Can't have it all ways

I worked nights last night, and with a bit of luck these will now be my regular shifts, I much prefer night to working days.
When it started to get light this morning around 7am, I looked out through the windows on to the stunning grounds that surround the home where I work and it looked stunning. There was just a little fog on the lawns and the sky was blue, blue with a nip in the air too. As we no longer get the summers we used to have, I always seem a little disappointed when October is upon us. There is no chance of hot days at this time of the year and only the harsh winter in front of us to dread.

I had forgotten about the cold crisp mornings that Autumn and Winter can bring and how much I love them too. I much prefer Spring though, as everything comes back to life, with the green buds starting to grow on the trees and the birds getting ready to build their nests and the slight hope of a good Summer too.

Spring is the only season that does not lie! You get exactly what you expect with Spring, April showers, cold crisp mornings and the days eventually start to get a little longer. All the other season lie, Summer gives you no Sun, Autumn soon becomes Winter and because of this Winter is far too long a season.

Anyway, back to the point. When I finished my shift I still had about a hour to wait to be picked up so I took a very slow walk through the grounds to the gate. I saw 3 or 4 rabbits, some still quite small for the time of the year a few skittish squirrels, a few brown trout in the stream and a kingfisher just to top it all off. Very good for the soul is a walk in the countryside after a night shift. Far better than the 3mile hike I used to had to make after my night shifts when I used to work in Oakdale back in Wales through the villages and main roads with lorries, police cars and even at that time of the morning Ice Cream Vans too, seem a 100 years ago and a 1000 miles away now.

One thing I will say for working night is though, while you get to see the wildlife at the start of the day, that is about all you see of that day, as sleeping is a must, and something I have tried to do without in the past and soon found that it just does not work. So the lovely Autumnal day that had blue skies and the chill in the air turned into a grey, wet and windy day by the time I got up at 1.30pm.

Can't have it all ways though!

Skip Autumn

It seems like winter has arrived here on the top of the Golden Valley once again and true to form skipped Autumn.
Though there is hardly any water in our spring and what is coming through is red from the soil. We are cleaner getting in the bath than when we get out sometimes it seems. The winds have really picked up, and the temperature has really dropped. So the wood is getting collected for the fire and the coats are on all day while indoors, electric blankets have been of now for a while.

With the water in the spring being so low, it might be OK if we have a fair amount of snow this year, it almost seems like we are trying to stock pile it in the fields ready to through down the well. That is after the pipes have defrosted.

The berries on the trees are heavy this year and ripe a little earlier than last year too, which makes for some good picking before the tree rats get a chance to take all of them. Though a fat tree rat is a tasty meal in it's self, I have wasted far too much time scaring them with my awful air rifle only to be laughed at as soon as they stop running.

When we first moved here, it was quite a novelty to be stranded. Stuck in doors with no way of getting out and no chance of anyone getting to us, not even the tractors were out during the first Winters snow. I think it is fair to say that the novelty wore off very quickly when the telephone wires came down, the spring froze, the electricity got cut off for days and you have no way of keeping warm other than to collect snow and try to boil it in a fire pit in a barn and use empty pop bottles as hot water bottles. Yep, that soon got tired!.

Last year we bought a log burning stove which allows you to burn wood, and when I say wood I mean stick. The fire box is so small that logs are just impossible. I remember Ray Mears saying that when lighting a log fire the wood heats you 3 times, collecting it, chopping it and then burning it. He was bloody right too. Although we cannot really cook on the stove, it does however keep the house a little warmer for us.

Well all we can do now is wait and see what will happen.

I am sure we will be fine!

Trying too hard maybe????

Well it seems that the online forum has been another waste of time. I have set up a few Community based websites and other things since we moved here, and there just never seems to be any interest from the residents.
The forum is well hit upon by visitors, linked well and advertised on facebook and twitter quite a few times a day when I get the most hits on the forum, but it just does not seem to work.

I have spent ages trying to get as much information on to the forum as possible by picking up local community magazines, searching the internet for news and / or events, but it just seems that nobody is in the slightest bit interested in posing on the forum.

I have however noticed that the posts I am posting are being read, but not a single post from any of the residents from the Golden Valley whatsoever.

When I lived in Wales, after setting up a community website for the village I lived in it was just short of a month until I had over 5000 hits to the website, emails offering news for the site, people asking to advertise on the site, the local nightly newspaper setting up a meeting with me to help advertise the website, the residents could not have helped more. It eventually led to me creating first a weekly newspaper and then a monthly community magazine delivered to over 15000 homes all with a start up of £0.00.

Seems I might have been wrong about the "Community Feeling" of the Valleys of South Wales after all.

Golden Valley Online

I have just set up a new forum for the Online community for the residents of the Golden Valley.
Here is the link.
http://goldenvalley.createaforum.com/index.php

Hope you like it and get to use it some time!

Windy "On Top"

It is always quite windy here "On Top" but we now have the tail end of Hurricane Katia blowing at us. We did have a 15ft trampoline in the garden this time last year, but in the beginning of the year, the wind picked it up and threw it about 400 yards away into the field above it and it folded in half. That was in March.

Now this past few days have been even worse than the March winds. The place is a wreck here, though I must say, it is a damn site better than the U.S. had, so I now feel a little like I have over reacted by saying the place is a wreck, but you know what I mean!

I was supposed to have been collecting Sloe berries ready for an order I have, but it has been just too windy to get out there, and too dangerous. The bird table is shot to bits, zinc sheets have been picked up and thrown about like sheets of paper and the large tree in the garden has had a good pruning too.

When the weather is as bad as this so early in the Autumn, it really does make me worry what the winter has in store for us here "On Top".

Just hope that if we do have any snow this year, it is during my time off in December, as I dont think we would get out very far if not!

Sloe Down!

Over the past few years, during Autumn and Winter, we have tried to use what is around us to make a little extra money. over the past few years we have collected, rose hips, hawthorn berries, sloe berries and willow whips and then sold them on.

Last year we made quite a bit of money from the Sloe's and Willow whips. People buy the Sloe's for Sloe Gin and the Willow whips for crafting hoops for willow wreaths. It is a good way to get the family all out together and not to have them in the house being bored and nagging. I really enjoy it.

Last year we collected around 60lb of Sloes and made about £300 by selling them via Gumtree and Ebay. Though posting was a bit of a nightmare to be honest!!

This year, the Sloe's seem to be out very early and in abundance too. I thought I would take advantage of this before the birds get into them. The birds are not really that keen on the Sloe's as they are very hard and very bitter and dry too, but when the Winter turns bad, they will eat them. I am always sure not to take too many from the same bush to leave some for the birds, and when possible, in the spring I take cuttings and then replant them to make the crop even bigger for the birds and me in years to come.

Now I am trying to follow a more Pagan path of life, I am not worried about asking and thanking nature for what I take and use, so just the other morning I was walked down to an old friend from which I have been lucky enough to collect most of the Sloe's from over the years. This time, I thought I would ask Mother Earth for the fruit and give thanks too. I took a few moments to think over what I was about to do and said a little thank you. I moved in to the centre of the bush to touch the trunk of the bush and on my way in a bloody big thorn stuck me straight in the thumb under the nail  and a branch freed itself and whacked me straight in the ear hole. What a bugger I thought, this is the first time I have ever asked and thanked Mother Earth for her fruits and almost straight away, I get told off by her, and the bush.

Thought about it for a while, then I came to the decision that I was having a good telling off for not asking all the times in the past I had taken her fruits.

Laundrette Etiquette

During the past few weeks, during the time that people under the age of 20 now call Summer, we were unlucky enough for our spring to run dry. Though this had nothing to do with the beautiful sunny days we had, just the lack of rain. We have always had trouble with our spring partly due to the fact that the chap in the next field was using our water supply for his quarry when cutting stone. He has a 2500 Litre tank that he started to fill around 3 times a week, which also helped us to have a dry water spring.

Anyway, the point of this is that while the spring was dry, we were unable to use our washing machine, now we have had rain, our washing machine has decided that enough is enough and has died.

So off to the laundrette in Hay on Wye! Not the best way to spend my first day away from work in a while I promise you.
Now this was only my second time to ever visit a laundrette, the first time was many years ago when I went camping to Porthcawl and it rained all night, so in the morning I visited the laundrette and popped my tent in to one of their industrial dryers.

On arriving at the laundrette, I was not quite sure what was a washing machine or what was a dryer. There was only one other person in there, a lady, but all the dryers and washing machines seemed to be full and working.
As soon as one of the washing machines became available we quickly put our washing in to it. Now then! How much washing powder should we use, how much to use the machine and how do we set it to the correct programme? It was all a little odd to be quite honest! The machines were not modern in anyway, big huge things they were.

Anyway, after sorting it out and maybe after adding too much washing powder, we started to fill the top loader washing machine, this was much easier, and £2 cheaper too than the front loader. I wondered why this was, and soon found out that it is because the top loaders just do not work, so as soon as there was one free, we put it into the front loader, £13 had been spent by now!

Now I am not sure how many others have ever been to a laundrette, but they are the sort of places that are not good for anyone's souls. Within minutes I was bored beyond belief! The lady next to us was quite helpful when asked how too, or how much etc. but was not very chatty.
Great I thought!
Now I get bored very very easily indeed, I need things to keep me awake and this place was almost as tiresome as an 18 hour shift at work.
As time went by slow second by even slower second, others came into the laundrette. I soon noticed that most of the people that use laundrettes have some what of an etiquette about them, so some follow the rules and some do not it seems.

Now, regular visitors to the laundrette seem to use the blue bags that you can buy from Ikea, you know the one's made from tarp poling kind of bags. These are the "Hardcore", "Every Thursday" people that use their local laundrette.

I also noticed that it is classed as very bad form to watch someone else'e washing going round and round in their washing machine, though not that they will say anything, they either give you a funny look as if you are trying to follow their knickers going around, or they stand infront of their machine to stop you looking.

If you are "Hardcore" you know how long your clothes are going to take in the machines, so then they seem to overload the machines, put the correct amount of washing powder in, and then bugger off shopping while the machines do their work. Not like myself, sat there watching MY clothes go round and round.

After about one hour, I noticed that there is a timer on the machines, counting down to 1 minute, I was gutted to find this out so late, if I had known this I too could have buggered off for a look around Hay on Wye. I noticed this when the machine I was using showed me that there was just 13 minutes left until the end of my boredom. The after what seemed like a lifetime, I looked again, 11 minutes. OH MY GODS! How bloody boring is this place.

I tried to take a step back to look at myself from someone else's eye's. There I was, sat with my two empty Black Bags (not the Ikea bags I mentioned before, I felt so cheap!) ready waiting to fill with my now washed clothes. In jeans with Chinese Sauce on the one leg after my awful supper that I ate last night and then had to throw up, because my wife noticed that they were oozing blood not red Chinese sauce as I thought), and with a thick wool jacket on done right up to my neck as the only clean T Shirt I had was one my mother had bought me for Xmas the year before with a X Mas message on the front! To make matters even worse, I was sat there watching the clothes go round and around like some kind of window licker, with a box of Daz sat infront of me, not knowing that they proved washing powder for just 20p a cup full.



I hope I never have to visit the laundrette again, but I ever do, I will be sure to have my blue Ikea bags, use their washing up powder, and to bugger off out of there for an hour.

Still "From Off"!

We have been living here now for almost three years. And it seems that we will always be "From Off". From Off is what you are known as in the countryside if you were not born there, come to that, I think you have to have a few generations of your family living here before you are really excepted as "Local". We have neighbours about 2 miles away from us, they have lived here for 40 years, and they are still considered by "Locals" as From Off.

Well as we are From Off and we live on the top of the mountain, we are "From Off, On Top".

Now coming from a small mining village in South East Wales, I am used to the way people have nicknames for people such as the local Baker in the village Phil, was know as "Phil the Bread", and Johnny Top House was John that live in the middle of the village. See some of it makes sense where as some of it is just odd!

Since we moved here in 2009, it seems that we have somehow brought with us very bad winters. The past 2 years the hills and mountains where we live have been covered at most in 3 foot of snow and ice, and with the way the trees are looking this year, it could be worse again this winter.

I started this blog to keep for myself as a sort of diary to look back on, I have started many blogs before in the past and have never really kept up with them, but this time I am going to make a determined effort to post at the very least once a week.

Hope you enjoy my blog and please, I would love to read your comments if you have any!