All Change!

It’s been an extremely stressful, exhausting and upsetting couple of weeks since my last post, culminating in a huge upheaval.

To begin with, my mother’s mental health continued to go erratically and decidedly downhill. The local social care people came for a visit and said they thought it was time to talk about full-time residential care, and after another meeting for assessment they found a place in a nursing home 16 miles away. Two days after that Mum succeeded in slipping into the kitchen behind my back and managed to turn the cooker on, naturally choosing the ring under the frying pan to leave on full blast.

I tracked down the smoke before anything but the pan was on fire, but it’s left a lot of damage in the kitchen.

The work of cleaning up is slow and tedious, and I’ll have to replace the charred cupboard at some point.

That did at least put a stick of dynamite under the admission process for the nursing home, and the covid-19 testing team arrived two days later, the test results took 30 hours to get back and Mum was admitted into the nursing home on Friday 7th August.

I went home, collected lunch and the dogs and went to my local stone circle, 15 minutes’ walk downhill, to sleep for the afternoon. After nearly a fortnight of 22 hour days and catching a couple of hours as catnaps sitting in a chair in the lounge waiting for Mum’s next excursion, I badly need sleep! The dogs also thoroughly enjoyed their first walk for a year!

The animals are all fine, however exhausted I am. The goslings are now known as Attila and Tamurlane. They’re both big and sturdy, regard any sight of me as a reason to run up cheeping for food (with parents in hot pursuit) and have discovered bread crusts. The ducklings are all growing up well, too – Mother Duck’s brood are fully-feathered and as big as the other adults, although the young drakes aren’t as hefty as their elders just yet. Patchy’s eight are feathering up well and looking more like ducks with less ‘ling’ about it by the day.

The ferrets are happily getting on with things as usual, and Ivy’s four young meeps are chewing meat and looking bigger every time I see them – she has one male sandy meep and three females, two sandies and a silver mitt, so I’m calling them Ulysses, Helen, Penelope and another… I need to go read up the dramatis personae for the Illiad and the Odyssey because I can’t off-hand remember any more reasonably pronouncable Greek female characters! I’m not calling a ferret Iphigenia or Clytemnestra….

The hens are getting along steadily, as they do. I found one of the hybrids dead in the henhouse the other day but the rest all look healthy. The three youngest chicks are now known as Cuckoo, Goldilocks and Ginger, and are running about the yard with everyone else.

The bunnies have become free-range. One way or another they all escaped and refused to be caught again until I only had one left in a pen, at which point I gave up and liberated Mistletoe too. They’re apparently very happy living in the yard, cleaning up spilled oats from the poultry and grazing around the place cheerfully. It’s giving poor Wicket the Whippet a few terribly suspenseful experiences as she steps out of the house to find untouchable bunnies sitting up looking at her, but she’s coping!

The horses are doing fine. Abe has had his first in-hand walk up to the carpark in the woods and back last night – he behaved very calmly and ignored a couple of passing cars beautifully, then had an OMG!! moment looking at a road sign! I asked him to walk up to it and tapped it with my hand, asked him to touch it and then he relaxed and ignored it, so that was good. He wore his rhythm beads for the outing – the jingling is supposed to be soothing to the horse and lets wildlife know you’re coming, so startled pheasants don’t explode out of the hedge under your horse’s nose – certainly he was very soothed and nothing jumped out at us yesterday!

The quail are all fine – I have two youngsters in the lounge feathering up well and another batch in the incubator, probably the last for this summer as I don’t want to be worrying about putting them outside as the nights turn colder.

At the moment I’m still tidying, cleaning and trying to reorganise the house so I can get back to crafting and earning some money. I do have a few irons in the fire in that direction – not just proof-reading, which I’ve done now for over 20 years as Aberdeen Literary Services, but also I’m in the process of setting up farm-gate sales for eggs (as Cairnorchies Croft – Facebook page coming soon!), I’m trying to get my crafting work back up and running (Beansidhe Drumcraft) and also I’m engaged on a major new undertaking with my old friend and mentor, Elen Sentier, via our shamanic teaching work on a new site called the Deer Trods Tribe, where we’re offering tuition and experiential courses in shamanism.