Merry Xmas!

Well, we had a cracking xmas, and we hope that you all did too! We don't know many folk lucky enough to be able to go cut their own hand-picked xmas tree from their own land, but we found a lovely spruce for the purpose. We plan to pick a balsam fir early this year and trim it ready for next xmas.

Cameron had put all of his money into a drum kit and so we topped it up and got him a full-size kit. Breagh is doing a horse course at 4H this year, so we arranged to borrow a horse for her on long-term loan. The kind fellow who is loaning us the horse lent us another to keep it company, so the barn is substantially fuller than it was a week ago! We had a frantic few days before xmas to convert the cattle stanchions into suitable loose box stabling for horses.

Xmas day took the usual format, sherry and mince pies whilst opening presents (after the barn chores are all complete of course), a short walk in the snow and then get stuck in to cooking. We had marinated the locally-produced free-range turkey for a couple of days in apple juice and sage and it was just superb, still is in fact, as it was over 14lb in weight!

We picked up our smoked bacon and hams on xmas eve, so with a freezer full of home grown meat we feel prepared. We have done substantially all the barn conversion work that we envisage for the time being. We need to get out and do some fencing, and a lot of fuel wood timber extraction, with a view to having 6 cords of wood cut, split and stacked ready for next year (and more).

The other big task is the renovation work in the house. We intend to create another room upstairs, but convert one bedroom into a family bathroom. Most of the walls and ceilings will need to come down to re-wire, plumb, then drywall and insulate with cellulose. We have been doing a lot of thinking about the jobs needing done and are still not quite sure about some aspects of the build. Many of the skills we learned building 22 Geary are not actually applicable here, as many things are done differently - back to feeling like a DIY-numpty, sigh.

Plans for next year and a review of this year will be forthcoming in a Hogmany special edition blog shortly, featuring new correspondents, Breagh and Cameron - at least that's the plan.

Oxen

Oxen extracting timber
Originally uploaded by rubhadubh

Jonathon, our nearest neighbour, yoked up his pair of oxen today to extract some timber from his woods. Well, it was more to give them some exercise, but they might as well be of use at the same time.

There is a long tradition of working oxen in Nova Scotia, and there are still many pairs in this part of the province, though they are mostly kept now for showing. The county fairs have many classes for pulling or logging, but not that many years ago, they were the backbone of agriculture, clearing land and every task from ploughing, mowing, spreading manure to hauling logs.

This pair are Herefords (with a bit of Durham?) and are incredibly placid and well-behaved. I wish my cows were more like this!

In other farm news, our flocks and herds expanded somewhat unexpectedly this afternoon, with the discovery of a pile baby gerbils in the critter cabin. Dammit, the pet shop assured us that we were buying 2 male gerbils!! What do you do with unwanted gerbils? Leave us a comment with your best suggestions?!

Snow time!

Snow time!
Originally uploaded by rubhadubh

I haven't mentioned the snow on the blog yet, I don't think? The kids have been making up for lost time, for all the years of sledging disappointment in 1cm of slush over 10cm of mud.

I'm being kept busy trying to keep the driveway clear with tractor and snow bucket. We got the snow chains on and so far it is coping well.

We have plenty of food in, and aim to travel as little as possible. The kids haven't been sent home from school yet though, and it should be their xmas concert tonight. We won front row seats and the privilege of parking in the Principal's parking space in a raffle, it'll be a shame if it's cancelled.

Fame! I wanna live forever...

I think we reached the pinnacle of our media careers this week.

Sheila and Tom Sheppard are a very interesting couple who settled in West Caledonia about 30 years ago. They have many strings to their respective bows, but both are involved in local journalism. Tom writes a column in The Advance, the local newspaper from Liverpool, and Sheila has a periodic spot on CBC radio about local affairs.

It turns out that the hill that our farm sits upon, was one one of the original 'seven settlers, seven hills' that was the start of Caledonia in 1817. The original settler of our land was a man named Alexander Spears and he hailed from Greenock, which as you may know, is only across the water from Arran, the Scottish island that I come from. Tom and Sheila wanted to talk to us about what brought to Caledonia and spotted the parallels between the old and the new settlers.

So, we featured in their respective journalistic output and I'm attaching Tom's article for your delectation! You can read the article here. It's a little bit big filesize-wise (for those of us on dial-up), my apologies.

There were two other outcomes from this episode...

The first concerns the aforementioned dial-up internet connection. As a postscript to Tom's article, Eastlink announced yesterday that they have won the contract to supply broadband service to our area, which means that the trial of high-speed wireless internet should soon become open to new subscribers - muted hurrah! One shouldn't count one's chickens...

The second was that it prompted us to ponder on a name for our farm. We're not sure how pretentious it is here to name your house/farm, but if we are going to market produce, we do need something with a little more ambience than our civic address. The original name was possibly 'Scotch House', though this is more likely to have been the original settlement in a different site. We like the ring of 'Settler Hill Farm', but given the geographical proximity of the two settlers' origins, we are thinking about calling it 'Kilbrannan Farm'. The Kilbrannan Sound separates Arran from Kintyre on the Scottish mainland, and strictly speaking the body of water between Arran and Greenock is the Firth of Clyde, but a small amount of poetic licence is perhaps allowable?

What do you think? Any votes?