New weather!

Wind - aye - I've told you about wind before.

Snow - yep - that one's covered.

Freeeeeezin cold - ditto.

So what could possibly be new on the weather front. Erm - have you guessed yet?

Hows about gale force winds, driving, and man I mean driving, snow and sub-zero temperatures made all the more grim by the gales.

Armour plated thermals for christmas please.

But I'm the lucky one! Most times I hide from it. Jussi goes out in it. Morning noon and evening feeding watering and shuffling the goats.

Grim up north. Aye.

We have over a weeks supply of hay. Gin and Whiskey. Pasta. Job done - heavenly so it is.

Gritless and grinless and ginless

I keep trying to blog - so I've a number of draft blogs not yet posted - but truth is things is tough just now, and it's quite hard to blog tough, blogging funny or plain observational is easy enough, but when things is tough, and nothing much is funny, or what you are looking at is grim blogging threatens to breach the walls of the rural idyll we are psychologically encamped in. And we don't like to do that.

In summary - we are nervous. Nervous because we have to get hay once a week, and we keep getting snowed in. Gritters do appear from time to time but they have a phenomenal habit of being the harbingers of heavy snow - so you have about ten minutes to try to get out, once that's gone the snow is too think again. Even with our new snow tyres.

We are nervous because we need to get a male to service the goats, and we need to get him quickly. But that's double trouble, somehow we have to plan a time when we an get out, and whoever we get the male from has access too. We've a choice of males to get - one is in Grampian - weather is v bad there, one is in Caithness - the owner seems to be impossible to contact, one is on Orkney and ice bound. The idea of arranging for them to put a goat on the ferry and then us not being able to get to it is more than daunting.

We are nervous because the builders have disappeared. Not through neglect - but they can't get through from Caithness, our heating engineers cant get up from Tain and progress on the house has halted. So close and yet so far. We really would like to be warm for a few days this winter...please.

We are nervous because we are running out of wood. The open fire is more a psychological fillip than any source of warmth - but there's something comforting about the red and yellow glow of it, and the house full of smoke.

We are nervous because the scaffy van hasn't got to us for three weeks. We are nervous because the post hasn't got to us for two weeks. We are nervous because we seem to have a sick puppy. We are nervous because we are lacking any Christmas spirit.

And we are nervous because we have no gin.