Sunday 9th October 2011
Well, what happened this week?
Mainly nothing due to most of the week being rain and high winds. Somebody from down home was complaining on Facebook that it was terribly windy at about 30mph. Oh for that sort of gentle wafting breeze.
It's surprising how you get used to the wind here. There are not many flat calm days and I suppose that force 4 (about 20mph) is more or less normal. You therefore do not really notice anything less than that and it is only when it gets up to 30-40 mph that you begin to think that it is getting a bit breezy.
This last week however has managed to stay above "a bit breezy" for most of the time and when this is accompanied by rain it becomes a bit unpleasant and not just "bracing".
One of the nice things about being retired is that if I do not like the weather then I do not have to go out into it (except for a quick dash round to feed the poultry) so it has been largely a week of watching the weather from indoors.
I have decided to let the medics have another go at fixing the bent little finger on my left hand. After all, now that I have started having keyboard lessons I will need all the fingers that I can get and judging from the first couple of lessons, a few additional fingers would be welcome.
Anyway I went to the see the GP to find out what could be done.
As always I was surprised at how different the health service up here is compared to down south. Our old GP surgery had a 5 minute slot for each patient and signs in the waiting room saying "Only one issue per consultation". The GP here has 15 minute slots and if you want longer you just ask.
At first the doctor thought that I had come to get feedback from the stay in hospital that I had for the bit of kidney infection the other month and so he went through all the results. I eventually managed to tell him that I was there about my finger and he is going to get that sorted at "The Balfour". In conversation I mentioned that I sometimes woke up in the night with a tingling in my legs so he checked the blood flow in my legs and then checked my back and decided that it was a trapped nerve for which he offered a physio appointment.
As I am nearly 65 he decided that I may as well have a flue jab and so gave me one and then took a blood sample to check for prostate cancer.
A full MOT without being asked. Much more of a health service than down south which just seems to be an accident repair shop.
On a slightly less efficient side, Pam was flown down to Aberdeen for a check up that could have been done here at "The Balfour" but then I suppose it was just so that the surgeon who did her operation could check things personally.
We have had happy events and sad events with the chickens.
I let one of Pam's cochin chicks out the other day after it had spent several days in a little run inside the pen for the youngsters and this morning I found 4 hooded crows (our equivalent of carrion crows) perched on posts around the pen and a half eaten young cochin on the floor. I assume that the hoodies had killed it although it is possible that it had just died and they were tidying up. We do not have any land predators here but the airborne ones make up for it and we have a wide variety of them.
On a brighter note I have had 2 Andalusian chicks hatch and maybe another one to hatch yet and the two that have hatched look as though they are going to be blue which is what I want as I have some white splash ones.
Now that the ducks are penned up we are getting an egg every day from the adult so she must have been laying somewhere all the time but we just never found the eggs. The trouble is that ducks are very messy birds and the pen that they are in is getting rapidly turned to mud so I will have to let them out later today and just hope that she decides to come back to the duck house to lay her eggs.
We do not keep the poultry to get a supply of cheap eggs and if we worked out the cost of poultry feed then the eggs would probably work out to be about 5 times the price of supermarket eggs but I had not thought that showing the chickens should be expensive.
When the cockerel won the prizes at The Hope show I did not expect any prize money and was surprised when I was told that I had to go down and collect the princely sum of about £4.40. You would at first think that this is at least a small profit. I later found however that we have to go to the "Harvest Home" supper at a cost of £14 per ticket so that we can be presented with the medal, cup and shield that we won. Still we only entered the show for fun and it should be a good night out.
On the plus side we got a cheque for £16 from the county show for our chicken winnings and we do not have to go to an expensive "do" to collect that as we only got the reserve champion.
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