Its been a week.....

....good or bad, its been a week!  Charley spent all last week at the vets, on the other side of town, doing work experience, which she arranged herself - very proud mum - and she loved it.  Unfortunately it mean't that I spent most of the day in the car!  Traffic in Hereford is chaos on a good day, throw in road works, accidents, and the final straw being rush hour and its a receipe for disaster.  Usually the journey takes about 15 mins, give or take but at its worst last week it took me over an hour and half to collect her and get back home, we had to stop for a pit stop at the sister in laws and have a cup of tea to calm the nerves, it is very safe to say I was not feeling the love that day.  But.  It was all worth it.  Now Charley has a direction in life and is off to our local vets (walking distance!!) to see if she can get some volunteer work there during holidays and weekends. 

Then my kiln started playing up.  A whole day of commission beads in the kiln and turn the programmes from garaging to annealling and ....nothing....it had a fit of temperature wobblies, registering 480 to 268 to 342 to 90 to 550 all in seconds of each other, so Jim got up from his night shift and rang the kiln man, but it was Friday and both Jim and Ben were off to Newgale for a weekend of kayaking so nothing happened until this morning when my husband, aided by the kiln man, got the little blue oven up and working again....wahoo....fingers crossed she will be co-operative tomorrow :o).

Ben moved one of my raised veggie beds today, during a monster downpour, the weather has been changeable for days.  Its still so mild and warm but the heavens open and down comes the rain, often not for longer than 5-10 mins but its heavy enough to soak you to the skin, the only ones loving it are Kayakers, Ducks and Golden Retrievers...aka Iz!!  whom loves nothing better than splashing in big puddles and rolling in muddy patches, the utility room is littered with soggy towels and smells like winter!

I have been having clear out of 'stuff' and found some dog prints that I did as a limited edition, so I have listed them on Artfire, the puppy is my favourite, but then thats probably because its our Iz as a teeny tiny cute puppy.

I also found some triptych abstracts that I have been storing in the wardrobe, the photos are not great, been having a hard time to capture the image, its not as easy on big things as it is on glass beads!! 

Amelia, my chook, is poorly again.  Sour crop.  I dosed her up with some Olive Oil this afternoon and gave her crop a nice massage, she must have been uncomfortable as she didn't complain, then some of the mass came out and I found out why they call it sour crop....yuck...it really does stink, and then Amelia started to get a bit bothered about the attention so I put her back with the other girls.  She was cuddled up to the other girls tonight at bedtime, so I am praying that she is ok again in the morning.  I think she is always going to have problems, this isn't the first time she has had sour crop this summer and of course we had the prolapsed vent early this holidays so she hasn't laid in over 2 months.  I don't mind her not laying if she was well and was enjoying herself more.  Mind, none of the girls are very chuffed with the weather, their coop is like a skating rink!  I have done some prunning in the garden, catching up on some of those jobs I put off when the kiln was working, and put the garden cuttings into the coop for the girls to scratch at and eat the grubs, they love a treat!.  I am also hoping the green stuff soaks up some of the slippery mud, before I end up going over!

Well, other than that this week, I have watched the trees at the woods start to turn from lush green to heavenly golden and have even spied the odd red leaf. I rather like this time of year, I prefer the sunshine, but late summer mornings you can't beat. Iz and I have been up at the woods really early a couple of times now, its so quiet you can hear the squirrels starting to get busy for the winter storage, so much so that Jane's acorn beads inspired this little guy....

Glass Bead Squirrel...with nuts!! 


Lx