What a Week!

Gosh, it's been an exiting few days. It started last Tuesday when I headed off for London for the day. I had to take the long way round as I didn't want to head down the M1 and get involved in traffic delays around the big fire at Hemel Hempstead. It was a smashing day and I enjoyed the drive down through Ludlow, Cleobury Mortimer and Kidderminster. The countryside there is gorgeous. I joined the motorway system just south of Birmingham and steamed on down the M40 towards London. As usual, the highlight of the trip was the climb up and over the Chilterns where I counted 12 Red Kites circling around.

It took about 4 hours to get to Stanmore. As I drew close to my destination I could see the great black smoke plume billowing up from the remains of the fuel terminal at Hemel. The smoke drifted off to the southwest for miles and miles. Where it was forced to rise over the ridge at Stanmore the smoke particles were acting as condensation nucleii and the plume turned to a big black cumulus cloud. Thank goodness it didn't produce rain. It would have been a nasty, greasy, sooty mess!

I went down to London for a couple of reasons. One was to take flowers to Mum, Dad and Grannie's graves and the other was to visit my friend Eve. Eve is the kind lady who kept an eye on Mum and Dad when they were alive and on our London house when we left it unoccupied for 4 years. Eve loves to play the piano, but doesn't have room for one in her house, so I was delighted to be able to help out by giving her my keyboard. We plugged it in immediately, and had great fun playing with it and experimenting with all the voices and orchestrations it has - especially the percussion. I think Eve will get so much more enjoyment out of it than I did. It was difficult to tear ourselves away, but eventually we went off to a local hostelry and had a good dinner before I set off home. Having seen that the fire was not interfering with the roads, I came back the shorter way - motorway all the way to Shrewsbury and it only took just over 3 hours to get back. Needless to say I was pretty tired, but I felt that the driving was all good practice for my test which will probably happen in late January.

Then came the highlight of the week. Most of you know that it was my 60th birthday on Saturday because John wrote to everyone I know and told them about it. The result was a flood of cards, phone calls, flowers, e-mails and e-cards. So once again I am swamped. I'm determined to reply to everyone, but experience tells me that it could take a long time to do that. When I found out I had cancer the response to that was similar and I still haven't replied to all the e-mails I had then!

My birthday was a wonderful day. We got up rather earlier than usual and over our morning cuppa tea John gave me my first present. This was my senior rail card (!) which enables me to get a discount on the trains. We used it immediately to take a train to Swansea, riding the lovely, scenic Heart of Wales railway line. The weather was beautiful and it was lovely to roll through the countryside, watching the green hills go by, seeing the sheep in the lush green meadows, admiring the glint of sunlight on babbling brooks and stopping in villages with unpronouncable Welsh names.

Here's John on the train:



This is not our first trip on this train. We rode it first when we were undergraduates after a week of sleeping rough in a barn and mountain walking in North Wales, and we've taken the same line a couple of times since. Swansea, of course, is where we went to University and where we took our brief honeymoon, so it was a return to the haunts of our youth.







Here's me!




As we rocked along John produced a fabulous brunch and when that was done he had all sorts of wonderful presents which included a couple of trial horse riding lessons (I'm keen to try horse riding as this is really terrific country for it) and a day's session on a skid pan. I've always wanted to try the latter - I've had a couple of spectacular skids in my life and found them quite thrilling. I would have enjoyed them more if they had happened under controlled circumstances where I wasn't convinced that I was about to die!



Here I am getting the skid pan present:



We arrived in Swansea in the early afternoon and just had time for a bit of a wander around and a cup of tea and a piece of cake before it was time to come home. We came back on another line, along the coast through Cardiff to Newport and then heading north through Hereford and Leominster. Again, it was really lovely till it got too dark to see anything.

We had about an hour at home to get changed and washed up and then we walked down into the village for dinner at the local restaurant. It was a great meal, and we both over-indulged, so it was good to be able to walk home. By then it was quite chilly, but the stars were out and it was a brilliant end to a lovely day.

Today I've been making (and eating) Christmas cookies. This is not a tradition here, but I wanted to make something a little different for Christmas. I've done brownies and lemon bars so far and expect to make mince pies and almond macaroons tomorrow. I'm having to convert parts of my American recipes. I'm OK with cup and tablespoon measures because I have my American cups and tablespoons, but butter is measured in grams here and it doesn't come in conveniently sized sticks. Baking chocolate is in grams and milk comes in litres. Ther are three grades of white sugar. Granulated is coarser than American, caster suger is a bit finer than American granulated and icing sugar is the same as American confectioner's sugar. There are several different kinds of brown sugar too, so sometimes it's hard to decide just what to get for a given recipe.

I'm having a helluva time with my new oven, too. I've never cooked with a convection oven before - you have to cook for less time and at a lower temperature. Most of it is guesswork right now, and we'll be eating our mistakes! Of course, it's also calibrated in Centigrade so everything has to be converted. Thank-goodness for Google's wonderful conversion feature! If you don't know about that, you should try it. Try typing the following into the Google search text window "32 degrees F in C" (without the quotes). It should come back with: "32 degrees Fahrenheit = 0 degrees Centigrade". You can use if for feet to meters, pounds to kilograms, etc. etc.

Well, it's time to go. Thank you all for your messages of congratulation/commiseration - it's been lovely to hear from you all. Please keep the communication lines open - we LOVE to hear from you.

Update on Yard Birds

The only notable additions to our yard list came this week with a pair of long-tailed tits. (OH SHUT UP - no more jokes, please!!!!!). They've been flitting around in the trees, but don't come to the feeders.

The pheasants are still about - 3 males and 5 females, but there's a lot more feather ruffling, displaying (by both sexes) and chasing around so we think they're starting to think about territories, harems and SEX! Because they keep harems we started giving them eastern sounding names like Fatima and Farouk, but have given up on that. Now the males are called Fatty, Thinny and Darkie because of their relative sizes and the coloring of their feathers. We can't name the females because we haven't been able to tell them apart!

Fatty does a lot of posturing and walks around with his feathers fluffed up. This hasn't actually seemed to have any benefits where the females are concerned. Thinny has a lot of grey on his back as well as his wings. He seems to be the most successful in rounding up the ladies! Darkie is considerably darker than the other two because his chest is a purply brown, he has no grey on his back and just a few streaks of grey in his wings. There is no grey on the top of his head either, just a slightly lighter shade of green. I didn't realise there was so much variation, but I gather that many different varieties have been bred and imported into the U.K.

The female pheasants remind me of a group of "old gals" out on a spree. They wander up to a plant and spend a little time pecking the seeds off it, then they all seem to drift off together in one direction or another. Occasionally a squabble will burst out. There will be a ruffling of feathers and a bit of chasing about and then they all go back to pecking and drifting about the garden.

We still have the same crowd at the feeder - lots of coal, blue and great tits and a couple of nuthatches - with a few blackbirds and robins scratching about on the ground. We haven't seen the woodpecker for weeks inspite of keeping a steady supply of fat for him so I think he's off to find a less cold spot for the winter.

So this is enough of an update for now. I'll try to write again before Christmas.

Stay in touch, please ...... mailto:joanarnfield@gmail.com

Engineering in the stream!

Remember how we all liked to play in streams or on the beach building and breaking dams and generally doing all sorts of waterworks? Well, I've been doing that today.

The weekend before Thanksgiving we had a tremendous cold snap. The temps in our valley never rose above freezing and we had frost on top of frost for five nights. Here's a picture I took:



The frost finally disappeared a couple of days before Thanksgiving, but it came back with snow on the day after the holiday. It was quite pretty and white when we woke up on Friday. And it put the whole town in a festive spirit for the Lighting of the Christmas tree in the town square on Saturday night. There was a childrens "fun-fair" consisting of some swings, a tombola and a roundabout; a parade led by the local fire engine, Bob the Builder and one of the Telly Tubbies, and carol singing in the square.

On Sunday, Church Stretton had its annual Christmas Fayre with stalls in various locations around the town, along with a hog roast outside one of the local restaurants, mince pies and mulled wine at the Scout Hut and various puddings (desserts) at the community center. The grand finale was a short service in the Church followed by a lantern/candle lit parade around town with stops for the singing of carols.

Since then, the weather has been slowly warming and getting wetter and over the last 2 days we've had a lot of rain. Of course, our little stream is swollen again and this time it was blocked by a branch which was collecting debris and starting to form a dam. This afternoon I donned wellies and rain-coat and went paddling in the ice cold stream to get the rubbish out of it. I don't think it would have flooded and I could have left it for a day or two, but it was actually fun to get into the water and do a bit of engineering!

Well, that's enough about the weather. I think I'll just do one more post.

Thanksgiving in Church Stretton

I meant to send you all a wish for a Happy Thanksgiving last week, but I ended up rushing around and never managed to post anything. Anyway, I hope all our American friends feasted and enjoyed themselves in the traditional manner.

Over here we don't normally celebrate Thanksgiving - it's a purely North American holiday, of course. However, I was determined to do something as we both really enjoy a holiday where the only thing required is that we eat a lot! So I invited some friends and relatives and set out to re-create a Thanksgiving dinner.

I nearly came a cropper on the Turkey. It never occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to find one, but I was looking around at the butcher's shop the week before and realised they didn't have any as it wasn't Christmas time. I could have gotten a frozen one from the supermarket, but I wanted a proper fresh one! I asked if they could get one and after a few phone calls the butcher said he'd have one for me on Tuesday. When I went in on Wednesday to pick it up he told me he'd sent it back because it was "blue". I imagined the worst, but he meant that it wasn't properly fattened and the skin had a bluish cast to it. He then told me that he'd sent his son off in the lorry to pick one up and his son would be back that evening.

I felt sorry that the blue turkey had met his end before his time, but was thrilled to be getting one at all. In the end I got a fine 14lb bird on Thursday morning. I thought it was really wonderful that they'd done all this just to get my Thanksgiving Turkey and I was profuse in my thanks when I stopped by on Friday! I think this bird had been dispatched rather quickly when the order came in as there were still a lot of feathers on it! We soon plucked them out with the needle nose pliers, though!!!!!

Raw cranberries weren't in evidence in the shops, either, so I had to settle for a jar of cranberry sauce. Still, it was tasty and added another layer of flavor to the lovely turkey with its cornbread and sausage stuffing.

Cornbread was another problem. There is no cornmeal to be had, as such. In the end, I took a risk and bought something labelled "Polenta". In the States, I think polenta would already be made up. The ingredients list of the packet I bought only contained one item: ground corn, so I took the risk. In the end, it made absolutely smashing cornbread. John and I scarfed a lot of it "just to test" and it was delicious so we had to make some more for the dinner!

I decided not make a green bean casserole and just did plain steamed green beans to which I added pine nuts and melted butter. Similarly, I didn't do glazed sweet potatoes, but cooked and sliced them and then added some crispy bacon bits and more melted butter.

One of our neighbours gave us a chunk of the huge pumpkin they had grown this summer (quite a rare veg/fruit for a Brit to grow in the first place) and I had pureed and frozen that some time ago. From this I was able to make a pie. Those of you who know me well know that I can't make pastry. Fortunately there is "jus-rol" frozen pie crust and I used that for the pumpkin and pecan pies. Pecans I found in the super-market, but of course there was no corn syrup. I used a very good substitute - maple flavored Tate and Lyles Golden Syrup.

So now you know more than you really needed to know about our Thanksgiving dinner. We had a good time. The food was good, the wine was uplifting, the company scintillating and the evening was a fine success. Next year, I think I'll invite more neighbours!

What a contrast!

Here we are at Ein Gedi beside the Dead Sea. It's early November and it's about 30 degrees C (90F).
























Now, here we are in Church Stretton (this is the same old view from my study window) in late November and it's about 5 degrees C below zero (<25F).

We're in a FROST HOLLOW!!!!

In case you don't know what a frost hollow is, this is a place where cold air drains and pools up, usually experiencing temperatures which are several degress lower than the surrounding area.

We thought we might be in one because we're down in the valley and we have a wall at the end of the garden which prevents the cold air from draining away, and today we found out! Last night was beautiful with brillianr, clear moonlight and lots of stars. Needless to say our temperatures dropped to about -4C and we awoke to a thick heavy frost over the whole garden. The frost stayed all day. It never melted in spite of it being a lovely clear sunny day. The problem is that the sun doesn't get into our garden. It's so low in the sky that it never shines over the hill. It was quite warm in the village when I went to the market, but as I came down the drive I was amazed at the temperature gradient.

I don't think we'll be seeing the sun down here till February at the earliest!!!! Don't get me wrong. It's lovely and bright down here, and we can see the sun shining on the hills. The trees are glowing with colour, too. There's just no direct sunlight. Even if we were on the flat land, there wouldn't be much at this time of year. The sun rises about 8 and goes down before 4. But we'll make up for it with lovely long days in the summer.

On the bird front, we seem to be having a bit of a lull right now. We've had a few waves of tits come by, but the large numbers we were seeing before we went away are a thing of the past. We also seem to have lost one of our male pheasants. I think they've started to set up territories, so one of the males has claimed our garden and taken over the three females now. They seem to stick together more now and every afternoon they work over our lawn and patio for whatever they can glean. The male seems to like something that's stuck to our french windows as we've heared him pecking away at them a couple of times!

Our good news is that we both passed the theory and hazard perception parts of our driving tests this week. We got full marks on the theory and I did better than John on the hazard part - tee, hee!!!!!

John is just getting over the cold he got on the plane back from Israel and I think I'm coming down with it now. Since we also expect to have quite a few visitors over the next couple of weeks, it might be a few days till I post again. Please bear with us and keep checking back.

Write when you can .... mailto: joanarnfield@gmail.com

We're Back!!!!

And you didn't even know we'd gone, did you?

Well, we've just got back from an 11 day trip to Israel. It was nice to get away from all the rain for a while. In Israel the weather was smashing, with temperatures in the low 70s during the day. Add lots of sunshine to that and you can see that it was a real treat.

It was great to see my twin aunties - Suzy and Louise. They seem very fit and well and took great care of us. We stayed in their appartment in downtown Tel Aviv. My two cousins are also well. Hagai chauffered us around and Becky came to visit from Haifa. Last Wednesday, while John gave a lecture at Tel Aviv University, I went to Haifa on the train along with the twins and Hagai's wife, Chantal. We met up with Becky and had a girls day out which included a wonderful lunch at a fish restaurant and a brief visit to the new gardens at the Ba'hai Temple. These are amazing - covering the side of Mount Carmel with both formal and informal plantings.

I had prepared a CD with old family photos and was able to give one each to my cousins - they were quite a hit! It started up some discussions about family history and I was able to get some information for my Turkish family tree. I doubt if I'll be able to get any more, the records are a bit hazy beyond my great-grandparents.

While we walked a lot in Tel Aviv, we weren't realy terribly touristy this time. We spent a lot of time visiting with relatives and friends, and we did manage a bit of bird-watching. Took most of a day to bird along the Yarkon River in Tel Aviv, and also took a trip to the Dead Sea with Hagai. While there we had a short walk in the Ein Gedi reserve and have decided we have to go back and do it more thoroughly. I took only a few pictures and they're quite disappointing, so I won't be including any in this post.

Here's our trip list - 42 species in total.

CORMORANTS
Great Cormorant
DUCKS, SWANS, GEESE
Egyptian Goose
Mallard
HERONS, EGRETS AND BITTERNS
Little Egret
Gray Heron
Cattle Egret
Black-crowned Night-Heron
IBIS AND SPOONBILLS
Glossy Ibis
FALCONS AND CARACARAS
Eurasian Kestrel
RAILS AND COOTS
Common Moorhen
CRANES
Common Crane
PLOVERS AND LAPWINGS
Spur-winged Plover
PIGEONS AND DOVES
Rock Dove
Laughing Dove
Eurasian Collared-Dove
PARROTS
Rose-ringed Parakeet
KINGFISHERS
Common Kingfisher
White-throated Kingfisher
Pied Kingfisher
BEE-EATERS
Blue-cheeked Bee-eater
HOOPOES
Hoopoe
WOODPECKERS
Syrian Woodpecker
CROWS AND JAYS
Eurasian Jay
Eurasian Jackdaw
Carrion Crow
Fan-tailed Raven
STARLINGS
Tristram's Starling
European Starling
Common Myna
OLD WORLD FLYCATCHERS
Black Redstart
White-crowned Wheatear
Blackstart
SWALLOWS
Rock Martin
BULBULS
White-spectacled Bulbul
CISTICOLAS AND ALLIES
Graceful Prinia
OLD WORLD WARBLERS
Wood Warbler
BABBLERS
Arabian Babbler
CHICKADEES, TITS
Great Tit
OLD WORLD SPARROWS
House Sparrow
WAGTAILS AND PIPITS
White Wagtail
Red-throated Pipit
SISKINS, CROSSBILLS AND ALLIES
Chaffinch

Let me know if you're reading this - I'm not sure who my audience is!!

email me:joanarnfield@gmail.com

Aggression and the Greater Spotted Woodpecker!

Hurray! Saw our first Greater Spotted Woodpecker in the garden today. It came to a fat ball that John has on a hook in the "front" garden. This is the garden that he can see from his office and so he monitors it well. I come running everytime he yells!

Agression levels seem to be rising amongst our feathered visitors. I don't know why - it's still very mild so I don't think food is getting short yet. Maybe they agree with all the forecasters who say we're in for a cold winter this year. Here's the list of fights we have seen:

1. Yesterday one of the male pheasants chased a squirrel and pecked its tail. It actually stalked the little devil before it attacked! This is good news really because the pheasants tend to feed below the bird feeders to pick up all the stuff that drops and if they keep the squirrels away we'll have fewer problems above.

2. Today there were two males at the same feeders and they both chased a squirrel away.

3. The coal tits only come one at a time to the feeders. If two land at the same time, one of them chases the others off. Sometimes they actually grab onto each other and fall about as they fight.

4. The robin will take up residence inside the mesh (we have some armoured "squirrel proof" feeders) and will fight off any one else who comes nearby. Sometimes he sits there for quite a while and the tits won't come when the robin is there. He tried to chase off the woodpecker, too, but the woodie held his ground. There was much flapping and exitement, but the robin retreated that time.

5. This afternoon there were three female pheasants on the lawn. Two of them had a face-off which included much head bobbing, pretend pecking of the ground, squatting with heads thrust forward and the ocasional lunge at the other. In the end they had a real squabble with lots of wing flapping and jumping up into the air. It all ended when the third female intervened. She's bigger and just ran into the melee and chased them off!

Here's a list of all birds seen in the garden so far. Only 20, not a very long list, realy, but it's a start:

HAWKS, EAGLES AND KITES
Eurasian Sparrowhawk
Common Buzzard
PHEASANTS, GROUSE, QUAIL AND TURKEYS
Ring-necked Pheasant
PIGEONS AND DOVES
Common Wood-Pigeon
WOODPECKERS
Great Spotted Woodpecker
CROWS AND JAYS
Black-billed Magpie
Eurasian Jackdaw
Carrion Crow
THRUSHES
Eurasian Blackbird
OLD WORLD FLYCATCHERS
European Robin
NUTHATCHES
Eurasian Nuthatch
WRENS
Winter Wren
SWALLOWS
Common House-Martin
CHICKADEES, TITS
Coal Tit
Great Tit
Blue Tit
WAGTAILS AND PIPITS
Gray Wagtail
ACCENTORS
Dunnock
SISKINS, CROSSBILLS AND ALLIES
Chaffinch
Eurasian Bullfinch

Time for dinner .... bye bye!

E-Mail: joanarnfield@gmail.com

Driving Lessons!

Well, we're taking our driving lessons and it ain't easy. After 40 years of driving, we're having to learn/un-learn an awful lot! We thought we could get away with just a couple of hours of refresher lessons, but it's going to take a bit longer than expected as we have so many habits which would fail us if we didn't change them.

The driving test over here is very strict. First you have to take a theory test, which consists of multiple choice questions based on a book called the "Highway Code". Then there's the hazard perception test in which you watch short videos and click the mouse when you see a potential or developing hazard.

The actual driving test comes after all that. They watch you like a hawk and you have to complete various sections. The backing up part can be parallel parking, backing into a parking bay and/or backing around a corner. You have to do a hill start and a three point turn. There are certain ways you MUST do things or they fail you and that's the part that's really hard.

Still, I think we'll come out of this as better drivers. If it wasn't such a bureaucratic nightmare I think it would be a good idea to re-test people at regular intervals. We all forget what we learned in driving school and we could all do with a refresher. In this country, especially, where the roads are so narrow and people drive so much faster, driving lessons are a great way to keep up your skills and boost your confidence on the road.

I'm experimenting with format for this posting. George asked me to post my e-mail address at the end of each post so you can send me your comments. I would have turned on the "comments" thingie on these postings except that I see people use them to post spamming adverts.

E-Mail: joanarnfield@gmail.com

Rain, Rain, Go Away

This isn't the last rose of summer, there are lots more to come yet, but it is looking a bit bedraggled as heavy rain hits the Stretton Valley.





E-Mail: joanarnfield@gmail.com