Chick-chick-chick-chick-chicken

A big fat chicken dropped by yesterday. Just out-of-the-blue.
A chicken.

There I was pottering about trying to put together a new workshop in Outbuilding 1, when she just... appeared. One minute she wasn't there and the next minute she was at my feet staring up and clucking at me.

She's doesn't belong to the house down the track - they're not exactly the chicken type - and she didn't come from the closest other house way up the road or their couple of neighbours (Dawn asked), and the market gardener through the woods doesn't keep them either.

Other than that the nearest houses are in a more residential area a mile downhill on a 60-100mph road, and I doubt she made some kind of perilous journey through the woods over a period of weeks, somehow avoiding foxes and buzzards, so for now she is a Mystical Chicken of Unknown Origin.

Unfortunately Grumble sees her as more of a sumptuous meal (Sausage had a swipe then thought better of it) so although Dawn and I have discussed the logistics of keeping her around for omlettes and existential conversation she's going to have to be rehomed with our friends over at Renovating an Old Stone Cottage, where they already have a chook menagerie in a lovely big enclosure that they're allowed to wander in and out of during the day.

In the meantime we've called her Tallulah and fed her bits of seeded bread and courgette, and she's crapped all over our tumble dryer in Outbuilding 1, where she spent last night. She has also voluntarily been for rides around on our shoulders and backs - we can't get her off when she's up there - and keeps trying to get in the house through the cat flap, which would make Grumble's day, especially because he broke it in the first place trying to get at her.

No eggs this morning, however.
I think our new houseguest is broken.

One look at Tallulah and Grumble started running around like he was on E-numbers

Sausage was interested for a while but realised he'd be biting off more than he could chew

Are chickens normally this friendly?

New T-shirt required

Let's get ready to Grumble

Three months after bringing GrumbleTheDog into the family I thought I'd do a brief catch-up on how he's settling in. And it gives me a chance to make you all look at our cute photos.

But first of all I should correct something.
Whereas Croatian-born-abandoned-rescued Grumble, who is mainly crossed somewhere between Irish Wolfhound and German Shepherd, looks in every way like a big, soft, beige lump of fluff with a cutesy broken ear, he is in fact 11.8% reptile.

Mister Grumble and Mister Grumpy

He is CrocaDog.

For whereas the vast majority of his time is spent being all sleepy and scratchy and investigating his missing bits, and being tickled and brushed and cuddled, a small but significant portion of his day is occupied with hanging off my limbs by his teeth. Or Dawn's. He's not all that fussed.

It became obvious from the moment we first walked him that Grumble, who is somewhere between 18-months- and two-years-old and regularly described by strangers as "handsome", would need some training as he tried to chase everything from squirrels to horses and had us on our backsides a couple of times each in the first 24 hours. He could pull like an elephant.
So after recommendations from most doggy-owners we met on our subsequent walks, training was started at Cosford Dog Training, which appears to be incredibly popular with 'serious' dog owners from around the Midlands and beyond. The gruff Scouse trainer, Fitz, is a former RAF Police Dog Handler who owns and trains Jimmy, the 2016 British Police and Services Canine Association Champion... so he knew what he was doing. He's even got a new book out which I'm sure he'd love me to plug in return for free one-to-one training sessions, even though he doesn't know I'm writing about him.

Now after an eight-week foundation course - with Bronze-standard Kennel Club GCDS Scheme training starting in a few days - Grumble can sit, lie down, stay (for the most-part) and stop yanking on his lead (ditto). The one thing he can't/won't do 100% of the time is come back when he's called. It's always a gamble. A Grumble gamble.
So he's kind of sort of, like, gone missing a few times.

Behaving in return for bits of hot dog

Apart from the time he broke his collar at training class and ran after the alpacas... and other than the time he got out of what I thought was a secure field and I found him herding cows - and an amorous bull - 20 minutes later, he has stayed nearby when he's slipped our grasp and gone trotting off or dodged through the courtyard gate, and only goes out of sight in the woods for a minute or two. He has only ran out of the gates and up the roads twice three times but we don't like to talk about the horrors of that.

That was until last night when I deliberately let him off the lead in the woods because I've been experimenting briefly with that lately, in relative safety where there are no roads in the immediate vicinity for him to get flattened on, to see if his recall is improving.
It's not.
An hour and a half later Dawn and I were tramping through the pitch-black trees and heavy, thorny undergrowth with two torches, one of them failing, expecting to see him in a fox snare because other than a couple of early barks we hadn't even heard his chain jangle in all that time. We even got in the ManTruck and drove along the estate's tracks for a while, only to find him looking absolutely chuffed-to-bits with himself back at The Lodge with his fur packed full of stickyweed burrs.
We've now ordered a GPS tracker and a flashing LED collar for him. Just in case.

And then there's CrocaDog. Grumble's Other Side.

Those teeth

Crocadog gets excited. Very, unpredictably excited.
He gets excited when he has a treat; when we walk through the courtyard gate; when nobody's doing anything; when we give him a fuss; when we don't give him a fuss; when we put his lead on; when we do our 'clicker training'; when he sees the bird-feeder (weirdly); when he spies SausageTheCat (who he doesn't get on well with yet, but we're working on it)... you get the idea. Not all of the time, just sometimes. And when you least expect it.

And when CrocaDog gets excited, if you can't calm him with a steady, firm hand on his side and a gentle "shhhh...", CrocaDog goes mental. Seriously, seriously mental. And he bites - hard.

I've had a T-shirt and a hoodie torn in the frantic battles and both Dawn and I have suffered many scratches and bruises, although I seem to get the brunt of his unstoppable enthusiasm.
A few weeks ago my entire forearm was black-and-blue from the wrist towards the elbow and one of my legs was bleeding after he literally tried to eat me alive while we were all alone in the woods.

Although it appears otherwise, none of it is aggression - it's all excited puppy energy - but he was running to the end of his long (80ft) training rope then coming back like a 25kg bullet before launching himself police dog-style at my defensive arm as my life flashed in front of my (tightly closed) eyes and I screamed "NOT THE FACE!". I tried to pin him down but he was squirming like a giant furry salmon so I had to tie him to a tree and run away like a girl.
Seconds ago - and I'm not making this up - he came over to me for a tickle and after 20 seconds pawed at my hand and started nibbling my fingers. Shhhh...

Grumble's suspicions are raised when he spots himself
reflected in Trevor's head

Apart from that he doesn't like or trust Terminator Trevor (but they're both getting better with training); being bathed/groomed; toys; strangers with sticks; loose cattle grids when in the car or traffic speeding past him but he does like being in the ManTruck; going to bed early; hot dog and cheese treats; chasing phantom rabbits; digging; having his face scratched all over; lying right across doorways; barking like a loon at other dogs; staring in to the middle distance and grumbling at TV-volume-drowning levels whenever he lies down, which he does like a sack of spuds on the hard floor, or changes position in his sleep.

So that's our Grumble now we've got to know him a bit. When he's tearing at human flesh he's genuinely terrifying but the rest of the time he's calm, patient and as gentle as you'd like.
He's proper, proper cuddly too.

Cat training was easy-going before he realised who it looked like.
We're not mad - Fitz told us to do this...

Not physically possible

Not digging

I can never get him past this rabbit hole

Censored for decency

A long-awaited catch-up

It has been a funny old couple of months since I last wrote a blog post and I'm not sure I want to tell you why. I mean I want to, but perhaps I shouldn't... some of it is quite personal.

My aunt counts her fingers to see if Grumble has eaten any while my mam
feigns arthritis to avoid having her arm ripped from its socket.
Dad draws the short straw.

For one, the introduction of Grumble (as he's been formally named) to the family has changed our routines and focus a little bit - naturally - and setting the unfinished Living Room up as a functioning Living Room for the doggy home-check proved to be an irresistible draw and has remained that way ever since. Such an arrangement isn't conducive to Getting Stuff Done.

But there have also been significant problems which, for June at least, made things completely grind to a halt. Over the past year our only neighbours, who we share the access track and gates with, have been gradually becoming the kind of neighbours you only read about in the newspapers once the justifiable homicide starts and things have been bubbling over with them recently as our my tolerance and politeness rapidly ran out (we briefly considered selling-up at one point). I've also had a couple of non-life-threatening (!) health issues to deal with too.

So I might write about it all one day, but then again I might not. The main thing is that we're all fine and dandy and things have started to move again with the help of our parents who have gently cajoled us in to action and even done some of the work to help egg us on.

I'll blog about the bigger jobs which have happened in separate posts, but here is a run-down of the things which don't need much in the way of wordage:


The Dining Room has been de-junked

aka the Murder Room, the Dining Room has been used for storage since we first moved in, attracting a tiny bit more clutter on the hour, every hour.
It spent a little over a year playing host to shelving, boxes, cabinets, boxes, the TV stand, boxes, drawers, boxes, the sofa bed and even the bathroom door, with the gaps between all of those being filled with more boxes, some of which had split and spilled their guts all over the place.

Imagine our surprise when we found a massive beige dog
lying at a funny angle under the old carpet

It was in desperate need of sorting out and as we wanted to get the old red - possibly asbestos - tiles off the concrete floor we thought we'd kill two birds with one stone.
The sofa bed was already in the Living Room being used as our main settee, so we dragged everything else in there, cleaning as we went, pulled up the disgusting old carpet then prised up a manky tile only to find that it had been glued to the floor with thick, still-sticky, black bitumen tar which stayed right where it had been slopped many decades ago.

Well that was that job scuppered. We weren't going to spend untold days scraping and dissolving the black stuff off only to pull the concrete up at a later date - which we will be doing, so we decided to skip that and leave it for such a time when we begin 'proper' work in there.
So the whole room was vacuumed top-to-bottom, the floor was mopped and dried (for what it was worth), a thick tarp was laid over the tiles and the cabinets et al were reintroduced with a semblance of order this time, giving us room to actually swing a cat. Of course more clutter has been appearing hourly again, but at least we can now kind of get in there.

Old Oily has been dismembered

Death throes

Way back in March the gigantic oil-fired boiler in the Dining Room decided that something in the region of £700-worth of servicing and repairs wasn't enough to keep it going and it decided to die for want of another £500 pump.

But being connected to the electricity, water supply, radiators and the oil tank meant that there was no way on earth that I was going to dismantle the thing myself, unless I wanted to set The Lodge on fire then put out the flames with a flood of Biblical proportions.

So Terminator Trevor And His Trusty Bag of Tools were drafted in and the poor old boiler was slowly and methodically pulled to bits, ready to go to the tip. Bits of it are now piled in the back yard while its main innards are out back by the bins, where they've been for a few weeks now.
We just can't bear to see it all go, but on the plus side we've gained a whole new section of Dining Room floor on which to pile stuff.

Every cloud and all that.

Replacing rotten water supply pipes

Once the boiler was out of the way we had access to a boxed-in corner of the Dining Room which housed the main water supply pipes to The Lodge, complete with stop tap.
Yanking that boxing off revealed (c)rusty old pipework which had obviously been caused by the tap which had been leaking since the dawn of time - just a tiny bit - and a small weep on the joint of the incoming water pipe. The two combined had made a right old manky mess of the pipes while keeping that corner lovely and moist right against the external wall.

The water supply in the back garden has limited uses at the moment...

On a related note we had been meaning to get Severn Trent Water in for some time so they could locate the main external stop tap, which we thought was one of two that we'd found, but one didn't turn the water off and the other one was about 6ft below ground, so we got them to come over and investigate.

It turned out that one of the taps we'd found was for something unidentified, and may have been disconnected altogether, and the other extra-deep one fed an independent water supply in among the weeds in the back garden area which we discovered last year. So that was a nice bonus. They found the one we actually needed with a metal detector, hidden under the gravelly/stony area at the front of the building. 

Once they were done and we were able to turn off the water to the property completely we called the providers of our home-emergency-assistance-cover-type-insurance-stuff who came and replaced both the decaying pipework from the external tap to the house and the leaky stop tap in the Dining Room.

It's all pretty boring really, but when the washing machine decides to explode when Dawn is at work one day I won't have to run around outside waving my arms in panic as a tsunami sweeps through the downstairs - I'll be able to calmly turn the water supply off at the shiny new stop tap then have a little sob while rolling up my trouser legs. Minimal drama.

History hiding in plain sight

Planning the various stages of the Living Room means looking at all of the detail that'll be present when it's finished. Which led us to a surprising little discovery.

The modern pendant light in the middle of the ceiling has been screwed to a wooden pattress all this time, but because it had been layered in white paint over the years we had never spotted it (thinking it was part of the existing plastic fitting), even though I've scraped Artex from right around it.

Pattress
It rhymes with mattress 

I unscrewed the light fitting and spent an afternoon carefully stripping the paint back while trying not to frazzle myself, revealing a solid disc of turned pale wood (I'm rubbish at ID-ing wood) which I'm guessing is old but not original.

An original mid-late 1800s pattress in that spot would likely have supported an oil or gas lamp which would have caused it to discolour with carbon build-up and scorching over time, but because there is none of that I'm assuming it was put there to support an early electric light - maybe around the 1930s when the National Grid first made an appearance.

It's not terribly important to us to find out minutiae like that, but we're happy to think of it as something worth keeping when we come to install the new lights. We're yet to decide whether or not to stain it to match the light or keep it as natural wood against the white ceiling.

Out in the garden

We could do little but shake our heads at Sausage in the hope he'd get the message

Months ago I knocked-up a couple of raised veg beds for Dawn in the front garden by the shed, and although that particular area could do with quite a lot of care and attention at the moment, the greens are coming along a treat in the one which has been put to use.
I know nothing about growing veggies other than celery is evil and shouldn't be entertained, but I'm told there are peas, mangetout, yellow courgettes, butternut squash, leeks and tomatoes in there.
Before it was planted there was also a SausageTheCat in there more often than not - doing what cats do - but a couple of dozen well-placed wooden BBQ kebab skewers soon convinced him to go elsewhere. It's not like there isn't a million acres of woodland on the doorstep.

Fertilised

We've been donated a ride-on mower which has pleased Dawn no-end because she has wanted one since she was a puppy.
The fact that the carbs need cleaning out regularly, the battery doesn't hold charge, the 'key' is a screwdriver and one of the rear wheels literally falls off every 10 minutes is of no matter. It's a ride-on mower and that's all that counts...

This is a 'pre-loved' Westwood Gazelle which, when one of the rear wheels overtakes you
and heads off across the grass, becomes a Westwood Donkeytrike

I didn't realise until it started to fruit last year, but we have a large wild cherry tree in the front garden which is extremely productive.
Not having made jam before I didn't want to jump straight in to it without doing the necessary reading, so I waited until this year before picking a whopping 2lb of lovely ripe cherries, pitting each one by hand over an entire afternoon (they're too small for a hand-held de-stoning thingy), throwing a load of sugar, lemon juice and pectin at them, boiling them up and producing a paltry two-and-a-half jars of surprisingly-lovely jam that's absolutely jam-packed (pun intended) with fruit.
I'm quite proud of my first ever Country Kitchen moment, but I'm not sure I can be arsed to do it all again even though there are still thousands of beautiful dark red cherries on the tree.

By the time I was finished pitting them I was sick of the sight of wild cherries

I keep getting wood

I'm not complaining - at all - but we've now got more wood for the log burner in the Living Room than I know what to do with.

When I first built the woodshed I figured that four decent-sized bays full of split logs would get us through a couple of years on rotation, with one or two bays providing seasoned logs while unseasoned wood in the other two had time to dry. I'd either scrounge or buy wood over a period of time to keep it all topped-up and things would tick along nicely.

However, for a start, we're rattling through wood like nobody's business. Up until the last couple of weeks the British summer has been nowhere near warm enough to heat the (stone) house on the inside to any kind of survivable standard so we've had the log burner on during the evenings to keep the place warmish and the damp at bay.
I'll admit that being male I'm somewhat enthusiastic when it comes to fire, but we've already emptied one seasoned bay and started on the other - wasps' nests and pied wagtail nests notwithstanding, meaning I need to get chopping and fill the first one up again with the sycamore cross-sections we've had stockpiled to the side of the woodshed since early April, of which there are many.

Holy cow... and there's another truck-load coming tomorrow

Except the tree surgeon fella from further along in the woods (one of our distant friendly neighbours) has decided that he doesn't want some of his latest good-but-not-great-firewood acquisitions and donated a flatbed full of willow a couple of weeks ago.
Just today he's dropped off most of a 90-year-old lime tree in the form of branches and trunk sections and another load is due to arrive tonight or tomorrow. Again, I'm not even close to complaining, but I don't think I've got the strength of character or the muscle power to work my way through it all.

So if anyone has a decent heavy-duty hydraulic or electric log-splitter that's either dirt-cheap or even going free please let me know. My back and arms will thank you.