A new resident

There is an amazingly talented lady down South who started Celestine and the hare a year ago and makes incredibly cute felt animals in her shed.  Up to now I've only been able to marvel at her talents as she charges very reasonable prices for hand made items but they're a tad above my budget.

Until she started making "weesuses".  Little weasels.  Those did fall in my price range and so one fell into my order of two mugs.

Today a packet arrived with two boxes and a little tissue-wrapped parcel.

One of the mugs is "King Norty" weasel in his walnut whip crown holding up the weasel slogan.


Weasels from C&H are, like myself, chocolate addicts.  If they detect "choklit" they hoard the stuff and then stuff themselves into choccy-coma.

What better way to lure out my new friend than to show it our fresh batch of chocolate brownie?

Initially nothing happened but rustling and the snuffling of a nose that has detected something yummy.


Said nose made an appearance accompanied by happy dooks:


Followed by most of the weasus:


"Can I have this bit please?"


"*urp* mmmmmmm"


"Think I might enjoy living here."


So I now have a new friend who can go anywhere with me and I plan to knit him/her (one doesn't ask these things, you know!) a little bag to attach to mine so when I go exploring they can come with me.

The other mug is part of my reward for having surgery next week, so that's staying wrapped up until I get home.

Weather here is still cold, windy and wet.  The drive turned into a pond by the morning and the wheelie bins aquaplaned being brought in.  But we are fine in our house, the electric bill is probably going to be a bit high, but a good long, warm, summer will cancel that out.

Pippa is off to the v.e.t. tomorrow for her annual assessment and vaccinations, not that she knows.  She doesn't even care about the jag, it's having her arthritic limbs stretched and poked that has her giving me the puppy eyes.  Still, she's bouncy as ever and other than perhaps sleeping a little more is showing no signs of being 15!

TTFN

Hello 2015

First off:  Happy new year!  Yeah, okay, we're a fortnight in, but still, we wish everyone a happy 2015.

What have we been up to?

Well, December 2014 was a busy month.  I ended up in hospital for tests but was home before Christmas and am doing much better.  Christmas day was great.  We had a friend over for lunch, had the BEST turkey to date and Jo made gravy from scratch that was deeeelicious!  He pretty much had to make the whole meal himself and excelled.

Among many useful and fun gifts that we received was a soft cheese making kit.  On our first attempt we followed the recipe in the provided booklet.  A recipe that contradicted itself.  It added the acid while heating the milk which causes the milk to curdle...we made 2l of curdled milk.  Alas, most of that ended up down the drain with some in the dog.  I put all the utensils through the dishwasher and the next day redid the sterilising (what a faff!) and followed a recipe from the book we were also sent.

This was the result after leaving it to curdle for 40 min:



It looked just like the previous evening's failed attempt and I feared the worst.  BUT, I sliced it up and started spooning out the curds in the hope of at least achieving ricotta (I was aiming for mozzarella).



Curds!  Actual curds!  Not quite as solid as the ones shown on the recipe but well worth continuing with.  The whey was even relatively clear:


(Turns out you can make bread using the whey, so we can freeze this next time we try)

The steps after draining involved heating the curds and shaping them and putting them into cold water.  When there's only one of you this gets messy so the camera was left alone.

End result:


and wrapped up:


It's a bit crumbly and lacking in flavour due to not adding a culture to it, but I made cheese!  We just need to eat it soon :)

Last Thursday (8th) a load of engineers were sent on the boat as we were predicted storms and strong winds.  That night we saw more lightning than I think I've seen in my life!  I did try to photograph it but, as is the way, I mistimed every time.  The gusts got to over 100mph, the roof rolled, and I had a very poor night's sleep waiting for the crash of escaped tiles.  Fortunately an inspection on Friday showed no damage to the roof and no escaped bins or lids.  The only thing that had happened was one of my bird feeders had flown off the bush and been replaced with a feed sack.

We've since been having strong winds; huge swells that keep causing the ferry to cancel, and hail.

Proper...


Heavy,


Invasive, hail.


Stones varying from a mere 2mm across to whoppers over 6mm across.

My poor oak sapling isn't too chuffed:


Madam has spent her time doing the sensible thing and staying wrapped up:


The back garden, to quote Jo, "looks like the Somme".  Mud, puddles, dead grass.  The reef doesn't look much better, the cows have already grazed it down and the crofters are having to spend a fortune on supplementary feed and shifting huge bales around.

Speaking of animals, I ordered more bird food and the garage mice tried to steal it:


Unfortunately I can't get rid of those mice, they steal the food from the ferret's bowl as he has to have food 24/7.  But the house has been mouse-free...so far.  Probably because all our food is stored better than we did in the past.

What else?  Oh yes, we got some money back from the electric people and Jo gave me permission to purchase a second hand DSLR for night photography.  I've tried and tried with both my newer bridge camera and that older Kodak but neither has really managed to capture what we see.

I spent quite a while on EBay and Google looking at cameras in our price range and reading reviews of them for night photos.  Eventually I found one that ticks all the boxes, a Canon EOS 20D.  It's 10 years old, 8megapixels but it does the job.  I admit to being rather daunted when all the bits arrived:



I spent quite a while reading the manual and still need to get my head around some of it.  I also had to order some extra bits.  It takes CF cards and we don't have those, so two 8GB CF cards were ordered.  It has no internal memory so I had 4 days of not really being able to practice because the camera refuses to do anything without a card.

I'd also ordered a new tripod.  Ours is...okay, but one of the legs has a habit of sliding back into itself under the weight of my Nikon camera and this new (to us) camera is about 3x the weight.



The new tripod is just a bit bigger than the old one.  And far more adjustable.

So now I had all this kit but the weather didn't want to play!  Windy is okay, there's usually a side of the house where it's sheltered, but rain?  No go.

Until last night.  2am I was wide awake and it was bone dry outside.

Moonlit power station:


Most of the "big dipper/ plough":


I had a play with exposure times as well.  The clouds were really zooming so moon shots ended up blurred while stationary points like the power station were crystal clear.  Also...stars!  I actually photographed stars!

So you can definitely expect more starry night photos and moon shots to come.  I even know what lens to get to get even better night shots!  I plan to play with star trails too.

TTFN