A German friend noted on Saturday, our first sunny day, that we had only had three sunny days in the past sixty days. My German acquaintance tends to make notes like this, as does my Swiss neighbour. They both tend to be mathematical about the weather, percentage of humidity, inches of rainfall – actually make that feet of rainfall, days of sunshine.

Some friends and I were chatting about this phenomenon of being so analytical about the weather and concluded that Irish people don’t have these tendacies because it would be too depressing to know exactly how much rain had fallen last week or that we have had only three whole days of sunshine in sixty days.

It’s much easier to cope when you know that it’s “been awhile since there was a good sunny day” or “there’s been a fierce amount of rain recently” as opposed to the cruel, hard, cold and wet facts.

So, back to the happy, happy fact that we have had multiple, complete days of sunshine. The ground is beginning to dry out, the mud outside our door has dried up. There are wasps flying about, presumably making the most of the last few flowers.

We have been working on the house again, for a while there it was too wet to be climbing up on the scaffolding to do outside work. We kept ourselves busy tidying up the inside of the house, moving the cedar wood indoors to keep it dry, painting the windows that have yet to be installed.

Now, for the last few days we have working outdoors again. We used the cedar to clad another wall, bringing us around to the south facing front of the house. We are about halfway to having the entire house clad and weatherproof.

Water Collection System and Cedar Cladding

It’s been so good to be working on the outside of the house again, even better has been working in a tee-shirt. It’s still a little chilly in the morning however it’s not long until the sweatshirt comes off – yahoo! Soooo nice to feel the warmth of sunshine.

Sundown, however, comes on quickly. The temperature drops so suddenly that it’s a rush to pull on sweatshirts and woolly hats, put the tools away and get indoors to light the fire. I laughed today when I thought about the silly old Vampire movie I saw over Halloween – the townspeople were rushing to get indoors when the sun went down, to avoid being Vampire supper.

We displayed the same urgency for different reasons, bright sunny, cloudless days lead to clear skies and cold nights. It’s time to be back indoors, enjoying the heat of the stove.

Be very, very simple, very un-complex, very natural, like very small happy children, undisturbed by what happened yesterday or what may happen tomorrow, but living and enjoying the ever present Now to the very full. Never try to possess anything, never try to hold on to anything, because when you do, you cannot be simple and childlike, for you are full of fear, you are afraid of losing that which you are trying to cling on to. When you can open your hearts and share all the good and perfect gifts, which I pour down upon you, holding on to nothing, then you know the true meaning of the freedom of the Spirit and you really are free. When all is out in the open and you have nothing to hide, what a glorious feeling it is.

One of the co-founders of the Findhorn Community, Eileen Caddy, received guidance from the “still voice within” and shared it with others in the community for more than 40 years. Today they continue this tradition by printing her guidance in the community’s weekly newsletter and by sharing it with the wider world through a mailing list.

If you feel inspired just go along to their site and sign up for the newsletter, you will get a little good news in you inbox every now and then.

Open Willow Seed Head

Closed Willow Seed Head

Yellow Daffodill and Narcissus

Narcissus

There are a few amazingly large bumble bees flying around our heads from time to time, however I have not yet been able to get a good photo so apologies for the bad quality of the shot below.

Irish Bumble Bee

Apparently there used to be 18 species of bumble bee in Ireland at one time, sadly there are not many to be seen these days. When I do get a good photo I will hopefully be able to identify which species of bumble bee it is.

We have been tending to our hedges here over the last week. We are lucky enough to have inherited some great Whitethorn (Hawthorn) hedges on our land, some of which have not been trimmed in perhaps sixty or seventy years. They had become very stringy and were looking a bit top-heavy, especially when they were covered in snow over the winter.

In order to prevent breakages due to snow or wind damage but mainly to encourage new growth we cut our top hedge down to about eight foot tall. I am looking forward to seeing the new growth over the next few years as the trees regenerate.

Right now we have a lot of thorny branches and trunks to trim, chip, cut and stack. The thinest pieces we are trimming and chipping, leaving cleaner bigger pieces of wood to deal with.

We have an electric hand-saw and an electric wood-chipper which have been given lots of use over the last week. Luckily we had plenty of power to run the tools and we only used one at a time which was also the most efficient way for us to work.

I trimmed the smaller pieces whilst himself cut the bigger pieces down to workable sizes for me to work with and we created a few different piles of brushwood for chipping which we then both fed into the chipper. The chips are then wheelbarrowed to the gooseberry bed for use as mulch.

Once we have a good size stack of timber we start chopping and stacking. The branches are cut to a size that fits our wee stove and stacked to dry for burning next year. We’ve heard that Whitethorn wood burns with a high heat so if next winter is like the one just past then we will be glad of the warmth.

When the tree trunks are left for a day or two you can see the moisture dripping out of the cuts. It’s a little sad to be cutting such lovely trees however it helps to know that the wood is all going to good use, firewood and mulch.

It’s also both comforting and promising to be building a wood pile for use over next winter and we are hopeful that we will be burning it in our new home, warm and cosy within the walls which we are soon to build.

Well I also have a friend who loves staying fit and was reluctant over the last two years to get out on his bike in the inclement winter conditions and bad roads around his home in north Leitrim.

These two friends got together during September last year when Hugh Piggott was over here doing his annual guest teacher slot and they created a new machine that would both help my friend to stay fit and also to generate enough power to run a laptop, printer and desk lamps.

Irish Turbike

The resultant creation is now viewable on youtube, sorry I don’t have the movie up here, you will have click on the link here and go view it for yourself.

It’s worth the click!

I have been happily hibernating since Solstice, very much enjoying the “cut wood, carry water” lifestyle of the old days, although it is more like carry turf-briquettes, collect water in my neck of the woods. The really severe weather which started before Christmas got us into a routine of doing basic chores and cutting back on energy expenditure, really hibernating.

The important jobs were cleaning out and relighting the stove, filling our water containers each day because our water pipes were frozen, carrying in the day’s fuel for the fire from our outside store, feeding the birds and making sure the cats had fresh water to drink a few times a day because the water in their bowl would freeze quickly and so on.

We learnt a new way to manage the fire in our stove so as to keep some heat all night long and to be able to clean the stove without removing the live embers and so relight it with the remains of the night fire. Keeping a large pot of water on the stove at night was also important as that meant that we had warm water in the morning to defrost the gas cylinder so as to cook breakfast and we also had some nice warm water for a morning wash – ah, what luxury!

Keeping the fire going

We didn’t go down to town often because we had stocked up with food to avoid unnecessary journeys. The few times that we did venture out on the road we often met the postman and collected our mail and that of our neighbours and then we would deliver it to the neighbours on the way home. The postman was unable to travel on our road because of the snow and the constant freezing conditions. It was nice for us to have that contact with our neighbours which we might not have had otherwise.

Delivering the post

We walked every day and were enthralled by the tracks of the wild animals in our area. Each day we could see the new tracks and were surprised by how much one local fox travels across our land and also delighted to see mountain hare tracks. It’s like being let in on a secret world. These animals all exist here along side us all the time and we rarely see glimpses of them. We felt quite honoured to have been made privy to their comings and goings, thanks to the snowy and freezing weather.

So now the cold weather is well and truly gone and I find myself slowly and reluctantly trying to re-enter the world of schedules, grocery shopping, cyber world and forthcoming elections…..

Lá Fhéile Bhríde shona dhuit

I thought that it was quite something to have a full moon for Solstice, then to have a lunar eclipse happening too is particularly special. The sunset last evening was really beautiful, we don’t get to see the sun setting from where we live, however we do see the colours of the sunset as they are reflected in the evening sky.

The last week has been amazing. The snow came on Thursday, just a light dusting here, no more than an inch with real snow on Friday. Because the moon has been filling all week the nights have incredible, the bright moonlight reflecting off the snow and the stars sparkling up above.

Solstice Week

It’s really beautiful here this week during the sunny bright snowy days however it is even more beautiful here at night and anytime I have put my nose outside the door at night I just have to go for a little walk.

Tree Walk

And so the longest night has passed and now the days lengthen. Christmas is at the end of the week and all pressures are relieved for us because of the weather. There is nowhere we have to go and nothing we have to do, just feed the fire, feed the cats, feed ourselves, walk and enjoy the snowy quiet of the hills in mid-winter.

Happy Solstice to you all, may the returning light bring strength and inspiration into your life.

Frozen tree moss

Ash tree with moss

We have been lucky with above average sunshine everyday and beautiful clear starry nights.

The east of the country has been blanketed in snow for the last fortnight and schools have closed. On our hill the snow from two weeks ago lay frozen all around until this morning when fresh snow fell, starting after sunrise and falling lightly and steadily ’til afternoon.

The snow has changed the quality of sound here, as it tends to wherever it falls. We are used to quiet up here on the hill, although for the last few months there has been the faint daytime sounds of forestry workers further over on the hill.

Still, the quiet that we are used to has changed, become even softer. The wee song birds seem louder and thankfully the whitethorn bushes are still laden with red winter berries for them.

Whispers in the wind

I saw a male blackbird today attracted by the peanuts which we put out and we never saw one up here before. I was used to the sweet sounds of blackbirds  where I grew up and missed their tunefulness so I am delighted to see one here and will be sure to keep a steady supply of peanuts over the winter.

Winter Woodland

Plugin Menu

Welcome to Geeky Wednesday. Today I am going to talk about adding plugins to a wordpress blog.

Naturally this topic is only relevant to those who blog using WordPress, I am not familiar with the inner workings of Blogger so I don’t know how to do anything similar in blogger.

Plugins add verstility to your blog and different plugins perform different tasks. WordPress does of course have lots of information about using plugins here.

Currently there are over 12,000 different plugins available for WordPress.

You will often find lots of plugins that apprear to do the same thing when you do a search for a plugin to do a particlar job and it can be very difficult to figure out which plugin you want to use or indeed which plugin will perform the best.

In order to do a search go to your dashboard and click on Plugins. A new page will open showing you all the plugins that you are currently using, or perhaps none if you are just starting off.

Plugins Page

Click on “add new” to search for a new plugin. For this purpose I typed the words “fixed social buttons” into the search box  because I know that this is the name of the plugin.

As you can see in the picture below when the search results come back there is a star rating, this rating is a very good way to guage the quality of the plugin. If it is possible then I would advise that you use plugins wiht a high rating.

Searching for a plugin

And just to show that sometimes things are not as straighforward as they should be I could not find the plugin that I wanted for this post, even though I am using the plugin and know both the name of the plugin and the name of the author.

If you can find the plugin that you want then click on “Install Now” and if you are lucky enough to have a god server it will upload quickly and all you will have to do is click on Activate.

Previously to this green hosted server that my blog is hosted on now I was on a server which made uploading plugins very slow and laborious, even though I followed the instructions as told on screen. However sometimes it took  ages and I would start to wonder if everything was going according to plan. It looked as though worpress was having trouble however it was the server at fault and the pugins never uploaded. If you are having this problem then the fault may lie with your server, not with wordpress or the plugin.

Fixed Social Buttons

This is the website of the Fixed Social Buttons that I am using on my blog. You can see the buttons on the home page of the blog on the right hand side and the very cute buttons float as the page moves up and down.

If you wish to use this plugin wander down the page until you see the Download section and then click on the most recent version, in this case V2.4.4.4, which is the current version of the software.

Download the software and you will most likely be asked whether to unzip or save.

Save it to your downloads folder, do not unzip the file.

Go back to your Plugins page and click on “upload”, you should then see the page pictured below.

Click on Choose File and look for the zip file that you saved to your Downloads folder and click on it. Then click Install Now and the magic should happen by itself.

Installing a wordpress plugin

Once the file is installed go to Settings in the menu on the left, when it expands look down the list for Fixed Social Buttons and click on it. This is where you get to play with the plugin and decide how it should look on your lovely blog.

You choose which buttons to use, such as Follow me on Twitter, Digg it, StumbleUpon etc. Decide which style of button to use and how large it should be, then where on your blog page you want to see the buttons.

If you are using buttons such as twitter or facebook then enter your social media profile details and you should be set to go.

I hope this was helpful and if you decide to go ahead and try the plugin please let know. I am not connected in any way to the design team who developed Fixed Social Buttons, I just like how they look and when a twitter friend asked how set the buttons up I thought that it would be a good subject for a Geeky Wednesday post.

Remember if you have any geeky questions that you think I may be able to help with then I would love to hear from you, next Geeky Wednesday post will be at the beginning of next year!

Snowy Road

This is where I would have liked to have been…

Irish Protest Nov 2010

This is why I would like to have been in Dublin today…

Irish Economic Crisis Explained (short wee you-tube piece, well worth watching!)