This is Misty. We finally got around to giving the goats a trim yesterday,
and today they are out
sunning themselves.
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This is Misty. We finally got around to giving the goats a trim yesterday,
and today they are out
sunning themselves.
A Bad Guide
General photo of the snow depth around the house? Can the goats now wander around in the snow? Do they want to ?
That’s a happy face! (specially the second photo)
It is a happy face. She’s been standing in the same spot for hours now. No, they can’t go very far at the moment, though I’m sure they’d like to. There’s still about a metre of snow, which is a lot for a goat to negotiate. I’m going to put some snowy pictures up next.
Hah! It’s been snowing here for about fifteen hours, and my balcony “windowboxes are over a foot-high with snow. I wish I had a sunny spot – yes, I’d half close my eyes and just bask. How blissful she looks!
missing close quotes for after windoboxes”
Our snow has vanished (except for a couple of dollops representing the sad remains of the igloo our grandsons built), and the weather is downright springlike — yesterday when we went for our walk I didn’t even wear a coat or scarf. My wife promised me winter would end, and now I’m a believer.
I get confused whether Catanea is the Spanish calligrapher from Alaska or the Australian racing driver from Dulwich–but that’s Canehan. I know them much better as Amanda & Paul.
The next six weeks is the only time I’m a bit jealous of those of you in other parts of the N. Hemisphere, because it really takes ages for spring to get going here.
That’s one happy goat! Here in Moscow we had a gloriously sunny but cold day. Snowdrifts still above human height, but there was one moment in the sun when I almost looked as blissful as Misty.
Yes, I think it’s three happy goats, although I haven’t seen Vesla today. I think she’s hiding. How is the ten-foot icicle?
Amazing how clean the wool about the face looks compared with the unshorn parts of the body.
Here too, spring takes for ever to arrive. Today feesl like spring (sunny, soil dry, snow almost all melted except in mounds where it has been pushed up artificially), but we won’t get real spring (with leaves and flowers) for another 5 or 6 weeks.
Well I’m sorry, but it’s nice to think someone else is in the same boat.
It’s not really dirt or dust, it’s grease–especially with Misty.
But grease attracts dirt, as on dirty hair. The wool looked much lighter on earlier pictures.
Misty looks quite pleased. I thought Vesla liked haircuts–doesn’t that mean the zebra coat? The way Misty is closing her eyes, the snow must be bright.
I think the darkness of the wool is quite exaggerated in these pictures. Of course, the grease keeps them dry.
We only clipped them on their tummys, bottoms & faces; it’s too cold to do the proper shearing yet, so no zebra coat. The snow’s quite bright, also she’s facing directly into the sun–she said something about absorbing vitamins.
I quite understand why they need the grease (same as sheep – full of lanolin), I was just commenting on the difference in colour.
They used to recover lanolin from the sewage works in Bradford. It came from the wool mills. My, my: the things you learn over lunch.
Who(m) do you mean by “they”?
The lanolin recoverers: ’twas a business. It ended up sold to ladies to rub into their faces, I was told. via Boots, I assume. My informant was a Northern Chemist.
Lanolin is excellent for the skin, and is usually mixed into a variety of products (pure lanolin has a distinct sheep smell). It seems to be a prime export from New Zealand.
NYPL formula leather dressing used by conservationists is lanolin and neatsfoot oil.
Older breed Big White Dogs (Kuvasz, Cuvac, Great Pyrenees, Maremma) have lanolin or something similar on their fur. This is a great asset if their absolute favorite activity is rolling in dirt / mud / gravel / grass / bark mulch / pine needles / snow.
My dog’s favorite activity was rolling in dead fish, the more aromatic the better. Teh beach was just one big adventure.
Instead of rolling in dead fish, humans make perfume from the intestinal secretions of whales. Or they rub their faces with grease recovered from sewage.
Arthur, how often do you grease your goats?
They’re basically self-greasing, but you’re supposed to check the grease every twenty-thousand km.
The ten-foot icicle is as long as it was but slightly shorter. The other day an alpinist rapelled down the facade of the building and checked the icicles. I guess he decided that 1) they wouldn’t pull off the facade and 2) he couldn’t do anything about them. Other guys go up on the roof and shovel/hack off snow and ice. And sometimes there is just a huge roar as the stuff loosens up and comes down. It’s very exciting, here in Moscow’s early spring. Every year dozens of people are killed by falling icicles. Doesn’t that seem an ignominious death?
I’d rather die by icicle than have the snow from the roof kill me. My daughter & her friends tell me you can get a fine in Norway for having excessively large icicles on your building. They say the boys at school break them off and “use them as swords” (these are 16-year-olds). A friend of ours successfully sued her landlord when an icicle fell in her stroller. Well, not really her stroller; her son’s stroller.
Yes, you see: you live in a normal northern country, with laws and fines. Here it’s Russian icicle roulette. Although the (Tadjik) guys trying to clean the ice off and shovel this year (for about $70 a month) get my full sympathy. Everyone does seem to be trying this year.
In NY it was the terra cotta bits falling off the old apt buildings and hitting people. Suing wasn’t the perfect deterrent in NY; it just meant any landlord with terra cotta ornament would erect really ugly scaffolding over the sidewalk that would drip on you when it rained. The only real solution is to always wear a crash helmet. Never take it off, even in the bath.
Yeah, I’ve been joking that I’m going to start wearing my bicyle helmet in the courtyard. Along with cleats to keep me on my feet on the 5 inches of slick, bumpy ice.
Never take it off, even in the bath.
Bit difficult to wash your hair.
slick, bumpy ice
Useful word of the day:
hålke n. f. (only sing.)
Uneven layer of ice on the ground, where it grows through cycles of partly thawing and freezing. Especially common on sidewalks or paths, on low-traffic roads and in courtyards, where the effects of traffic adds more to its hardening than to its decay.
From my childhood – a patch of ice polished to make it especially slippy was called a “slire”.
Large icicles are supposed to indicate that the roof is not properly insulated. Is that right?
Ooo, Mr Engen, I adore you and your language. Why don’t we have a word like that in Russian? That’s EXACTLY what is in my courtyard and on half the streets of the city. No matter how expert I have become in the piston walk — not heel-to-toe, which guarantees a slip, but feet straight up and down — I’ve fallen about 5 times in the last week.
The big icicle, m-l, is on a ledge. Water dripped down from the roof. We had a morning confab in the courtyard, and it turns out that the alpinist had been hired to destroy the icicle, but some @(#*$&@#(& jerk parked his car under it despite the huge signs everywhere. (We don’t believe in following laws here in Russia, even when they are to our benefit.) However, as I have been complaining privately to Mr Crown, I live on the top floor and in the spring my roof has been leaking into my bedroom. The ice-snow melts, water accumulates under metal sheets (porous from age), then freezes, then melts into my apartment. The housing board has requested city funds to put on a new roof, but who knows when we’ll get it. So the board let my apartment renovation workers climb up and seal every seam. As we approach spring, I stare at my new moldings and smooth walls and ceiling, and pray that they stay that way.
Rant over. It’s very trying to be a home owner in a place where you have zero control over external influences on your property. Top floors are bad that way. On the other hand, I’m don’t have people above me who get drunk and let their bathtub overflow.
m-l: Large icicles are supposed to indicate that the roof is not properly insulated. Is that right?
That’s only one possible cause (i.e. heat escaping from your house and melting the snow on your roof & subsequently freezing again as it drips, away from the heat source). The heat from the warm spring sunshine is another cause of icicles. Lots of icicles are forming on the edge of our roof at the moment, as the snow melts; the normal course of water drainage is blocked by snow & ice.
Maybe we could start a helpful household hints blog.
If anyone asks me what a hålke is, I’ll say it’s similar to a slire.
Never take it off, even in the bath.
Bit difficult to wash your hair.
Difficult, but not impossible. Not if you really try.
We had a morning confab in the courtyard, and it turns out that the alpinist had been hired to destroy the icicle, but some @(#*$&@#(& jerk parked his car under it despite the huge signs everywhere.
Was it an expensive car and/or an important driver? Seems to me the absence of the rule of law ought to work both ways. (But I am not wise in the enigmatic ways of the Russian soul.)
in the spring my roof has been leaking into my bedroom. The ice-snow melts, water accumulates under metal sheets (porous from age), then freezes, then melts into my apartment.
That’s bad. I am guessing that the reason the water is hanging around long enough to find its way through is that there are great masses of ice downhill from it on the roof (ice dams, we have learned to call them) which block the way.
When we had a bad case of that a few years ago, someone went and scattered a lot of (some kind of) salt on the roof to speed the thaw. I resorted to a bit of that this year just in case. Fortunately the problem areas are not too hard to get at.
Wow. Helpful hints central. I guess folks are 1)home-owners and 2) obsessed with water leaks. Yes, water backed up on the roof and didn’t go down the pipe. We cleaned that out, but the metal sheets are lying flat on the roof and not at an incline — plus they are, in the words of another gasterbeiter — “like clay, like clay.”
The car wasn’t that fancy, but the housing board folks were afraid they’d be sued if the icicle destroyed it. Oddly, they are less concerned that they’ll be sued if the icicle falls and kills a person. We get private property; we don’t get the value of human life. Hey, we’re working the bugs out of the system.
Clarification on ice terms: is slire what we Americans call black ice?
It’s called black ice in Britain too. I think slire must be a Scottish term. Dearie needs to tell us more about slire.
When mab was first looking at the ten foot icicle it was -20 or -30C in Moscow (except round the icicle, obviously) and at that low a temperature salt won’t help things melt.
Don’t car insurance companies cover falling icicles as acts of God (acts of Santa)?
Sodium chloride won’t help below a certain temperature, but I gather that some other chlorides will.
Hm. Good question on the insurance. I do insurance the US way — for everything — but car insurance as something mandatory was just put in a few years ago, and a lot of people only get what is required by law, which is mostly for accidents when you are at fault. We are a land of risk-takers.
I don’t get the salt thing here. They started using some “special European” chloride a few years ago, and it was a disaster. For one thing, it stuck on your shoes and the marble floors in the metro and underground street crossing passages were like, in the words of a friend, ice covered with sour cream. The roads were slicker; dogs had hurt paws. No one knows what the problem was (but everyone suspects it was some corruption scam — wrong chloride, smaller doses, whatever). Now they don’t use much of anything except dirt, which means that Moscow is always muddy and filthy. When Russians go abroad, they are most astonished by the fact that you can wear your shoes into the house even on a rainy day. Here you can’t wear your shoes into the house on a sunny day in July.
Nobody wears their shoes indoors here, either. And though it’s not sour-cream like (mmm!), the road salt in Norway is filthy too. But they mostly use grit (sand?).
I’m sure there are Highly Technical Terms for grades of dirt-sand-grit-gravel etc., but yes, we’ve got the same black grit. I get that people are worried about the water table (and that chlorides — all or some? — shouldn’t be allowed to leach into it), but surely there is something more modern? effective? life-saving? than dumping black grit on the ice slicks. I keep wailing: they’ve had ice and snow in Moscow since the dawn of time — isn’t that long enough to figure out how to deal with it?
I’ve checked Chambers Scots Dictionary: “slire” doesn’t appear. The nearest I can find is in Chambers “The Scots Thesaurus” which gives “slair” as “smear, cover (with something soft, wet, messy)”, and says that it’s “now local” in Angus and Dumfriesshire. So my guess is that “slair” refers to something slippy and soft, “slire” to slippy and hard. Wet and clinging is, of course, “glaur”. It’s odd how words I’ve not used in fifty years sometimes come back. And sometimes don’t. Anyway, perhaps “slire” is unknown to scholarship.
A good thing you mentioned it, in that case.
Completely out of subject here … but since days ago we talked about Argentinian films and which one captures something real of our society, I truly recommend “El secreto de sus ojos” (The Secret in their Eyes) of Juan José Campanella.
Perhaps you can find it now that it won an Academy Award.
Yes, I was thinking of trying to see it. Thanks for reminding me.
My pleasure! (And sorry for the interference)
There’s no such thing as interference on this blog. We’re desperate for something to talk about.
Anyway, perhaps “slire” is unknown to scholarship.
It’s even unknown to the Dictionary of the Scots Language, which is pretty comprehensive, so I’m thinking it’s a local pronunciation of “slair.” Here is the DSL entry for the latter (*crosses fingers, prays for correct HTML*):
DSL – SND1 SLAIR, v., n. Also slare; and intensive forms slary, s(c)lairie, -y, s(c)lerich (Per.). [ˈsler(e), ˈsklere, -ɪç] I. v. 1. To smear, bedaub, cover with (some soft, wet, messy substance), to make a mess at any work (n.Sc. 1808 Jam.; Kcd. c.1850; Ags., Per., Clc., Lnk., Ayr., Dmf. 1970).
*Rnf. a.1794 A. Wilson Poems (1876) II. 11:
Brodie soon slairyed his beard Wi’ braw creeshie platefu’s of gravy.
*Rnf. 1813 G. MacIndoe Wandering Muse 151:
The Tradestown laird had ply’d the bean, Till slar’d frae lug to lug, man’ Wi’ snuff, that night.
*Lnk. 1895 W. Stewart Lilts 85:
Sae, gin ye butter slair ava, On him be’t slairt, he’ll swallow’t a’.
*Ags. 1912 J. Ogilvie Rhymes 79:
Ilka inch in ilka street Was sclairied ower wi’ glaur.
*Sc. 1924 Sc. Recitations (Harley) 156:
He had slerried a’ his ain mooth wi’ gold, through sookin’ the brush.
*Per.4 1950:
I’ll sune sclerich it wi paint.
*Abd. 1955 W. P. Milne Eppie Elrick vii.:
He clartit ower ‘e pob as muckle mair roset as ‘e cud get sclairit on’t.
2. tr. and intr. To eat or lick up in a messy, sloppy way, to gobble (food) gluttonously and disgustingly, “to outstrip in eating” (w.Sc. 1880 Jam.). Deriv. slairy, adj., slovenly in one’s eating habits (Clc., Rnf., Lnk. 1970).
II. n. Gen. in intensive form slairie, etc.: a smear, daub, smudge, a “lick” of paint (Kcd., Ags., Per., Dmf. 1970); a sticky mess (Kcb. 1950); food spilt on one’s clothes (Sc. 1808 Jam.); transf. an untidy slobbering person (Rnf. 1917 Thistle (May) 95).
*Gsw. 1889 J. Houston Autobiography 109:
A soda scone wi’ a slairy o’ treacle on’t.
*Per., *Ayr. 1958:
I’ll gie a sclerich (Per.), slairie (Ayr.) o’ paint.
[Immediate orig. uncertain, but no doubt to be associated with the series Slairg, Slairk, Slairt, Slerp, and Eng. †slore, slur, slurry, all with sim. meanings. For related Teut. words cf. Du. sleuren, to drag, loaf, Norw. dial. slarra, to trail about, slarva, to work in a slovenly way, n.Eng. dial. slare, to move slowly and idly.]
Could be. We, however, used “slire” only of ice or some other hard, slippy surface – there were lots of things around the river, shore and harbour that fitted “soft, wet, messy substance” but we never used “slire” of them. So I’m not persuaded. For “soft, wet, messy substance” we tended to say “slouter”.
Although it may be true that the Inuit don’t have thirty words for snow the principle – that people who live in cold countries have more words for snow than people who live in warm countries – does seem to be right. People like Mark Liberman, and that frightful little man in California, Arnold something, who are so patronising about how gullible we non-linguists are, should really do the world a favour and shut up about it.
When Stalin died, Crown, you had been in the womb for about six months, so many would say that you already had a soul at that point.
If I were to found a religion involving reincarnation, I might include a promise that upon leaving this world everyone gets to at least express a preference about what to come back as. Maybe a simple form with first, second third choice. No guarantee that you get your first, but …
oops, wrong thread?
There is no wrong thread, the whole is a bouillabaisse of mixed fishy flavours.