Series 4

I have nearly wet my pants

Roland

We have not suffered a " rodent incident" for a good while now.
The reason for that is the simple fact that Albert eats his kills rather than spending the effort to drag the baby rabbits across the lane and up into the cottage in order to present them to his large extended family.
Young rabbits are saving me a fortune in felix meaty chunks
Yesterday morning, that went all tits up.
I had just sneaked back to bed for a crafty ten minutes after taking Chris to Prestatyn for the early train when I felt Albert jump onto the bed. Some inner sense told me that something was afoot, and so when I opened my eyes I wasn't that surprised to see Albert standing there, with his tail swishing from side to side.
In his mouth was a small struggling rabbit, blood seeping from a large wound on a back leg.
All was calm.......
Then...................
Albert spat the baby out it in the centre of the group of sleeping terriers, and swiped at it with his paw.
The rabbit screamed.
And the dogs hit the ceiling.
I have had years of this sort of thing to cope with, so I would like to think I was cool as a cucumber when hysteria breaks out amid the ranks. As the dogs , with their eyes wide as saucers bounced into action I quickly flipped the corner of the duvet over, and the rabbit effectively disappeared from view.
Now, retrieving an injured rabbit from under a duvet is not as easy as one might think , especially when a pack of dogs are screaming around the floorboards but I finally managed to subdue the little fella by wrapping him up in a pair of discarded underpants before taking him into the bathroom to give him the once over.
Apart from a nasty leg wound, I could see no other injuries, so I cleaned him up, sprayed antibacterial spray into his wound and popped him into a spare hen house with food water and silence.

Wild animals do poorly after a cat attack. Their wounds become infected very quickly  and they can die of shock literally minutes after being caught, so when I checked on the baby this morning , I half expected to see a small , hard dead rabbit crouched in the corner of the spare hen house
This is what I saw

His back leg is trailing somewhat , but he's still hanging on in there.

I have nicknamed him Roland.

Cool Off/ Cool Down

Oh dear... I was all a bit gloomy this morning, was I not?
Pulled myself up by the proverbial bra straps , however, this afternoon and got stuck in to weeding the garden.
It's hot... But I am stopping short with all this ". Heat wave hysteria" from the media.....old people with bad chests always die in hot weather......it's Darwin in action so to speak!

A massive delivery lorry got stuck in the lane outside the cottage this morning....I did my King Canute thing and stood firmly in front of it and demanded that the driver back up the half mile or so to the slightly larger B road. The driver was a burly, unsmiling scouser who tried to bluff his way past the cottage in the foolish assumption that he could squeeze by, but I was in no mood for idiocy ( heat makes me feisty) and So started to get all thin lipped and difficult ( a sure sign my blood pressure is up) . The scouser wisely backed down and reversed away down the lane with me watching the procedure..hands on hips........another small victory for the old lady of Trelawnyd.

Anyhow I will leave you all with some heat wave photos.... I am off to sponge down my chickens

Bosoms in the heat

The view from the field to the south

Shade is at a premium

In the cool of the living room

Old Dog

Dogs have no concept of ageing.
Arthritic joints, a slowness of gait, the slight blueness in the eyes an intolerance to silly games
They are all just slightly confusing things that just happen to them .
But they are things that break your  heart when you, as an owner realise that they are there.
Old dogs have no idea of their impending mortality
Only we do.
And like I said
That realisation can break your heart

I Wish

I saw this on http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/
It did make me smile

" I'm A Good Girl, I am" ........and a note of thanks...

Yesterday I showed, what I thought to be a remarkable amount of self control. I went to see an animal in need of a new home and came back empty handed, It was a case of head ruling the heart.

I drove a few miles down the coast, and on one of the hottest days of the year I met up with a four and a half year old bulldog bitch called Millie.

She was a delightful character. Lively, affectionate, needy, and totally adorable, and so just as I could feel my objective grey cells wavering, I mentally started to list the more challenging aspects of Millie's condition. 

At nearly five, she was still not housetrained. She was suffering from two eye conditions ( cherry eye and entropion) and her interaction with a bouncy, screaming little chihuahua was just a little too sparky for my liking.

 Our old bitch Meg, is sparky enough, for one household to cope with

With a heavy heart, I made my decision mentally then and there, with a fat bulldog bitch bouncing all over my head. 

And I drove away knowing that I had done the right thing

Hey ho.

Anyhow...on a brighter side, my collection of items for the flower show and for the arts stall and raffle on my Open day , seems to be growing rapidly. The kindness of my fellow bloggers in donating these items is just phenomenal as on a daily basis,another package arrives from another small corner of the globe.

Thank you all so very much. The items received for my open day will help raise money for both St Michael's Church here in Trelawnyd and for Marie Curie cancer Care.

Titivating

 To me there are some things that make a house really feel like a home.
Clutter, antiques, dog snot on the windows, black hair on cat shapes embedded on the duvet, fruit in a bowl and photographs on the wall....the list could go on and on and on.
Ever since I bought my second home, which was a Victorian terrace  over  three floors, I had always gotten into the habit of having flowers in the house. It was a sort of promise that I made myself when the mortgage was agreed.....
It was a " flowers maketh a home" sort of thing even then.
And I have no real idea where the need came from, after all I was never a fan of Home & Gardens or anything like that.
It always used to be an expensive luxury
The florist was located just around the corner
Now, with a cottage garden in full bloom, and a lane bursting with flowers, it's cheap and easy to treat the house with vases of colour

I am such an old lady 

In The Heat Of The Night

I am not going to complain about our continued hot weather

But it does have a bit of a down side.

It took me almost 90 minutes to water Bosoms by hand this morning

And after a week of blistering hot sunshine all of the animals have become slow, lethargic and

And somewhat listless.

I have even had to lift some of the very  elderly hens from their perches in the mornings

Egg production has tailed off,

The sheep now spend their lives in the cool of the hawthorn hedges 

And the dogs are bickering with each other over  dinner times.

Welsh animals are not used to long periods of old fashioned summer