Today was a bit warmer than it has been lately, and we went for a proper walk.
I took the goats out for fresh air and exercise. They’re looking disheveled,
with stalks of hay stuck in their coats. It probably itches.
I was taking a picture of this horse on the lake, when a skier whizzed by. This slope down to the lake is the fun bit. I thought it looked like a poster: Come to sunny-but-cold Norway and drink hot chocolate!
Now that it’s frozen to forty centimetres depth, they practise trotting on the lake. If you own a trotter and you take it to the races in Oslo or Jarlsberg, and if your horse comes in first place, you might win enough money to break even on the evening’s outing (the cost of entering, transportation, hiring a jockey and so on) – most won’t win, of course, but farmers still do it.
When we came home, Misty was eating the beech hedge.
They stayed out all afternoon until it got dark.
A Bad Guide 
The shot with the skier, by scrolling up and down to experiment with where to crop, I found myself most delighted by just having the horse at the bottom, the house behind. “Oh yes! Now I really would consider going to Norway…”
You’re saying I should bag the skier? It’s true, it’s is a very empty country: the size of Italy* and only 4.5 million people.
*(I made that up, but it could be right.)
I noticed that when I go out alone here, I feel there are 4 million people in my way (and in my head). When I go out with Angela, the city’s population shrinks to two.
Better to go out with Angela, then.
She’s a mystery and has vanished again. The first woman I’ve been involved with who behaves like somebody in a novel.
The Lady Vanishes.
Just perfect. I remember flicking on a black and white film halfway through, alone one day in 1999. I thought nothing of it for the first few minutes, then I realised I was watching something astonishing. I saw it to the end. It was Strangers on a Train. I tend to think there’s no sweeter way of confirming the greatness of an artist than by encountering them in this way, totally unaware of name and reputation.
Cheering photos. “They’re looking disheveled”: projection?
I was disappointed that it was a horse pulling a trap and not a sleigh. My winter fantasies run away with me sometimes. Glad the goats got a good airing out.
I usually look disheveled, if that’s what you mean. Except if I’m going out. Which I’m not. But at least I can drag a comb though my hair if I want to, which is more than they could say (if they could talk).
There are a couple of sleighs here. There’s an ancient one sitting unused in a barn and then there’s one that some of our neighbours have. They sometimes use it at the local hotel to take evening tours. It has flaming torches on either side, and they trot down the country lanes. I think they all sing and drink schnapps, but I may be making that up.
I always liked The Lady Vanishes although it’s much less scary than Strangers On A Train or any of the other Hitchcocks.
It’s true, it’s is a very empty country: the size of Italy* and only 4.5 million people. *(I made that up, but it could be right.)
Right, indeed, but modest on Norway’s behalf:
Norway “has an area of 324,220 sq km (125,182 sq mi). Comparatively, the area occupied by Norway is slightly larger than the state of New Mexico.”
Italy covers ” 301,230 sq km (116,306 sq mi). Comparatively, the area occupied by Italy is slightly larger than the state of Arizona.”
From something called the Encyclopedia of Nations, which may be affiliated to the UN – it’s not the CIA book.
if they could talk
Search tells me that talking goats haven’t been discussed explicitly here before. Like Rinkitink‘s Bilbil. They have a Thompson index of B211.1.2.
The other day I was trying to explain the plot of Vittal Acharya’s Jagan Mohini, in which a talking goat and a talking cobra go up the mountain together to find some ascetics. It makes more sense in the movie than it did in my explanation then or here.
If you really get to know goats, and I think I have with ours — I’ve known Misty & Holly all their lives and Vesla since she was one — they don’t need to talk to communicate. They are very expressive in other ways; more so than horses, comparable to a very intelligent dog (I say that because one of our dogs is much more expressive and seemingly intelligent than the other, so I believe there’s much variation). Anyway, goats don’t talk, but they still have voices and gestures and ways of standing and of staring or looking away that let me know their humour just as transparently as I know my daughter’s or my wife’s. So I can think to myself: X is a bit cross today, or Y seems rather tired but glad to see me, without any exchange of words.
I’m always amazed by how you can guess it’s cold by watching the nose, the ears and around the eyes of the goats: these parts all become reddish.
Quite often an unusual reddish tint comes from rubbing up against the salt lick.
As I have mentioned before, I like the way you can estimate the degree of cold by observing the curl of the rhododendron leaves. I’m going outdoors now and shake some new-fallen snow off the rhododendrons to find out how cold it is.
Let us know your findings.
Not particularly cold, but real Winter Wonderland stuff. I still clear the driveway the old-fashioned way, with a shovel. It’s a way of proving my manhood. But today I’m glad have a great strapping son to do some of the work. There will be plenty still to do by the time he wakes up (noon?). He has no school today; the storm forecast was such that for once on their lives the schools decided the night before to close for the day. Large pine boughs are lying here and there, some almost too heavy for one person to shift. One of them seems to have struck the wires leading to our house from the utility pole across the street, because some of the wires are dangling low, pulling away and a little bit of house with them. Miraculously we still have power, telephone, cable TV, and internet.
Empty, can you give some clues — ideally in the form of photos — about how the rhododendron leaves behave depending on the temperature? (Never know, that might save my life one day if I venture into the Martian Deep South during the “meridional” winter.)
Sig, I saw your recent non-snail photo. Are you suffering an abnormally serious drought in Mauritius or just a typical one ?
November/December are usually the dry months on Mars, but this year it’s been worse than usual (an example). Water cuts are very bad in some places and some people fear possible riots. We are all busy doing the Rain Dance, with limited success so far.
Wow. And then there’s flooding in Queensland. It seems one of the worst parts of global warming is the unpredictability of what might happen next. Over here, we’re having an unusually cold winter.
The flooding in Queensland, or at least in Brisbane, is no worse than in 1974. Equivalent floods have been seen there every few decades since settlement. Global warming my left foot!
You’re quite right, dearie. Silly me.
According to my mother, my parents were constantly going to parties at people’s properties and then they weren’t able go home for a week or two, because they’d been “bogged in” by floods. I don’t know whether this happened to other people or just to my parents, but I always thought it sounded quite fun. I bet they never ran out of booze. And then there would be a drought. Humans were not meant to live in Queensland. It’s a beautiful place, though.
There’s a brief account here.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/1/13/brisbane-flood-history.html#comments
I agree that Q is a beautiful place; we liked it when we lived there. I must say, though, I was astonished and horrified by the flashflood in Towoomba. You have to drive up a bleedin’ escarpment to get to Towoomba – it would never have occurred to me that it was vulnerable. I dare say that we’ll hear about poor civil engineering by the city council, houses and businesses built on flood plains, and all the usual sorry stuff. But what a horror for such a lovely wee city.
I remember, in about 1973, driving for hours and hours to get to Towoomba. One of the main reasons for going was to get some Kentucky fried chicken, because my great uncle loved it. It was pretty good, the first and only time I had it, I think. The landscape was beautiful around there.
There’s a great video of the flood, here.
It seems that South East Queensland Water has not covered itself in glory. It may even be partly responsible for covering Ipswich and Brisbane in water. Time will tell; maybe.
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/01/brisbane’s-man-made-flood-peak/#more-12840
On the video of the cars being washed away one by one there was an ad saying “Win a house in Australia”. They didn’t say where.
Great Barrier Reef.
If you can tolerate Germaine Greer’s irritating style, or maybe it’s her personality that irritates me, anyway, she’s written quite an interesting piece about the Q’land floods here.
The number of times Greer uses “I” and “my” in the first few paragraphs is indicative of something more than the need for an editor’s intervention.
Having visited Brisbane (not recently), where I have friends, I have been following the Australian situation with more than usual interest. I just read the Greer article and most of the comments and I have no problem with the use of “I” and “me”in the first paragraph and at the end, while the rest of the article is more general. There is nothing wrong with a journalist introducing an article with a personal experience of the situation written about – it is done all the time, and the first paragraph here gives a vivid impression of the difference between the usual gentle English rain and the irresistible violence of tropical rain. It would have been inappropriate to write the entire article in the same style as the first paragraph, but the personal approach was certainly not out of place in that first paragraph.
My friends (who mercifully live on high ground) wrote that the amount of soil in the water makes the clean up of houses and their contents very difficult, as the mud rapidly dries to the consistency of concrete, making it impossible to remove without using extremely high pressure machines.
I once had the chance to run Germaine Greer down with my bike as she swept imperiously across the road, indifferent to the interest and safety of every other road-user.
“The chance”?
I too read that it’s very muddy water, it’s washing away all the topsoil into the sea.