Offlineness and kindle-ism

I've just returned to the online world after spending a week teaching english at a camp. Samm has done an awesome job looking after the farm and our friends have been an amazing support of energy, food, love and company to her throughout the week. Returning to the internet,  I'm surprised to see that the world hasn't fallen apart, the ice-caps haven't melted, etc and the world has only incrementally changed. Thankfully, nothing major happened (ala Russia 1991) but it has caused me to re-evaluate my priorities.

I'm not going to be checking out of the internet but certainly trying to improve the quality not quantity of time spent online

One of the Joys of being away was reading using my 1st generation kindle which samm lovingly gave me one Christmas. The beauty of the device is that it is just an e-ink reader (it can read books out too which is great as I get travel sick if i try to read) but has no other major feature. This means I'm not distracted by other things and I can focus in on the details. The only downside to kindling is that I remember written works by layout and relative position of important text within a paragraph in a book. Depending upon how I move around in the document, the kindle unhelpfully reformats and changes the layout for me. This slight disadvantage is overcome by the ability to make and remove notes so If i jot something down in the book, I'm not remind of my stupid thoughts for the duration of the book's life.

I'm now trying to convert long web articles onto my kindle. The process isn't tricky just a few steps. First, i  save the web page, then opening it in Sigil and resave at as an epub file. this is  then covert to mobi within calibre which can be automagically sent to the kindle. This enables me to enjoy, read and return to short Web-essay with out the need to check my facebook status every other second.

First Grain Harvest

Very exciting day today as I've harvested, by hand, our first oats. The photo doesn't look very impressive but the wheelbarrow is full of organic oats on their stalks. The oat seed were from taken from the Rabbit feed and were then planted in an unused piece of rotovated land just to see what will happen. The biblical sowing technique worked but it made harvesting very hard as the random pattern combined with weeds meant that it was easier to uproot the whole crop then attempting to swing a scythe or sickle.

I'm not going to thresh the harvest but feed everything to the rabbits who will have a field day munching through this.  Overall, this has been a success and I will be dedicating more land to growing traditional farm food including alfalfa, sunflowers, oats to help lower our animal feeding costs. In order to realise this, I'm probably going to have to invest in a small seed drill to ensure straight lines of dense crops which will reduce weeds and hopefully improve yield.

Thinking about Defeat, death and new life

Following on from my tweet today about mediation (here), I been thinking about defeat and bouncing back from this post. I'm not sure how I am coping with failures, how I (if I) pick myself up after another problem, set back or defeat. Maybe I'm too much of a scientist and not enough farmer, too analytical and not enough "next season will be better".

Today as I was preparing to repair my internal fence for containing Goats. My friend pointed out that the potatoes which I thought I have killed in spectacular style, with lack of water would actually produce new potatoes. Armed with a garden fork and shovel, We dug up our first potato harvest which were 100% organic free-range spuds. They were really tasty boiled as part of our lunch. 

This was definitely a seizing a victory from the jaws of defeat

Wild oats

Whilst setting up the washing-up table for the end-of-term party at the farm, I noticed we have some wild oats growing  These must be seed from where we milked our goats which we borrowed for a month last year. The oats are actually ripe, taste similar to the rabbit food oats and are 100% organic, free-range and unintentional. I hope our planted oats grow similarly

The Wet April has paid divends to our Sunflowers, corn and fruit trees. Our roses old and new also love this weather

Samm's Grandfather

Whilst online, Samm discovered what her maternal grandfatther got upto in WWII. The article below is from  http://www.ewell-probus.org.uk/programme/2010/Arnhem.htm

Well Blow me down

This evening as we were leaving home to take Crunchy (our new house dog [until she gets better]) to the vet, a little storm kicked in and there was a crash. On closer inspection when we returned with bandaged dog (www.twitpic.com/cwj5lx), it seems we were very fortunate/lucky/protected. The mulberry tree has completely toppled but didn't take out the house or our new perimeter fence. There is slight damage to a neighbouring tree but all is relatively OK  What was more amazing is that I was butchering three neighbours' goats under the shade of this tree at the weekend. A slight wind could have resulted in the dispatching of an Andy as well.
It looks like I will be chainsawing firewood for the foreseeable future.

Cake and lots of it!!!!

Today I had a surprise when I went to church. Today, we thanked all the lovely people who work in the various different groups which serve our church as schools are ending in the next few weeks. I was dragged up to the front and was given a small present which was lovely but then I was ambushed by Zoli Bacsi and others who appreciated my weekly guitar bashing and all the other bits and they gave me a MONSTER CHOCOLATE CAKE AS A GUITAR!!!!!!!! This was a small gift showing their appreciation of me! They obviously prefer a slightly fatter Andy :) I am feeling very very very very very very loved and wanted and a bit tubby after munching some of this lovely baked product. So thank you all lovely people (, It made my day :)  Nagyon Köszönöm mindenkinek és puszilak is!