Rambly stream-of-consciousness here's-how-our-week-was post

April 21

Coolest thing of the day: there was a snail in the water barrel outside the glass house and it was all swollen up with water. I thought it was probably dead but I pulled it out and put it on a rock. And guess what? It was fine. It managed to live. I wonder how long it was in the water for? That's pretty cool. Sorry, no photo. Just the kind of thing one sees while workin' away in the walled garden (see my Facebook page for photos of that).

One sees a lot of buggy life in the garden. Lots of sow bugs, which used to make me squeamish until I worked beside this really cool  biology teacher from the Caribbean (when I worked at Lower Canada College and was teaching chemistry), and he laughed his big deep laugh (kind of like Disney's Uncle Remus I guess) and told me that  it was only a little sow bug and they're good for the soil. So now I am happy when I see them, squiggly little roly-polys that they are.

There are also an amazement of earthworms. Since I was moving huge areas of black plastic and big rocks today, I sometimes saw them all naked of dirt. One of them went amazingly fast scurrying across the plastic.

It occurred to me that I saw at least a half dozen escargots today while gardening (they make a cool sort of sound/feel when I pull them off the black plastic and stick them to a rock, say) and I have garlic in my pocket, but... well. I guess I've never cooked them up before!

Why do I have garlic in my pocket you might wonder? I think I have some kind of fungus on my thumb. It could just be dry skin too but I'm not sure, so I'm putting a slice of garlic clove under a bandaid on it just in case. Last year I had two spider bites. The first one swelled and swelled and after a couple of days the fever wouldn't go away, and I had to go to the emergency room and get antibiotics (well, I chose to). The second time it happened, I strapped garlic on the bite right away. It took away the swelling and I didn't get a fever or have to go to the hospital. However, it did eat the skin away! I am prepared  for that. Better to do that just in case it is some freaky fungus. (April 22 update: I'm betting on dry skin. I left so much cream at home when I packed! Ack.)

It could just be dry skin. But the most terrible thing I saw on someone's hands this week was chillbains. Like real chillbains in this day and age. Why on Earth wouldn't you buy yourself an electric heater or wear mittens, I ask you? Like seriously! Instead she had purple bruises all over her fingers and complained about her house being cold. I think she mentioned that they hurt (my ears might have gone fuzzy as I stared in horror).

Yesterday was lovely, lovely. After work our house-mate Alexi and I walked to the pub. It was really sunny and gorgeous. At the pub they said "there you are" like they were expecting me. When we left they told us we'd better be back tomorrow (we didn't though. Other things to do today like quizzing Yarrow on his science work so far and writing this blog and playing boules and pool and... there are so many things to do). Alexi is a francophone so he tries to understand Irish people but honestly, I had to stand really close to all of them at the pub (they mumble) and usually ask them to repeat themselves two or three times before I understood anything too. But it was fun.  (April 22 update: it's the day after tomorrow but I made sure to stop in tonight to write you this blog.)

It's nice to be welcomed and remembered and chatted about and chatted to. Canadians really ought to do it more often.  For example the electrician on site yesterday told me that the owner down the pub mentioned that I'd been in. :) It's sweet. When we went in yesterday she teased me about having a new man (ha, Alexi is 17 or 18 years younger -- I don't think so!) and the Californian guy who got enchanted when house-sitting here and just stayed forever says that he talked to some other folks about our van insurance situation and told us what he'd learned (upshot: nothing new, really, but yet another person who says "it must be possible. It can't possibly be impossible!").
(April 22 update: when I walked in with Yarrow tonight the pub owner lady (whose name is Frances, I've learned) told me that a tall dark handsome man had been in looking for me. :) Ha. Mysterious and hilarious. Maybe even possibly true. Who knows. It is Ireland, after all.)

The pub owner lady wasn't actually behind the bar when we went in yesterday, her son was. He is nearly impossible to understand, I tell you. A nice fellow though.

There are two pubs open in town (and a bunch of closed ones). There's Eily's, which has no heating whatsoever and is the drink-alot place. It's preferred by the wwoofers here it seems. Jimmy the can-do-everything main hired man and boss, his daughter works there and also goes to college. She came by the garden yesterday, showing a friend of hers around the place, because this place is really like a museum, and that's not even including inside the manor of the lord of the manor, which is a whole 'nother museum that I mostly have only peeked into.

The other pub, the Glenannar, is my preferred one. First, it has food, which we were looking for the first time we went pubbing (we started at Eily's as Jimmy dropped us there, but only had a glass and moved across the road, where we asked for soup, and got it, and tea, and free apple pie afterward, all for 10 euros for both of us). Second, it's full of friendly oldsters.  And third, and equally important, the fireplace is usually on! And now fourth, they seem to expect us to show up with some regularity, so we'd better, eh?

Yesterday Alexi and I didn't ask for soup, but I did notice a cardboard box behind the bar that said Cheese Onion so I asked the barman what that was so he gave us some potato chips. They went well with the Murphy's so they did. I had a wee taste of Guinness too just to make sure that I really do prefer Murphy's and yes I do. To me Guinness is very watery from the second taste onwards. (April 22 update: They have a Scotch whiskey behind the bar that's called Black & White, and having never heard of it I gave it a try tonight. It's very smooth, like an Irish whiskey so it is.)

While walking to down Alexi and I happened upon Lord Doneraile's house, which is a mansion much larger than the huge mansion on our property. It has a tea shop that we're resolved to try out on Saturday. See, Lord Doneraile or his family donated the estate to the public at some point so it's a public park. Since that property was joined to our 101 acres, we can get to town by walking through what is now Doneraile Park.

This is the little Zen garden I made today. The lord of the manor had assigned me to remove a lot of black plastic from beds, but when moving rocks around I decided the gravel around this fish pond was a good spot for a Zen garden. Strictly speaking (according to Wikipedia anyway) Zen gardens ought to have a wall around them... also, I wish the ripples were more visible but so far they're not).

It is amazing, like a dream come true (a dream I never even knew I had) to have such a HUGE garden to play with. There are all the beds in the walled garden, and the orchard and the berry cage and the glass house and the potatoes and the flowers and the rhubarb and the fish pond and the roses and the... it's amazing.

I twisted up the rose vines too.

Here's a picture of the blue side door and a giant magnolia tree that hugs overtop of the 12 foot wall.  Pusskins the handsome rangy cat who lives here went up on the top of the wall this morning while Conrad was showing me what to do with the black plastic and to plant an extra squash plant that he'd gotten from his brother's polytunnel and water the glasshouse and... so on. Berry cage weeding from yesterday only half done. 

Yarrow reminded me today while typing up his blog of the cool thing we did on Monday: we painted a stone wall "magnolia" colour (inside one of the upstairs converted-barn retreat rooms). This is not as easy as it may sound, but it was fascinating and fun. There were dozens of decades of dirt on it at first. Cobwebs too, and nooks and crannies in the rock and concrete and plaster, and crumbly bits too. A challenge, we might say.

Here's a photo I took on the walk to town yesterday, with the settings played with. There's so much scope for cool photo taking here.

On the way back from town, we took a wrong turn somewhere (there's a tricky bit where you have to duck through the forest) and ended up meandering back through the Lord of the Manor's childhood home (now his brother's farm).  It's also enormous, very enormous and stone and old, though it doesn't have a castle like this property does.                

We happened to bump into the brother, too, and he showed us how to get back to here from across the river. I took this neato photo of our bedroom from there. (It's the two white doors at the front there).