Cooleague

This post is work in progress over a few days and this sentence will be removed when finished.

WEATHER. Locally anyway, the weather this year has been topsy-turvy to say the least. Anyone who thinks global warming doesn’t need the most urgent attention should learn about feeedback loops - and then tremble; (one needs, in particular, to understand why bubbles form on a glass of still water taken out of the fridge). Driest April (so no April showers) on record. Made some hay in April - unheard of. Late frosts in May then decimated my spuds. Then a crazy wet summer that got critical for farmers by mid August and then a prolonged dry and warm Autumn that helped the land recover a bit. Christmas is coming and there are lillies up 1 foot in the air and it wont be long till the daffodils are blooming; blooming Christmas daffs darnit. In the past fortnight it has got so wet that the land is nearly flowing away and everything just looks “rinsed”.

DOGS. Two of my dogs have had major problems. I know they are “getting on” but its still horrid when illness strikes. Jester got prostatitis so had to lose his “jewels” but he got better with feminisation and antibiotics - now he is a bit overweight and sleeps a lot - not the same vim to him. Discovered that Joe, who had limped for a long time, had a nasty lump in his groin. Bryan skillfully removed it - seminoma probably and should be OK. A few weeks later he got a cough, ataxia, temperature and was diagnosed as having a prostatic abscess some 7 inches in diameter!! He went down hill prior to intended surgery and I brought him home to die, moribund, bringing up blood, etc. I changed his therapy and treated him like a patient on an HDU. It took a while but he slowly got better. He now has little relapses (he gets wobbly and his urine goes alkaline) but antibiotics have worked on each occasion and I now think he gets recurrent urinary tract infections and that his huge “prostatic abscess” was in fact a chronically distended bladder.

CATTLE. Had a good enough year talking to themselves about eating grass outside and haylage inside. Never had haylage before but there have been no complaints so far. Ninety percent heifer calves this year and ninety percent bulls the previous year. Go figure.

COMPUTERS. It was lovely to get hooked up to wireless broadband (Ciaracom transmitting from the Bawnboy end of Slieve Rushen), since we are too far from Ballyconnell to use the telephone lines ADSL. This hobby of mine is beginning to get out of hand. Too busy and charging a lot just seems to encourage people. “There’s nowt so strange as folk” - and that’s a fact. I’m reminded of a story my mother used to tell about a couple that set up a fish shop in Cavan after the war. It was a resounding success. It closed after about three weeks. When asked why they closed down the reply was: “You couldn’t stand it. There was people coming in here morning, noon and night bothering us for fish!”