Busy Busy March!!

It has been a very busy month, March that is! We have been doing alot of work on the house, painting mostly - both inside and out. I have also been building a new website all by myself!!! I am meeting up with some of FarmerBoy's relations on Sunday and hopefully we can get it up on the internet, keep your fingers crossed!

The first picture over there is my driveway, or rather the lane that leads to my home. It is a quarter of a mile long and is the greatest asset we have. A guest once told me that it reminded him of the show Dallas!!! Okay, whatever!!!! We certainly don't have JR's money but the thought was nice... The downside with a lane like this is that it requires a tremendous amount of maintenance, the gravel has to be raked, holes have to be filled, and the goarse (the prickly green brush) has to be trimmed back. Can you guess what else has to be done? If you guessed the fence you were right! We have been painting the fence on every nice day we get and child labor laws be damned -- crack the whip and let's get painting!!!! We are a third of the way done or maybe a little more than that. There is sheep wire on the fence so it really slows you down and FarmerBoy is a perfectionist so it is pure torture.
The kitchen has been painted, sitting room painted, one of the guest bedrooms has been painted and hopefully the downstairs hallway and stairwell will be done soon. The vegetable garden has been plowed and we are planning to harrow it soon, need to get my potatoes in. The seed trays are done and are in the mini greenhouse. Hmmm, what else have we done!!!

The darling children have all started their GAA season and training is going on, I am in the car non-stop! Middle son is prepping for his second music exam and has sung a solo at church and will be singing at the First Holy Communion this year with the choir.

We purchased a 9 seater bus for our cycling/walking business. I have a meeting with Failte Ireland Business development this week about marketing supports for the activity holiday business. We seem to be going non-stop and hopefully things will come together soon. It took us two weeks of phone calls to find out where to get public liability insurance for the cycling business and it took a week and a half for our insurance agent to give us a quote for our mini bus. Talk about frustration, sweet mother of Jerusalem there are moments when you want to scream!!!!!!

Last night I finally got to sit in my small cubby hole and sew. What a delight it was and I am now up to date with my BOM Mystery Designer Quilt. I have some bindings that need to be sewn down and two quilts that need to be machine quilted which I will hopefully have done soon. I have also decided, after some encouragement from some of my Irish friends in the village, to give quilting lessons one morning a week in the local community center. I will put a notice up in the village in late August as well as the local notes in the paper and the two churches in our village. I am meeting with a rep for a fabric company this week and am going to dabble in selling fabric as well. Do you think I just might have a full plate?? So, now you know why I have been absent for the past few weeks and hopefully I will be less negligent with my blog going forward or at least until all the guests starting flooding in (I can dream can't I!!!!).
All the best!

Cute Little Lambs...Not!!!

First, let me dispel some ideas that some of you may have!! Lambs may be cute but they are a nuisance and they bite!!

These pictures were taken on Friday, the pet lambs have become soooo impatient about getting their bottles they have now taken up residence in our garden. All four of them parade around the house baaing all day long and leave you know what all over the concrete footpath that winds around the house!!!!

Imagine coming down first thing in the morning for a cup of coffee and the first sight you see when you enter the kitchen is four faces peering in at you through a set of french doors!!! And not only are they peering at you but banging the door with their heads and baaing non stop. When you open the door they all charge to come in and let me tell you folks they have hard little heads....

Even the kitten is dismayed, she slinks around them and when they come over to say hello she leaps up onto the window sill. Our golden retreiver, Sophie, ignores them and refuses to look at them when they come up to her and poke her... It's as if she's thinking, "if I don't look at you, then you simply don't exist"!

Can you imagine some poor American or Dutch couple coming to our door and being attacked by this marauding group of hooligans... it might be funny if you were in your car watching and certainly the next morning after breakfast we would all be chuckling, but during the assault -- not so funny!!!

The last straw was this morning, the little suffolk lamb (her picture is below or rather her mug shot!) bit my DD, yes they have teeth and they can be quite sharp!! She broke the skin and we had blood. This happens every year, we disinfect the cut and move on, but still it hurts. They also took up camp around my rose bushes and started eating all the new leaves as well as trampling down the spring flowers that are starting to pop up through the ground.... This was an act of war as far as I was concerned.

I have been scrubbing and scrubbing for days; we are getting the house ready for the upcoming tourist season and they were creating havoc outside which simply means more work for me.... cute lambs my foot!!!!!
FarmerBoy and I had to expel them immediately. We pretended to be their friends and coaxed them with their bottles, once they had finished and were too full to realize that we were not their friends, we grabbed the two biggest ones and carried them to the field with the best security and put them over the fence!!! The two little ones wanted no part of this and ran like bats out of h*ll, squeezing their little bodies through the rails of the fence and running up the field. They must have met up with the rest of their gang because we haven't seen them for two hours. My only hope is that they aren't hiding somewhere preparing to ambush me when I go out for firewood, trust me people if they were just a little smarter they would be a force to be reckoned with!!!!!