Category: Birds.

A nice visitor :-)

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Windy and cold all day but I did see a little patch of blue sky when we went out on our morning walk. I had been to the supermarket before we went out though to buy yeast. I tried baking soda bread but I’m never good at it, plus don’t eat too much soda bread because it destroys all vitamin b and that’s something we don’t want to have too little of. After that I went to the dollar store to buy bird seeds, they are so much c cheaper than any other store and before going home I went to the pet store to buy two small fish, Siamese algae eaters.

The wind is horrible and it really drains the life out of us but it does make the electricity bill less expensive since the wind power plants works like crazy 🙂 We managed to keep away from most of the wind by walking in the forest though. It sounded like we scared away a lot of animals  when we walked out to the bog, mostly wild hogs I guess because they’ve been working hard to get down in to the ground to find something to eat.

We had been at home just a short while when my neighbour called and said that I shouldn’t let the dogs out because we had a visitor in the garden. So I took a look and indeed we had 🙂 A beautiful Roe deer was walking around eating what it could find on the ground. It felt so safe that it eventually just laid down and fell asleep 🙂 The garden must smell an awful lot of dog so I wonder why it felt so safe here? perhaps we have a wolf here again and even if it smells of dog here it still felt more safe than having a wolf coming too close?

I eventually had to go outside and tell it to leave since the dogs needed to go outside 🙂 So it trotted away, jumped over the fence and walked towards the cow pasture instead. It might come back tonight again because I think it has been hanging around for some time now, the dogs always run around the fence and garden like crazy when they go outside and early this morning Alma barked at something outside the fence. It did look as it had much to eat here as well, it stayed in the garden for well over five hours 🙂

It is time for that last cup of tea and I’ll also have a roll I just baked now when I finally can leave the tries to bake soda bread 🙂

Have a great day!

I’ve picked up my car.

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So they texted me long after they had closed that my car was fixed. I didn’t mind since I had the car I could borrow anyway so I went there this morning to pick it up. The exhaust pipe wasn’t broken thankfully but the seals where the different parts of the exhaust fume pipes were stuck together had given up so they just put in new ones. So it didn’t cost an arm and a leg, just an arm 🙂 🙂 So a new spring for the front wheel, two bulbs and the seals costed around $ 900 US ( tricky to know exactly at the moment since the US $ has lost so much value lately but somewhere around there I would guess).

So I paid without crying 🙂 🙂 and went out to my car. It was so slow, like driving in fudge. The guy who had repaired my car had mashed a rookie mistake, never use the handbrake on a French car during winter 🙂 🙂 🙂 It will freeze stuck and must be brought inside to be knocked off the brake disc 🙂 🙂 Only took a few minutes and now the handbrake will rest until this winter is over 🙂 🙂 🙂 I stopped twice on my way home, once at a big grocery store in Falköping to get some jam for pancakes I’ll make later and a second time to pick up a parcel.

I have an incinerator toilet, no water used in it with other words, and need paper bags where everything goes before I “flush” the toilet so everything drops down and gets burned in a very high temperature. The odd thing is that the chimney from it just gets lukewarm. I’ve never been able to figure out how they can cool down that hot air so good that I only need to have a plastic chimney. It works and that’s the only thing that matters 🙂

I’ve started to sow those heart nuts now and went online to check something about the sowing. I never look at the AI suggestions google put at the top of every search but something caught my eye. AI said the nuts was supposed to be placed warm?! That’s not what I’ve learned.So I went out into the wonderful world called internet and finally had to admit that I might be wrong about keeping them cold before they germinate. The places I found said keep warm, so now I’ll keep them warm for a couple of weeks to see if anything will happen. There are always easy to remember general rules when it comes to sowing. If the seeds comes in early summer they’ll need warm weather to germinate, if they come in autumn they’ll need a period of cold.

There’s always exceptions to this rule and some seeds can work both ways. So if a seeds falls to the ground but surroundings aren’t good they can lie all summer and wait for next spring and germinate when there’s enough water and warmth, but it’ll then only work if they’ve gone through a cold period and not been collected and stayed indoors all winter. Some should have it warm but just refuse to germinate anyway and then a cold period will help them to start and vice versa . So I’ll keep these nuts warm as I wrote for a few weeks and see what will happen, we still have much winter ahead of us unfortunately.

It is time for a cup of tea I think and after that I’ll make some pancakes 🙂

Have a great day!

By the way, this is how my Kaki (Diospyrus kaki) fruit seedlings look like now

We might get sunshine tomorrow :-)

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I was so tired when. I woke up this morning around 5 am that after the dogs had been outside I went back to the bed and slept for two more hours, that’s very unusual for me. Normally I just gets up and starts with the food for us all. I would have guessed that I had a cold but no it doesn’t feel like that at all. Perhaps I had nice dreams and wanted to continue with them but I almost never remember what I’ve been dreaming about so I don’t know 🙂

WordPress is acting weird lately, I can only write and post something if I do it in edit mode 🙂 🙂 Have no clue to why but this works as well. So it has continued to snow all night and day and with big flakes but looking at the ground I’ll say we might have gotten two fifths of an inch as most. Almost no wind so the snow hasn’t drifted away with the gusts. There were lots of tracks from different animals and I could see that we’ve had Roe deers passing by the cottage. Also the wild hogs have been almost everywhere but thankfully not close to our homes.

cars have been passing my cottage after it has become dark so I guess there might be hunters out in the forest tonight and when they are here at nights it’s because of wild hogs.  Alma and Malkolm don’t like them so if some are gone our walks will be easier I think. Malkolm have been without the cone of shame for a couple of hours and has behaved really well 🙂 They said that he isn’t allowed to clean himself  ten to twelve days after the surgery but surely the wound should be healed enough after a week? Can’t remember they ever was that strict with all the other dogs I’ve had here.

We might actually have some sunshine both tomorrow and on Tuesday! After that the stronger winds will come back and of course they won’t come from south but north to east. Always nasty winds when they are from east or northeast  except during the summer half year because then they come from the continent where summers can be nasty hot and then I’ll complain about them again 🙂 It is time for that last cup of tea but I’ve had enough to eat today so it’ll just be the tea 🙂

Have a great day!

Snowy day.

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It has been snowing here all day but it barely shows on the ground. I’m not happy about it but I feel I really can’t complain about it since there are places in the US that will have it so much worse. According to the weather sites the temperatures will stay as they are now for at least ten days and sometimes we’ll get snow and sometimes sunshine. Almost no wind here now but it’ll come back next Wednesday till Friday they’re guessing.

 

Today was nice though, despite the snow falling. Almost no wind but I chose to walk in the forest and out to the bog anyway. We could hear animals moving away from us but I never saw any. I wouldn’t say that Malkolm is especially bothered by the cone but I can see the difference in mood when we go out for a walk and he doesn’t need to wear it. I’ve had to calm both him and Alma down because they play a bit rough in the garden and I can see they think I’m sooo boring 🙂 🙂

 

Nothing much has happened here, the only thing I’ve done is to put some pork chops in the oven, boil a few potatoes and made a mushroom sauce, I have to say the sauce was the best of it all 🙂 :-)I had bought a big pack of chops so I’ll need to put some of them back in the freezer.  A neighbour, well his mother is still a neighbour even though he has moved away, texted me yesterday evening and gave me 3-4 cubic meters of fire wood if I wanted. His mother doesn’t use firewood any more and he had more than enough where he lives now, so it’s time to make some space in the wood shed. No panic though because I can bring it home when I want. The space making can start now but I can bring home the fire wood when it gets warmer again. I’ll use my big wheel barrow (two wheeled) when it is time.

I think I’ll start with the sowing of Tamarillo seeds tomorrow. I really like that fruit and used to grow it when I lived in an apartment in Gothenburg. The plant itself smells like come and help me to die (Swedish expression 🙂 ) but the fruits are delicious. I’ll also need to see what tomato seeds I’ll sow, I think I mostly will skip the vines varieties and instead go for the ones growing like a bush and perhaps have a few in the ground instead of in the green house but I will of course have a few vines too in the green house. I do hope we’ll have an early and warm spring this year otherwise I’ll be in trouble 🙂 🙂 🙂

It is time for that last cup of tea and after that falling asleep in the recliner 🙂

Have a great day!

Nasty wind and sowing season has started :-)

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Same nasty wind as yesterday but from a slightly different angle, south east this time and that made the walk so much nicer since it couldn’t reach us most of the way. Still not especially fun weather and both Alma and Malkolm pulled their leashes almost all the way. Well it could have been worse I guess.

After removing the old microwave oven yesterday I have been continuing to clean and declutter my kitchen counter, it was really needed already long ago 🙂 I have to stop temporarily because I need a new bib plastic sack to throw most of what’s on the counter away. No it isn’t hysterically much but I’m waiting for a door food sack to be emptied and I do need to throw other things away as well 🙂

While cleaning up I realised why it was so cold by the little window. The insulation list must have either become worn out which I doubt or it have broken somehow at the bottom of the window. I do have several potted plants standing there so I couldn’t feel the flow of cold air coming in through there. I don’t have any at home so instead I duct taped the window all the way at the bottom of it. Didn’t take long before it felt much warmer and nicer again.

Somewhere beneath that ice and snow there’s a metallic bridge, I didn’t trust that is for a second so we took a detour 🙂

I found the name of two of the cacti/ succulent seeds I found behind the microwave. One is for leaf cacti and the other one is some sort of agave. There’s a number on each little paper bag so I had to go through 44 pages with 48 species/ varieties to find them 🙂 🙂 The three left I’ll assume are cacti and I’ll wait trying to sow them until it is much warmer outside. I have however started to sow Two species of edible passionfruits, a Chinese dogwood, Japanese raisin tree and also lots of Guava seeds. The guava trees I had I killed last winter by over watering them and also keeping them in the cool  cellar, they didn’t like that at all. I’ll also sow seeds from a pink dandelion I once had, well it wasn’t totally pink, it had a yellow center and the rest of the flower was pink.

I guess that normal dandelion seeds would germinate no matter how old they are but this species isn’t that tough, the last ones only lasted three years before they gave up but I’ll give them a chance anyway. I have more seeds I also bought five Heart seed walnuts (Juglans ailantifolia cordiformis) that needs some time in cold weather to start growing. I don’t know why I keep on sowing walnuts because I really have no space for them 🙂 🙂 🙂 I already have a black walnut tree and an English walnut tree, well tree is too much to call it but it is alive and if it makes through this winter I guess it’ll survive in the long run as well 🙂  ) The one moving here the day I’m gone will have some interesting days to figure out all what I have or it’ll be someone who just will cut it all down 🙂 :-).

It is time for a pot of tea and a French roll I think. The last of the meat sauce was eaten today and now I have pork chops slowly thawing in the fridge. It was cheap and a big pack so either I’ll have the same dinner the coming eight days or I’ll have to put some of them in the freezer 🙂

Ravens passed above us and all at the same direction, I guess an animal must have lost its life.

Have a great day!

One more day before it gets cold again, yay

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Mostly grey and dull today, the sunrise that almost happened was really beautiful for a few seconds and then it was gone behind the clouds. I didn’t mind that much because it was at least over 0C (32F). We actually almost saw the sun one more time when there was a rip in the cloud cover.

Yesterday.
Today.
Lots of water yesterday
but less today.

I had to pick up a parcel today, the oat, sorghum and millet flour I ordered online this week since they didn’t order anything to the supermarket had arrived. I actually got the text message on Thursday but decided I could let it be until today. My phone has this thing of if I touch the screen in the wrong way (which I to be honest still doesn’t know how that works) the phone then put that message in the archives. I didn’t even know there was an archive for text messages. I had apparently done that with this message.

Worse in the forest though.

So there I stood in the store and couldn’t for my life remember what shipping company had been used 🙂 🙂 🙂 Thankfully no one else was there and the store owner did what she could to find the parcel anyway. It took well over 15 minutes but then she found it, it stood just by the door 🙂 🙂 🙂 I have now figured out how to find archived messages but I still need to know who the sender is, otherwise it’ll be gone for ever it seems 🙂 🙂 🙂

So I tried to use millet for the first time and I failed something spectacular 🙂 🙂 🙂 I found a recipe online, did exactly as it said but the dough was less thick that what it would be for a sponge cake?? I think, but it didn’t say so in the recipe, that this bread should have been thin but wide. I poured it in to a normal bread tin and that was so wrong. It collapsed already when I put it in the oven 🙂 🙂 🙂 It is edible though and millet has a sort of nut taste to it. I’ll either do the bread in a lower tin next time or I’ll find another recipe 🙂 🙂 I do think it’ll be really great to have now when I’ll have rice pasta and spaghetti sauce after I’m done here.

So I’ll wait with that last cup of tea for the day, I can have some after dinner instead. lots of snow has now melted away and there’s one more day before the colder weather arrives again so I hope most of what is left will melt away before it gets cold again.

Have a great day!

Finally, it is melting!

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It took its time but now we’ve finally had above 0C (32F) but the day began with mostly snow falling but also some rain. The roads have been rather bad and for once even worse in this village. My neighbour was going to take her children to pre school but had huge problems to even go up the small slope up to the village road. After that it was even worse, so she had to go back home again and can’t work tonight.

Our fox has survived the hunters so far 🙂

I walked up to my mailbox just a few minutes ago and if it doesn’t freeze too hard tonight it’ll be much better when I have to drive around noon tomorrow. I’ll go to a job interview so hold Your thumbs and cross Your fingers for good luck 🙂 Anyway, it had rained before we went out for our morning walk but it turned to snow when we were out. Instead of dry fluffy snow we now have what and slushy snow 🙂 I could get a grip when walking though so I think that was better 🙂

I can’t figure out if this is a track from a piglet or perhaps a small roe deer. I think it is a piglet.

Bot Alma and Malkolm behaved better than they have ever done I think. Well the only thing Malkolm does is to pull the leash because he wants to follow tracks as fast as he can but he does listen when I tell him to calm down, the majority of times 🙂 🙂 Alma is a different thing but today she stayed mostly quiet and also followed Malkolm to see what he thought was so interesting 🙂 So no aching shoulders on me today 🙂 Otherwise I haven’t done much. I baked some French rolls before we went out and I’ve realised that it’s the cheese that make any bread much better. I didn’t have any leftover cheese this time so the rolls sort of missed something 🙂 I also did some laundry just so I have some clean clothes tomorrow 🙂 🙂

It is time for that last cup of tea for the day and I’ll have another of the rolls I baked because they’re always best the day they’re made 🙂

Have a great day!

Finally, it is getting less cold!

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It is slowly but steadily getting less cold now and that makes me smile. Thankfully we had clouds covering the sky during most parts of last night so it wasn’t as cold as they guessed it would be but to cold for me 🙂

So it almost felt warm when we went out for our morning walk today, only -11C (12,2F). No wind and a thick layer of clouds so the whole area sort of had a led grey hue to it.  The wild life had noticed the change towards less cold as well so today we saw lots of tracks in the snow. Mostly wild hogs but also deer, both Roe and red deer and also some moose tracks. The squirrels are to light to make any prints in the hard surface the snow now has (still powdery beneath the surface though) but the foxes were just enough heavy to make paw prints.

We did hear a few smaller birds tweeting close to the village but that was it, no Jays or Ravens made any sounds. A squirrel ran down a pine trunk on the back side of the tree but we could hear it and just had to follow the snow that fell from the surface while the squirrel ran downwards. It felt like walking in a world where only the vegetation was left. Well the whining from Alma sort of destroyed that feeling a bit but she was actually much more quiet than she normally is.

Tomorrow I’ll brush off all snow from the car and go to the supermarket. I really don’t have much left in the larder or the fridge 🙂 I also need seeds for the birds, some birds just don’t like peanuts, especially not those who only comes to the feeders when it’s too hard to find food in the forest like the Bullfinches. To be honest they are rare then to but it looks like both the House sparrow and the field sparrow prefers seeds before peanuts. 

It is time for that last cup of tea for the day. If I hadn’t had dinner just an hour ago I woukld have made a couple of sandwiches because I made some French rolls yesterday that almost tasted like normal ones and as always I’ll never recreate them since I just mixed together what ever kind of flour I had. Perhaps one day I should write it all down 🙂 🙂

Have a great day!

This must be the most sad looking Thuja in the world. The ground is dry and it never get any sunshine 🙂

Nasty cold!

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So last night was cold, the temperature dropped down to a bit lower than 19C (2,2F). The sky was clear so there was nothing stopping what was left of the heat from going straight out to space. Tonight will be even colder they say and it is already -16.4C (2,48F). The weather sites says it’s only -13C (8,6F) at the moment and won’t fall that much more 🙂 🙂 🙂

We did go out for a morning walk when it was slightly less cold but the dogs changed their minds after a while. Malkolm refused to walk where there was less snow for some reason so his paws got really cold and I did warm them up but that did only help for a short while. Thankfully my neighbours had to buy food so they helped me with a few things because I had no wish what so ever to be out driving when it was that cold 🙂 🙂 🙂

They say that it will be much warmer the coming week and even above 0C (32F) from Wednesday and for the rest of the week but since they can’t get what temperature we have now right why would I believe them about what might happen later in the week 🙂 🙂 🙂

So it has been a lot of tea drinking most of the day, so I have already had that last cup because what goes in must come out 🙂 and so far not all has come out 🙂 I think I’ll make myself some warm sandwiches  and try to stay close to the radiators for the rest of the day 🙂 🙂 I truly hate winter!

Have a great day!

A day free from snowing.

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Bullfinches looking for food.

No big difference today compared to yesterday but it didn’t snow for once. It will start to snow again tonight but after that the two big weather sites once again have different opinions. Yesterday it was the Norwegian site that said nasty cold during the winter and the Swedish just bitter cold, today it’s the opposite and according to the Swedish site we’ll have snow falling for two days while the Norwegian says one.

Yesterday evening I thought it would be very cold here because my brother living on an island by the sea had it much colder than here and so was a friend living by our biggest lake, Vänern. That never happened here, it was just the normal cold temperature so I feel like that was a sort of win for us here because it’s always much colder here during winter. We get it back when summer comes though because it’s always a couple degrees warmer here. An old garden enthusiast said it’s because of the big bog, it is so big that it makes its own miso climate. Big lakes and oceans evens out the temperatures while big bogs like this one do the opposite and so far I’ve never been able to prove him wrong 🙂

No mice in the box trap this morning but later in the day when I had let the monster down there, she sits outside and looks at me until I open the door so that she can walk down, I heard a rumble that can’t be anything else than she chasing a mouse.  I haven’t checked if I can find any victim but she usually eat up her victims so I’m not sure I would even find any signs of it.

I had to pick up a parcel in Gudhem today. I have a couple on the way and all have different delivery companies so I was a bit unsure what it was I was going to pick up 🙂 Today it was all the stories that the Grimm brothers had collected. All these stories comes from different origins and to get one story, like Cinderella, they had to combine several local stories to one. Some of those local stories were so bad, even for that time, that the brothers actually had to censor them 🙂 🙂 It’ll be interesting to see if they are anything different to what I read when I was growing up because those stories shouldn’t be read to children (but they were because I grew up in the stone ages 🙂 🙂 🙂 ) and if they were censored I can’t imagine how bad the original stories were 🙂 🙂 🙂

It is time for that last cup of tea for the day and I think I’ll start reading those stories when I have that tea ready 🙂

Have a great day!

More snow will come or perhaps not :-)

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Hunters were out in the forest this morning because it didn’t snow, they wouldn’t have if it had snowed they said 🙂 So I drove to the supermarket while they were out there. I actually woke up pretty late today, at least the last time 🙂 The dogs needed top go outside just before four am and afterwards we went back to bed for a while 🙂 I woke up well after eight am 🙂

The smaller roads were no fun to drive on but the big one to Skara was pretty good actually. The reason I drove today was because of snow warnings the coming days. Now when I look at the biggest weather sites they really can’t agree. The big Swedish one says snow and the same temperature as today (around -6C (21,2F) but the Norwegian one, the one I trust the most, says no snow but bitterly cold. I don’t want it even colder but then again I don’t want more snow either 🙂

Wild hogs had been working on the forest road before the hunters arrived 🙂

I used a big brush when I went out to remove all the snow in front and on the car. It was so fluffy that it only took a few minutes but the snow on the car had melted to a thick ice sheet.It was more or less impossible to remove that on the car roof but the ice on the windows was sort of fragile so I didn’t even have cold fingers when I was done 🙂

I’m so glad that our hunters are a bit lazy because instead of walking to where they are supposed to be they take their cars. To be honest I can understand them because it is so hard to walk on this fluffy and dry snow because nothing can get a good grip while walking in it. Anyway that helped me a lot when we finally could have a walk because the cars are so heavy that I could walk in the car tracks and actually get a grip. Only when walking on the road of course but still. I walked in their foot steps in the forest and that didn’t help at all 🙂 🙂 🙂

There were lots of tracks from mostly wild hogs and roe deer and the occasional fox as well but this weather make the animals stay where they are. I guess it’s just nice to get out and get fresh air and saying they’ll hunt is just a good excuse to get out of their homes 🙂 Well it is time for that last cup of tea for the day but I think I’ll instead have a last cup of coffee. Waking up so late as I did today sort of mess up my day, I don’t have a headache as I usually get when that happens but my brain is sort of a few seconds behind if You understand what I mean 🙂

Have a great day!

I wish You a good ending of this year and a good new year.

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So it is the last day of the year and it did at least end with beautiful weather but a bit too chilly for my taste. It was cloudy when we went out on our morning walk but as soon as we reached the cottage again the sun showed and continued to shine for most of the day. The sky is still clear and it is already much colder than they were guessing it would be.

The new year will not start as beautiful though, soon the temperature will rise, even above 0C (32F) and snow will start to fall and it will continue to fall for at least two more days. This time the snow will stay for a while because it doesn’t look like any warmer winds will reach us for the coming ten days. Also no sunshine either so I can’t say I like it at all 🙂 🙂

I usually try to plan my shopping for either Fridays or Saturdays if possible but they have put out a warning about extreme slipperiness tomorrow plus all the snow they’re guessing will fall but I didn’t realise that before I had put the ribs in the oven. I hate standing in line in stores so I let the ribs be almost done, shut the oven off, left the ribs in the oven and drove to the supermarket before too many people with panic because they’d missed some ingredients for the food tonight arrived or needed something to give to the host of the evenings party and I was lucky 🙂 🙂 They started to arrive when I was on my way out of the store 🙂 The ribs were perfect when I came home 🙂

No fireworks around here tonight, not a good idea to have when we have a big field filled with bulls in the middle of the village 🙂 🙂 🙂 I will be able to hear the fireworks from the towns around us, Like Skara and Falköping and perhaps some from the village Gum. It sounds like muffled thumps but I’ll most likely be asleep anyway so I won’t even hear that 🙂

It is time for that last cup of tea and I’ll most likely read something because tv isn’t what it used to be 🙂 🙂

I wish You all a good ending of this year and a good new year!