13/10/2008 by Keith.

Not the house.  The blog.  It is in the process of re-starting at www.thecowbarn.eu  There are a few technical reasons for the move which you can read about at the new site on a page entitled er.. “technical” (not much imagination there then).  Hope you like the new site!

Posted in Barn | Print | No Comments »

01/05/2008 by Keith.

Suzie ls thirteen today! To celebrate she made a point of not biting any passing vets.

Posted in Pets, Barn | Print | No Comments »

30/04/2008 by Keith.

Not written for a while, this time it’s because Suzie has not been a well dog and there was even a moment when the vet suggested that we should consider “quality of life” options (vet talk for putting your pet to sleep).  I can tell you we were having NONE of that!  Neither was Suzie, and having spent some time making a very slow recovery (not quite there yet) she demonstrated to the vet, on a subsequent visit, that it was certainly not even close to over yet, which leads to a question.  Did Suzie bite the vet because she KNEW he was going to stick his fingers in her bum OR did the vet stick his fingers in her bum because she bit him?  This will probably remain a mystery but I’m going for the first option, dogs do seem to know what’s going to happen before it actually does, in which case our vet should think twice before invading Suzie’s nether regions under the pretext of carrying out a full medical investigation.  We have been busy trying to get her to take various tablets and she has been busy extracting said tablets from the various different treats we have been hiding them in.  It’s amazing to watch, you can give her a piece of ham, inside which is hidden a tablet, she will give it one chew and swallow it and then SPIT THE TABLET BACK OUT.  Treating Suzie is not easy.

In case you are reading this and have not met Suzie here she is:

Posted in Barn | Print | No Comments »

18/04/2008 by Keith.

I can tell that spring has arrived. It was particularly apparent on Thursday morning when I was driving to work. Half way up one of the hills I have to drive over I came to a bit of a halt, I stopped because the truck in front of me had stopped. The truck in front of me had stopped to avoid hitting the large lorry in front of him as this had stopped. Do you know why the large lorry had stopped? I’ll tell you. He had stopped because he could not get up the hill due to the amount of SNOW on the road…. well, I think it was on the road, it was hard to tell as we could not tell where the road was due to the SNOW. As I edged out to see if I could get around the stuck vehicles I was presented with a head on view of the truck coming the other way, well, he would have been coming the other way if he wasn’t stuck in the SNOW as well. So the road was blocked completely. By SNOW. So I had to turn round and go home. That’s how I know it’s spring.

Posted in Barn | Print | No Comments »

16/04/2008 by Keith.

I may have mentioned before that there are a lot of birds around here, like this one:

We are surrounded by them!  In the nest boxes, on the feeders, on the fence, power lines, phone lines and in the bushes.  It’s like Alfred Hitchcocks “The Birds” around here.   Scary

No doubt they are all planning to produce yet more birds.

Posted in Barn | Print | No Comments »

09/04/2008 by Keith.

AGAIN! That’s on account of the fact that I do not seem able to grasp the fact that it is probably better to update this daily, or even every couple of days.

Well, if there is in fact ANYONE reading this here we go:

On the 21st of March Sarah, Chris and Jess were foolish enough to drive all the way up from the other end on the country to visit us. It rained, snowed, got foggy, cleared up, got sunny, and rained again. Then it snowed again. On account of the fact that Jess is a tad underage, sitting in the pub ALL weekend was out of the question. So we drank indoors all weekend instead……. not really…. we didn’t! Instead we went to EWE-PHORIA and looked at some sheep. These were demonstrated on a stage and seemed to involve a lot of pulling of levers in order to open various hidden doors which the sheep failed to use. Our host, Aled Owen, had to clamber through the sheep sized doors and drag the sheep onto stage. Then we watched Aled Owen demonstrate his handling skills with a sheepdog and some more sheep.

How to show off your sheep at Ewe-Phoria

It is in fact well worth a visit and I would recommend anyone staying anywhere near Corwen to pop in for a visit (especially if it’s hissing it down with rain on account of the fact that they have a tea room as well).

On the 28th of March Elizabeth and Ray came up. It rained, snowed, got foggy, cleared up, got sunny, and rained again (yes I did copy and paste that bit from above, in fact we could nearly have copied and pasted the entire weather itself from the weekend previously). This weekend did not involve getting within TWO CENTIMETRES of an annoyed looking sheep but did involve a couple of pubs and some shops.

Posted in Barn | Print | No Comments »

19/03/2008 by Keith.

We have guests staying this weekend.  I have just looked at the weather report.  The guests will need to bring the following:

• Clothing suitable for a mid Atlantic storm.
• Clothing suitable for a trip to the Antartic.
• A shovel (to dig the car out of the snow).
• Sunglasses.
• Wellington boots.
• Safety ropes (to make sure they can get out of our front door without getting blown back into England).
• ELT (Emergency Locator Transmitter).
• A sense of humour.

Posted in Barn | Print | No Comments »

19/03/2008 by Keith.

I was sitting outside yesterday watching the birds at the feeders and thinking how blissful it all was when I noticed that the birds were in fact beating each other up. How are you supposed to enjoy your coffee when there is violence of this nature going on only a few feet away from you? And that’s just the birds! What are the rest of the animals up to? Have we got mafia style hit squads of rabbits wandering around? Gangs of sheep threatening other gangs of sheep? Underground terrorist cells of moles? Foxes running protection rackets with the chickens as the targets? It just doesn’t bear thinking about.


The Birds from thecowbarn on Vimeo.

Posted in Barn | Print | No Comments »

14/03/2008 by Keith.

The area behind our Agri Shed has been a bit of a dumping ground since before we took this place over, and we have been adding to the pile of rubbish ourselves while we sort other bits out.  Today I decided to clear it up (now recovering with glass of wine).  Things I found while doing this:

• So much old wood that I had a bonfire burning ALL DAY.
• Enough corrugated iron that we could have re-covered our Agri Shed.
• Enough bale twine to….. er….  keep someone who uses bale twine going for YEARS.
• A sheep skull.
• Enough old stock fencing to go round a one acre field.
• Some more bale twine.
• Lots and lots of bricks.
• Another bundle of bale twine.
• An eight foot long metal post.
• And… yet more bale twine.

Then I attempted to rotovate the, now cleared, space.  The rotavator managed to break itself on account of a rather large bundle of, hitherto undiscovered, bale twine wrapping itself around the blades hence causing the pin that holds the blades on to snap when the blades didn’t want to turn anymore.

I HATE bale twine.

Posted in Barn | Print | No Comments »

13/03/2008 by Keith.

OK, not fantastic but….It’s still video! I am using “Vimeo” to host the video. There are three reasons for this, first, the playback quality is pretty good (considering I am uploading MPEG files ‘cos I can’t wait ALL NIGHT while the video uploads). Second, it embeds into Wordpress pretty well. Third, Vimeo don’t insist on pushing all their other users’ videos on the embed.

I KNOW that the subject matter for the first video isn’t great but I had to film SOMETHING! (During my lunch break I might add).

Posted in Barn | Print | No Comments »