Winter is here, but not quite enough to rename myself Jon Snow as yet. I escaped to Amsterdam for a week in November and spent much of the rest of the time cooped up inside trying to keep the place warm without creating an astronomical electricity bill. I am considering shifting my centre of operations to the kitchen where the big wood stove is but first it needed cleaning.
There is nothing quite as cute as realising that little Nancy is following behind me as I take a walk around the garden.Nancy when not following me or his brother Sid likes to hang about in my vicinity I guess for a sense of security, she is a very nervy cat. Here he is stretched across the doorway, so I have to notice her, basking in the winter sun, Regal like , if it weren’t for her oddly positioned rear legs!The willow tree is one of the ones doing best in the beginnings of my arboretum. So well in fact that I have dismantled the deer and rabbit fence that surrounded it in favour of some old mosquite net to protect the lower bark from rabbits. It’s a wonderfully twisty shape. I hope those yellow leaves are just a sign of winter and not some disease!This russet beauty is growing right under my washing line , I’m surprised I didn’t step on it! Definately not gonnna try eating it though!What do you suppose this is? Well it is the view one has from the back of the kitchen wood stove when the back is open looking through to the front with sunlight on the smoke stained glass. As seen whilst I was in the process of pretending to be a chimney sweep cleaning out the wood stoves and the chimneys.Who’s the cowboy in flares? Nope its not Jim Morrison at a rodeo; it’s moi with my chimney cleaning cable, too much hair and a weird angle affect that makes me look a lot slender than I am!What on earth is that/ I hear you exclaim! Well this is the view along the horizontal chimney shaft to the main vertical shaft which has my wire cleaner running up it, fascinating eh!There hasn’t been much snow as yet this year. A load did come down whilst I was in Amsterdam but this dusting of the cold white stuff was enough to disconcert poor Nancy whilst performing her not so discreet toilet!I capture pix of all the bugs I find at Barabrith inorder to send them n to my mate the “bug lady” this one looks really big in this photo but fear not she was not ‘that’ big! Quite a beauty though and wondering around in the cold without a hat or scarf too!And for those of you wondering where my Top Cat Sid has got to, well he spends a lot of his time in his barn. I guess there are lots of things living in there he can torture. When he’s in an “attention seeking” mode he’s difficult to refuse. I tried doing my chores with him acting like a heated neck warmer, it lasted 5 minutes before he got bored of the high view and left me for something new, the fickle feline that he is.
