News From the Hill

Archive for January 9th, 2009

I have just been relaxing for a while here on a frosty Leitrim afternoon, catching up on reading other blogs that I enjoy.

Correction – I wasn’t really relaxing, I was working- I was actually waiting for the washing up water in the sink to be the right temperature to wash the dishes without scalding my “dainty” little handies. The reason that the water is so hot is that I heated it up in a great big saucepan on the wee stove that heats our home. Sometimes I do this to conserve the use of gas however today I chose this method because our water system is frozen, has been for days now so we have no water on tap.

Yes, this is the twenty first century and this is still Celtic Tiger Ireland and I am going out into the yard with a bucket to break the ice on the rain-water barrel in order to collect water to heat over the fire and do the dishes and what’s more – I did it with a song on my lips. Have you seen the sky this evening?

Stop reading now, go outside right this very moment and look upwards. The sky this evening is just breathtaking, awe-inspiring, just completely beautiful!

I had been reading through my fav blogs, as I said earlier and I had really enjoyed Liz’s post about the wolf moon when I noticed that the fire was going down and remembered that I had to bring in some fuel from the shed. This led to a chain of events because I then remembered that the dishes were waiting in the sink and that I needed more water to put the big pot back on the stove and that the cats needed to be fed.

So out I went, gloves and hat on, bucket in hand – to be stopped in my busy tracks by the moon.

What a sight! The sky was just so beautiful and the moon so close and inviting of admiration that I started to sing a moonsong - you can make up your own to whatever tune you please.

Every direction was beautiful, the colours in the sky so lovely.

So the cats were fed, the fuel for the fire brought indoors, the ice broken and the water collected all with me singing my heart out. This is one of the many times that I am so very grateful to live in a somewhat isolated place.

I reckon Liz must be right, this has got to be a moon for wishing or praying or placing intention – whatever you wish to call it, I feel that is a particularly good moon for it.

I think that I had better go do the dishes now…

I love this story which I found on TreeHugger, a site that I check out every now and again, I like the fact that you get good news stories there, there are enough of the other kind (like my last post for instance!).

This story is about a young fella in the USA who got so frustrated at what he saw happening around him that he had to take action. Apparently GWB, the almost EX-president of over-there (how I love saying almost ex) decided in his unlimited unwisdom to sell off the leases on thousands of acres of Utah wildland – “After receiving complaints from the National Park Service, The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had dropped half of the initially proposed 359,000 acres from the sale” – wow, did someone notice the sellout? This young fella went along to the auction to protest and, understandably, got carried away…

Read the story here for yourself, it’s worth the click…