Well, now that I am all alone, or rather just accompanied by paws and claws, I have taken the liberty of hijacking the tiny white box to ramble about what’s happening here. It’s been very hot here, and spending all day outside has had a curious effect on my skin – I sensibly slathered myself in sun cream, but was unable to reach a section in the middle of my back, and forgot my legs altogether. The resultant blotches may take some time to fade. I have never been a very shirt-off type of person, but in this heat doing hard work all day it seemed like a good idea. Plus I thought the only beings around to see were the cats; Pyewacket turned up her nose in disgust and retired to the pile of sawdust under the chainsaw trestle, and Wixon is too stupid to form an opinion.

So far I have worked for three rather long days, getting up at 5.30 one day and working through until the light started to go. For my own reference and to make me feel good, I have so far broken up the concrete paths all round the house and moved them to the now even more enormous rubble pile outside the back door, despite the temptation to put it all on the Witchling’s newly -laid lawn, which would have been a damn sight more convenient, sanded the render off the porch woodwork, scraped, sanded and cleaned every window in our tiny house (all nine of them; this was actually rather a big deal as they were covered in render and I had to take all the casements out as I went, then reinstall them), cleaned and sanded the fascia / soffit boards, then painted them, dug out a gatepost which was a devil of a job, and started putting guttering up.

Gosh, I’m boring, aren’t I?! Possibly the most irritating bit of it was this morning, when I painted the fascia / soffit boards. Usually the Earthenwitch does painting, particularly when it’s fiddly bits, as she is better at it than I, but I had to do it this time as it had to be finished before the guttering went up. I had primered it the day before, so this morning hoped to do the first of two top coats. We had coughed up our life savings and plumped for a Farrow & Ball number called Railings, in exterior eggshell (well actually the Earthenwitch had sat on me while reading my debit card number out to the nice man on the telephone, leaving me gasping for air and for reeling from the realisation that I had just spent £48.50 [that's a lot of dollars, for our American readers] on 2.5 litres of gunky dark paint; Messrs. Farrow & Ball must be laughing all the way to their extraordinarily large piggy bank), and I had just begun to apply it, up at the top of a very tall and wobbly stepladder, when a bloke appeared round the side of the house. I came down, and he explained that he was a tree chopping chap doing the rounds for the electricity company, and that one of the poles in our garden had about 6m more ivy on it than was allowed. I was delighted that he was prepared to hack it about instead of me, so after a pleasant conversation about wood which they might chop and I might collect, I went back to my painting. The Farrow and Ball had grown a skin. It was OK though, as I stirred it back in. I went back up the teetering ladder and continued. Almost immediately our neighbour appeared, along with two year-old boy and aged hound, who proceeded to make his way indoors to polish off Wixon’s breakfast (much to his horror). They chatted for a minute, then disappeared just as another neighbour, who is an electrician, dropped by to talk to me about some work we need doing. The skin was forming again. I continued, only to be halted five minutes later by a delivery van with bits of house for me, and then again two minutes later by the neighbour / boy / dog, passing the other way. The last straw was when a building supplies lorry turned up with more stuff for us, and I had to pause to direct the chap craning sand over the hedge. Mind you, he was my favourite driver – an animated Italian, who gesticulates wildly and talks almost incomprehensibly while beaming in glee at everything you say.

In the end the Farrow & Balls-up went alright, but took a lot longer than expected.

I have to say it’s very strange to be here on my own. I don’t really like it, although the heavenly bliss of uninterrupted nights (even if I do get up obscenely early) is enjoyable. But I miss my baby. Where is the little voice that demands “pruuuune” at the end of breakfast? Where are the tiny feet that run around upstairs? Where is the little bare naked baby who runs away at bath-time? And where is my garden helper? I miss her enormously. Oh, and I miss the Eathenwitch a bit too.

Right – I’m off for tea. Pizza again (gave up bacon sandwiches after eating nothing else for a day and a bit, and then being very sick; too much salt). Cheerio.

Anyway, recent activities have included the acquisition of a reclaimed pine table for our kitchen, which genuinely feels like a kitchen now, and which has really changed the way we’re living in our tiny house to an extent I hadn’t anticipated. It’s so nice to have space for the small girl to toddle about the place without having to think about table saws and screwdrivers as potential weapons in tiny hands. We’ve even got space for a rug where she can sit and explore some of her recent haul from her grandma; she is loving the extra space, and we are breathing out, collectively.

We’ve also made quite firm plans for what this summer will be. So far, it looks like Quercus will take parental leave from his job in order to spend a concerted block of time on the house – three weeks to finish the outside of the extension, which includes drainage, guttering, painting and various bits and bobs of things like fixing lime render where frost came too soon for us. It’s going to be another busy year, but I’m trying to stay upbeat about this; the loss of the chickens has hit me harder than I’d imagined possible, to be honest, and I am struggling to find the optimism which normally buoys me up on even the greyest of days. Partly, I think that’s why I’ve not been writing here very frequently; it’s not that I have sunk into the slough of despond, but I do feel that it’s very wearisome to read yet another depressing ‘oh shit’ post, and it’s probably only going to hack me off further to write such witterings. So, I’m holding my metaphorical tongue until such time as I have more cheery tidings to impart.

I’m also conscious of being rather very behind in the 52 Recipes in 2010 stakes. I started late – I think it was April – but still, I think I need to be cooking something new every single day from here to 2011 at this rate. I’m going to try to get two new things in this week as a bid to turn things around, mood-wise. I’m reasonably cheery, I suppose, and I just need to remember that, and develop it, all of which is hard when the small girl is teething molars, and waking quite frequently, so we’re knackered, as usual. (It’s all so boring, sleep deprivation, yet utterly overwhelming from time to time, I find.)

Current preoccupations:

Children, the number, timing, and nature thereof;

Cooking, and the need not to repeat oneself ad nauseum;

House work, as in cleaning and painting windows, drainage, fixing gardens et al;

The physical self, and why my body wants either chocolate or sleep ALL THE TIME.

Tell me nice things in my comments box, please. (Inspired by DW, whose “I need to hear nice things” post made me smile.)

Anyway, that is a rant for another day, and for now, I’m happy to see our hens still standing, and OK, and alive. Quercus and I are still miserable about what happened, and the garden is horribly quiet without the chooks about the place. We had had them for three years, and seeing the place without them is just wrong. I think we are tentatively agreed that we will have some more hens while we live here, though we have yet to work out which changes we’ll make to make the run more secure (and, of course, how we can make me less forgetful; I feel unspeakably guilty, predictably, and I think I will full-stop, to be honest, when I think about what happened). I think we’re both prepared to go quite some way to try to ensure that this doesn’t happen again, whether that means an automatic chicken gate (which sounds rather like a bizarre political scandal, doesn’t it?) and electric wiring, or just tonnes and tonnes of ordinary chicken wire, or a moat and guard dogs and machine guns on watch-towers or what. But I feel better in my head when I think that this is not the end of the line for us as hen people, so we’ll continue to work out the details while I try to sit on my hands and not push Quercus before he’s ready.

We’re also trying to use what happened with the hens as an incentive to sort out the garden. A few weeks back, we tidied intensively in one half of it, before rotovating and sewing a mixture of grass, clover and camomile; it’s getting quite green out there (though let us not speak of the insanely healthy-looking rhubarb which has survived this ordeal, having played dead for several months prior to our decision to just cut our losses with it…) and it’s made us appreciate how nice it would be to have outdoor space that didn’t involve old nails and rusty bits of ex-roof. A garden, one might call it; I hear these things are catching on these days. So, it looks like our plans are changing from focusing entirely on the inside of the house, to sorting out the rest of the exterior work and creating a garden, not least for the small girl to have somewhere nice this summer. Hopefully, part of this will be creating a secure space for some more hens. And then retrieving our two from e.

In other news, next weekend we are getting a dining table, bringing us dangerously close to civilisation! In the kitchen! There will be pictures! We are going to Quercus’s mother’s for this, and a weekend away seemed like a rather nice idea given that we’ve had a week of horribleness. So, Weald & Downland here we come.

* And thanks for the sympathy on my last post; I really appreciated it, and it did go some way to stopping me feeling a complete and utter arsehole.

Anyway, in other news, well, nothing much, really. We’ve had lots of snow, which was very pretty and meant three days of working from home, and we’ve now had lots of rain, which means business as normal for Devon, really. I am struggling to work up enthusiasm for anything at the moment, somehow, partly because I’ve got lots of loose ends which I really ought to weave into some semblance of order, and partly because the witchling is teething and we’re up a fair bit in the night once more, after nearly three weeks of unprompted, spontaneous, out-of-nowhere sleeping-entire-nights bliss. I have got plans and whatnot (as ever, being the paranoid soul I am) but I’m just sort of ‘meh’ about putting them into action. Is this Januaryitis, I wonder?

Anyway, as a bid to ease myself back into the proverbial (saddle, that is), I thought I would share some of the questions currently tormenting my tiny mind. Here they be:

1. How on earth do we persuade the cats that the newly-fitted, polished, and worked-on-to-within-an-inch-of-our-lives oak worktops are not seating places, nor scratching posts, nor (God forbid) extended hunting grounds for playing with mousies? I don’t want to have to shut them out all night – the cats, that is, rather than the mousies; they I am quite happy to shut out – but our catflap is in the kitchen door, and Quercus is getting a rather mad glint in his eye whenever he sees the cats within, say, a four-mile radius of that woodwork…

2. Why does having been hit by a van means oodles of paperwork for us? OODLES OF IT, I tell you. All to be returned in seven days. Shite.

3. How does anyone find technology interesting? I have just spent about three months (well, in active terms, about half an hour) agonising over external hard-drives. Of course, because I’ve got a Mac, I’m looking at about half the storage for a wodge more cash. Arses.

4. How does one reset one’s mojo? Mine appears to be in a bit of a decline, in a sort of Victorian-lady-reclining-on-chaise-longue manner. I had all these good intentions about blogging more regularly, and maybe adding pictures more frequently, and getting more exercise (which is a whole nother post on its own, frankly, as I reach ever closer to Woman Mountain Status), and whatnot, and instead I am largely sitting here and thinking that ginger wine would seem to be in order.

Answers, anyone?

2. Am I ever going to get over my adoration of baby legs in stripy tights?

3. How much jam or jelly is too much? This weekend, I appear to have concocted six pounds of crab apple jelly, and about four of bramble, apple and rose. Should I start on a ‘for sale’ sign now, bearing in mind that I still have about three pounds of rosehips waiting to be made into jam, I wonder?

4. Are our chickens in league against us? Having spent the entire summer in intensive relay broody races wherein the Buff Sussex chooks tagged each other, apparently as they left the laying box, for broodiness, one of our Black Rocks is now broody to the extent that she appears to be putting the others off even approaching the empty box. We’ve booted her out for a few days running, and she’s persisting. Egg-count today? Nil. Grumpiness as a result? Plenty. Six hens and no eggs = not fair, particularly as it’s not even daylight-related yet, I don’t think. They are moulting, though, so I am trying not to hold it against them too much.

5. What do you do when your iBook is approaching meltdown in terms of hard-drive space, and you can’t upgrade your hard-drive because there isn’t room, physically? I am contemplating backing up important stuff like pictures and whatnot, and then just wiping the whole thing and starting again. I have about 2Gb of space left out of a forty gig hard-drive; not ideal.

6. Anyone ever installed their own hot-air ducting heating system? We are thinking of doing this; have stove – will burn, sort of thing. Apparently it’s more popular as a concept in North America than here in the UK; the basic concept seems good in that it would let us move excess heat from the sitting room, where the stove lives, to the extension, along the building in a direction which heat doesn’t really move naturally, or at least not to the extent it would with a small fan attached.

7. Ever noticed how ‘tidying’ the remnants of a jam-making session into one’s stomach makes for furry-feeling teeth in next-to-no time at all? Oh. That’s just me, then, is it?

This month, I thought I’d start out by setting down some of the things I’d like to do in the coming weeks. It’s sort of my October wishlist, because, well, it’s October, and this is… a wishlist. Right. Glad we’ve cleared that up, then. So, in no particular order:

- Finish the hat I’ve started knitting the witchling.

- Stack the chopped wood we’ve amassed in what has become the chickens’ shed, which means emptying said shed of such varied contents as… a washing machine (defunct), a potter’s wheel (very much not defunct, but sadly underused at the moment), boxes of assorted detritus, a large rat (we fear), and fourteen incomplete sets of dustpans and brushes.

- Chop more wood so we’ve got enough to fill said shed, if possible;

- Accrue roughly one hundred pallets as part of Project Free Woodshed (of which more anon);

- Make the witchling a small quilt to go on her cot; I have lots of fabric kicking about, and lots of interest, but sadly bugger-all time at the moment (yet here I am…) because I’ve taken on yet another copy-editing job when I said I wanted time off, and this one’s 23,000 words. Oops.

- Rosehip jam, of which probably six pounds; we have quite a few rosehips kicking about – I’ve already got three gallons of wine going, so I think something new is called for. This jam is supposed to be almost cheese-like in texture, and a most glorious colour, so it sounds worth a go.

- Walk a couple of miles on at least three of the five days a week that I go to work. I’m trying to remember to do this, because since I’ve been working in the mornings, the obvious time to take the tiny daughter out for a walk in the sling has become a slot which Quercus has to himself, mostly. But I don’t want to turn into the Woman Mountain (TM) just because I’m working a desk job for a portion of my week; work, after all, is something I see as a minor interruption to Real Life, so I’m buggered if it’s going to be responsible for any further slide down the hideous slope to the point where hiring oneself out as a temporary roundabout becomes an option. Quercus and I both enjoy walking, so at the weekends I’m hoping that this month, which sees less pressure on us in terms of house work (although if we want a kitchen this side of Christmas, we do need to press on with the work inside; at least for now the outside is weather-tight, again, of which more anon) might find us out for some Proper Walks, which tend to be a full morning or afternoon, and often amount to something like seven or eight miles. But these walks alone will not suffice to escape Woman Mountain status, after all; I need regular exercise, and although I hate to admit it, I actually seem to thrive on it. I feel better. I feel more energetic. I sleep better (!). So, I must do it, and make time for it, because such things are important. (Although how best to manage it when it gets dark at four and we live in the middle of lanes with no lights, I wonder? I used to walk quite cheerily to the station in the dark morning and afternoon when I worked full-time, before the tiny daughter was born, but I feel I’d be living life on the edge slightly to wander about with her in the sling and no lights… Paranoid?)

So, that’s what October, if I manage to retrieve the small shred of discipline I once possessed, may bring me. And you?

Our second picking trip brought home a big bag of elderflower, gorgeously pollen-dusted and blissfully fragrant, which we then proceeded to ignore in the evening, having said we’d sort it as soon as we got home, in favour of sitting on the sofa and watching Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (we started out saying ‘ooh – we should so watch this more often! It’s a lovely film!’, then reached the bit where everyone gets blown up and remembered why we don’t watch it more often…).

Guess what we’re going to be doing tonight, then? Yup – another four gallons of de-stalking flowers and whatnot. The smell makes it more than worthwhile, particularly as it gives us chance to sit in the kitchen, gawping at our newly-painted-red wall, and remembering the months we spent without plaster on the wall, and with cob dust collecting all over the place as a result. Cob dust. So very… dusty. And so very… red, in our case (Devon has very, very red earth). And, of course, as we pick, we listen to music. I suggested the idea of a music swap in the post below, and a few people have asked for a theme for playlists; on balance, I think the best plan I can come up with is to say how about music that just works for you? Here is a rough idea of what we’ve been listening to lately:

Joni Mitchell – we listen to a LOT of la Mitchell chez nous. Oh yes. From ‘My Old Man’ to ‘Free Man in Paris’, it’s all good.

Thievery Corporation – every. single. album. Even the slightly dubious mix ones.

Bach – particularly the Goldberg Variations, played by Glenn Gould.

Steve Reich – ‘Electric Counterpoint’ is one of my favourite pieces of music.

Gotan Project – ‘Queremos Paz’ always makes me think of driving across southern France and marvelling at fields of sunflowers.

Debussy – particularly the String Quartet.

Horace Silver – the first CD I ever bought Quercus was ‘Pieces of Silver’.

Cali – ‘Je m’en vais’ is an utterly fab song, and one which I can listen to for hours.

So, there you go. Illustrative of this week, at least.  If you don’t fancy the idea of the CD swap, then how about some listening suggestions in the comments box? Go on – be a devil.

(Quick update: just to clarify, what I’d like best is to do the actual CDs you think are worth a go – I burn you something, you burn me something, we all make tracks to the post office et voila!)

For the first time ever, the witchling slept through the night last night. This is even better than it might otherwise have been, as we have been having Interesting Times, sleep-wise, in the last few weeks; the night before last, we got about four hours, and she was awake from 4.00 until about 6.30, with four previous wakings between 7.00 (when she went to bed; it took her about ninety minutes to get to sleep, with lots of up-and-down-stairs for us before that) and 2.00. I don’t know if it’s teething, or nappy rash, or frustration that she wants so to be able to move freely and can’t quite manage it yet (she is now able to stand quite confidently for about ten minutes, though walking – as I look around our chaotic, DIY-in-progress house – is, thankfully, some distance off, I think); whatever it is/was, it wasn’t easy, and Quercus and I had had a few nights of shiftwork, where one of us (me, in this case) sloped off to sleep in the caravan at the end of the garden for a few hours, in order to function during the day. I hate doing that, and I hate being tearful and emotional all the time due to the lack of sleep; just as I was getting to despair, she went and slept from 7.30 until 6.30. Who’d'a thunk it?

We are continuing to eat better, and to eat earlier. Our evening meal had slipped back to 8.30 or so, due largely to its being prepared after the witchling had settled for the night. Now, I am trying to get at least the legwork of cooking done during the afternoon, so that dinner is cooking while we’re in the bath with her; it makes for an easier, earlier, more relaxed feast, and means that I can contemplate going to bed at 9.30 without feeling gargantuan. I likes that.

Pyewacket has taken to sleeping on top of the fridge, curled up on our woolly-sheep tea-cosy.

The bad:

Yesterday, for the third time, Liquorice, our Barnevelder hen, managed to escape somehow. I don’t know where the hole she used is – Quercus and I have looked all around the hedges several times, down on hands and knees, and blocked up any holes we could see with wire – but still she found somewhere. I’d noticed twice before that she was disappearing somewhere in the afternoon, and it had been a while since we’d seen an egg which was definitely hers (darker than the Buff Sussex eggs, and often speckled), so I thought she’d found somewhere to go and lay in peace, following the broody Sussex saga last month.

Although I was worried about it, as she’d come back before, I assumed she couldn’t have gone too far; I hoped that I’d manage to catch her either coming in or going out, so we could block up the hole. But she didn’t appear; it got to be dusk and Quercus and I were out, be-wellied, looking for her for the fourth time, and no luck. Quercus got up at 6.30 this morning to go and search again; this time he found feathers in the lane and no further sign of her. We can only assume that a predator has got her.

I am really sad about it, far more than I’d expected; they are hens, and I am not perhaps as attached to them as I am to, say, the cats, but Liquorice was a lovely hen with a very placid nature – she exercised a calming influence on the other – entirely lunatic – hens, and was always first at the gate when I walked down the garden to feed them some leftover greens. I miss her already, and feel horrible about it all. I also know that it would be nigh-on impossible to stop them ever getting out – our garden is surrounded by a bank on one side which makes fencing very difficult, and the hedge, while thick, has holes which are clearly visible to hens even when diligent human searching misses them. Our general ambition is to be around in the garden frequently enough to alert predators to our presence, and to make the hens’ run sufficiently attractive to them as to curb their enthusiasm for escapades; generally, we do pretty well at this, I think, but I feel miserable that, on this occasion, it didn’t work well enough. It has, to say the least, rather undermined the joy at the witchling’s sleep prowess.

2. The witchling is teething again. She’s got four teeth at the moment, and seems to be working hard at the arrival of number five. Lots of crying this morning which wasn’t very nice for either of us; fortunately, the sling still works wonders with her, as she very rarely cries when carried. 

3. Over the weekend we have clawed back a small piece of vaguely presentable garden so that the witchling can have some time outdoors without being bombarded by building-site nonsense. I am really quite pleased, not least as it gave me an excuse to dig out a couple of windchimes to hang in the tree. 

4. We are about to order some clay paint. Well, it might be clay paint, but it might be casein distemper; having spent days sorting out the lime render on what used to be an external cob wall, we’re keen to give it the right finish so that the wall can breath. It’s going to be red, whatever the finish, and eventually I shall paint a new spiral on the wall somewhere. I am looking forward to that day more than I can say. 

5. We have acquired a new magic board. When I was pregnant, Quercus had the rather touching idea of a board where I wrote things I wanted to do myself, but couldn’t, for one reason or another. He then came along and did said things, without saying anything, and wiped them from the list when they were done. It worked very well, and kept me sane about various bits and bobs that an increasingly large waistline made difficult. Now, it’s become a bit swisher – a dry-chalk pen, and a picture frame with a piece of black card behind it in order to create a wipeable surface – and has spawned a ‘We must…’ section, together with a ‘We need…’ bit. 

6. One of our hens is broody. Trout. We’re not in a position to make raising chicks sensible, and are thus spending a lot of time turfing her out of the nesting box. 

7. The witchling’s favourite meal appears to be sardines on toast. I have gone back to making bread lately, which is a genuine delight to me. Months of bought bread, no matter how nice, makes me realise anew how much I enjoy baking bread, and how grounding I find it. The kneading, the rising, the baking – there is a sort of rhythm to it which I find immensely reassuring, particularly when I do it just after the witchling has gone to sleep, and the house is still and gently dark. Better yet, the witchling seems to like my bread best. 

8. The witchling’s favourite activity is probably playing hide and seek, which she does at the table in her chair. I finished making a cushion for the chair on Thursday; it’s a wooden highchair with a sort of curved back, a little like a carver chair, and she likes to rock, which gave me conniptions because I thought she would bash her head, sooner or later, hence the cushion. (The irony is, at school, I loathed needlework and all such things, yet now I frequently make things, and the more I make, the more I enjoy it. I wonder if the people who were good at things like this when we were in classes together still make things, or does the universe move to ensure that only a select few can ever master the obscure art of sewing-machine-threading at any one time?) Anyway, she raises a tea-towel over her head, and grins out from underneath it, sometimes hiding, sometimes peering around one edge. It’s hard to say who has more fun – her or her audience. 

9. My favourite words at the moment: mama, dada, duck-duck. Bet you’d never guess why…!

10. The chard seeds I sowed last week have sprouted already. Soon, we shall have rainbow leaves again. The colours! The colours!