was rubbish, but it was glossy rubbish, where the main survivors were all cute kids, buff men, pretty women and the obligatory old person .....thin as cardboard but , to me highly entertaining!!!!
It makes me laugh
if the tv series was set in Trelawnyd then the group of survivors would be a group of old ladies,a fat faced red farmer and me with a chicken tucked under my arm! ( hummmm BBC take note)
I can feel a movie script coming on

Another Lesson learned

Last night was stormy. The wind howled and the rain fell in buckets.
It was a night NOT to be on a small motorbike!
I picked up my aunt at 6pm and had suggested to Chris that if the weather had closed in, he was to have left his motorbike at her  house ( he commutes to his University by train and only "pops" back a forth from cottage to station on his moterbike) and I would take them both up the 600 foot hill back to Trelawnyd.

Now Chris was not at my aunts house when I arrived, so thinking that he had gone ahead we battled the elements and zig zagged up the hill back home. Chris was not at there , even though it was way past the time he usually arrived, so I checked he phone and my voice mail to see if there were any messages. Nothing!
I rang his mobile phone.... straight to answerphone. It was then that I experienced a creeping uneasiness that something awful had happened

I have never really had a big "worry" about Chris safety before,even though we have been together over a decade, and it is an awful, awful feeling to experience I can tell you. He is a complete creature of habit, so if he has been delayed messages are always left....so in my overactive and uncharacteristically worried imagination  I had visions of him being sideswiped in the dark by a blundering lorry or tractor.

Leaving Judy in charge of the food I ventured out to look for him on the country roads and minutes later passed him on the main road between the village and the next village of Dyserth. Apparently he had tried to drive up the 1 in 4 hill and just could not negotiate the steep road curves given the lashing rain, so had rode the long way around the country roads back home.

Prestatyn Hill between the town and Trelawnyd ( Araf is the Welsh word for slow)

 The lesson from this meandering story is plain and simple. We take our partners and loved ones for granted..of course we do, that fact is a part of life as normal as the preparation of a cauliflower cheese! but sometimes we need to stop ( ok I need to stop) to realise just what we do have, and what we have a potential; to lose given the fickle finger of fate!

Donated chickens

Jacki,the dog groomer has enough on her plate. She has three adopted children and two youngsters of her own, so she hardly has time to devote to her grooming business. She keeps perhaps a dozen customers now, including our three dogs, and states she enjoyed grooming them because they are so well behaved.

Today it was George's turn for a cut and brush...I have used around 2 lbs of his hair to plug the gaps in the hawthorn hedge on the field......apparently foxes HATE dog hair.

The unwanted wellsummers arrived this afternoon, and a pretty trio of hens they are too.

I have not got a hen house to set them up with on their own, so I have bunked them in with the ghost hens, who are all now laying small but very welcomed brown eggs.

My aunt Judy is coming for dinner tonight....the weather has been so bad I have spent the afternoon baking apple pies and comfort food like creamed cabbage and cauliflower cheese

It has been a nothing sort of day

Bluebeard and catch up

Hazel and I sat through 90 minutes of French fairytale dross that was the movie Blue Beard tonight. The film was incidental as it was necessary for both of us to catch up with life and news, so the chat and gossip in the car on the way to Theatre Clwyd was much more important. than a 16th century romp around French folklore.
When I got home, Nu had left a message that she is coming over to visit on the 17th of December and Bel (he of the lovely poem -last post) invited us to his daughter's wedding in Sheffield on the 4th of December!!......my pre Christmas socialisation plans have just taken a boost of 200%

Anyhow Chris was in bed when I got home, so William and I sneaked out to watch the badgers again for a while. Tonight a juvenile joined the two adults with their nightly mooch around the coops and I had to carry William with a hand over his mouth, as the terrier understood that we were there specifically to watch these beautiful creatures.

Tomorrow three welsummer hens are being "donated" to the field population....I received a phone call from someone in Holywell who wanted to re home some unwanted poultry...of course I accepted......With them the field population will number 95