~a week~

 

so the rain still falls, but now we have sleet and hail showers.

this morning we had a heavy hail shower and i looked up from my seat on the sofa to see leveret and magpie come rushing over calv's  fence and come crashing through their little door.

they are now curled up on the armchair asleep.

 

 

i have had a lazy couple of days, catching up on the documentary's and films i have recorded.

calv and i had a good chat the other day~one of those rare days where the sun was shining and we sat out in my nook chatting over a mug of coffee. we talked about the lack of structure to our days and this came back to me on Saturday while watching a documentary.

i decided that i need some structure to my life, to give my days more meaning...well not so much meaning as to make my days more productive.

sitting here with my laptop it is so easy to be drawn into other places...like pinterest...

 

there are so many things i want to do with my days but it is so easy to become distracted.

 

the time has come to make some changes.

 

this links somewhat with my earth magic card i drew a few days ago...(displayed with the help of magpie)

the cycle of re-birth, brushing away the cobwebs that opens the way for the seed-ideas that have been germinating over the dark months... 

 

 

 

also this past week...

 

an early morning hello from a crow...

 

 

kittens cuddled up...

 

 

finishing a felted pouch. i was going to put this one up for sale but fell in love with it! so today i will be doing some wet felting...

 

 

 

this is the same pouch~the lighting really does change the colour!

 

 

 

 

we popped to our local country store where they sell all kinds of things~chicken coops, chicken feeders, assorted 'stuff' for livestock, wellies, tools, fencing etc etc...we needed dog food, which we buy in cases of 24. the store is near buckland rings and while i waited for swampy i had this view down a steep sided valley where someone had lit a small fire...

 

if you enlarge this photo you can see the wood smoke rising...

 

 

 

 

and now its time to get some wet felting done...have a lovely day whatever and wherever you are

xoxox

~rain, rain, sun & more rain~

 

the weather here for weeks and weeks has been just dreadful

the jet stream has been stuck and sending wave after wave of storms at our small country in from the atlantic to the west.

 

here in the forest we have had a lot of flooding although nowhere near as much as the poor folk on the somerset levels and more recently along the thames.

 

on friday a huge storm came rolling in and we had a 'risk of life' warning placed in lymington and milford-on-sea which is five miles from us with winds expected to be 70-80 miles an hour.

 

friday is usually our shopping day so we went out early and it started to rain heavily. coming out of the village the roads were clear but it started to rain heavily.

by the time we came home we were faced with this...

 

 

  this is the west of the village~the bottom end of the small road the shops are on~to the locals the village is actually the single short road the shops are on. we luckily live about five minutes away up on the side of a hill.

 

those of you that know brockenhurst will know there is a ford at the bottom of the village (locally known as the watersplash). the flooding you see here is from the stream that feeds the watersplash that had burst its banks. but it had also been fed from smaller streams that cross the forest and of course because we had had so much rain for so long the land itself is totally waterlogged.

 

it probably became much worse but we managed to drive through without getting stuck...the car you see on the right of the last photo was being attached to a landrover to be pulled out as we went around the corner. we got home and stayed home as the gale started within an hour of us closing our front door.

 

my oh my did it howl and roar.

 

 i went to bed early with my book and was convinced that the bedroom window would blow in and we could physically feel our little home shake. the power went off at 11.30pm but luckily my radio is a wind-up one and so we were able to keep in touch with what was happening locally via radio solent. as well as no electric or heat we also had no internet access, not even through our mobile phones~we could only assume the mobile antennas had been blown out.

luckily we have a gas cooker so was able to have hot drinks and cook. our power came back on 11 hours later but my mum and sister who live down the road had no power for another further 5-6 hours so they came to us and our warm home.

 

yesterday could not have been more different...

 

 

glorious blue sky and warm sunshine...

i went around taking photographs of the new life pushing up through the soil, just to remind myself the spring is on its way...

 



 

 

and i sat on my patio charging my crystals and myself...

 

 

gazing up through the tangle of rose and jasmine to the blue...

 

 

we made the most of the day and pottered around the garden, trimming, re-potting, moving the ferrets cage, chatting to calv over the fence as he did some work to his shed.

by tea time we had worn ourselves ragged and i could hardly move...the risk i run when its nice, i do wayyyy to much and then the m.e and fibro kick in, protesting and telling me that i should go carefully when its nice and not push myself...which of course i ignore.

 

yesterday was also the first really nice day the kittens have had since we had them and they have been allowed out into the big wide world...

 they have really grown up...now at 6 months old...

 

 

magpie is growing into a big cat and is the most adventurous...

 

 

 

i had forty fits when magpie first climbed onto our room~he gets up via the fence and my nook. however the pitch of our roof is a gentle slope and so i no longer feel so concerned...

 

 



 

 

this is nelson who has been visiting our gardens since he was a kitten. he has grown into a big cat and is not at all sure about these new kits on the block. several times he has chased them both in through their cat flap~on one occasion he came in himself as he chased a terrified leveret...

 



 

 

 leveret is much smaller than magpie, not quite as adventurous and she loves her little toys much more. she will carry them around the house and play with them. she also enjoys following me into  the bedroom at bedtime and will lay on the bed with me while i read...
 

 

 



~kitty & the kittens~

 

so

 

we are having two new family members coming to us soon...

 

six weeks ago today one of the many cats that visits my mums garden, along with foxes and badgers, had a litter of five kittens in her hedgehog house.

 

worried about what other cats might do and afraid to leave them over night to the foxes and badgers the little family was brought in to the safety of the porch at the back door and the following day my sister went to the person she knew owned this little girl.

 

this person promptly denied all knowledge of this little girl and produced a cat saying it was their only cat. knowing how irresponsible this person is with her cats~this was this little girls 3 or 4th litter in only a couple of years, my sister did not press the point and we all agreed to help out with the new family.

we took them all to our vets on the second day just to make sure all was well and see if the vet could tell us which were boys and girls.the place almost shut down due to the flood of people wanting to come and see them all as they very rarely have such young kittens brought in. as it turns out sexing them was easy and we found out how special kitty (our name for her!) is...ginger female cats are very rare and so the three ginger kits were boys and the two tortoiseshell girls.

 

a bit fuzzy as taken with my phone quickly at the vets...one day old

 

 

 

we have watched this little family grow and grow and kitty has been a wonderful mum. the kittens are active, healthy little butterballs who are already eating solids and getting into all kinds of mischief.

my sister has found three of them good homes with people she works with and we are having a ginger boy, magpie~who has almost identical markings to kitty and one brother, and a tortoiseshell girl, leveret.

 

leveret

 

magpie

 

*squee*