Smelly? Crikey yes! Hacked? ********!!!! = Yes!

So...  the 'smelly' bit first.

 

When I open the door to the cheese fridge I am met with a variety of smells,

none of them are 'oh let's have a jolly good whiff' though,

but most are bearable.

However......creeping in amongst the smell of aging wheels of cheese has been a horrid waft,

as if something is rotting, not well, unhappy.

 

 

Second shelf up from the bottom of the fridge,

the wheel of cheese on the right,

that is the stinker.

I am not exaggerating, horrid, that is the smell.

 

Worried in case the deceasing cheese was going to spoil the other cheeses,

Lester removed said cheese..

'You can't win em all' he said,

as with a flourish he cut the wheel in half to have a look.

 

 

 

...a Caerphilly type of cheese,

only two weeks old.

A taste then.

?

Oh crikey but it was gorgeous,

mild, sweet, slightly crumbly, very more-ish.

 

But why only two pieces on the plate?

Have we eaten the rest?

Nooooooo.

They are tucked away in the cheese fridge, all wrapped up, stored for future use.

 

 

My new bit of kit for the kitchen....a vacuum sealer.

 

....and the rest of the Caerphilly, all bagged up.

The cheese will not keep aging now it is sealed in the bags,

but it at least it will stay as it is, I hope.

As for the other pieces, they went into the other fridge, got forgotten about, were found a week later, and wow but that cheese had romped ahead with its maturing.

Cheese making? Takes ages but worth the effort.

 

So..........'Hacked'?

I do other things which I do not speak about on this blog, preferring to keep Snippets as a smallholder type of blog,

but this other work had a website, Aspects of Self.

It was huge, several hundred pages in content,

all written, designed, and built, by myself.

Anyway, the website got hacked in to,

and our host server said that they had to kill it off because it was now unsafe,

and oh what a blow that was,

and then I thought that perhaps the Universe was having a hand in this,

that for ages I had been having thoughts that perhaps the website was outdated,

that through all the ups and downs of the last eight years,

of learning to live at a basic level in caravans and a ruined house,

of having to be patient as we got a home back together again,

of learning to be smallholder and feed ourselves,

of learning to be more grounded and appreciate the simple things in life,

that I have moved past the person who built that site,

that the Universe knew this and just helped move me on.

Everything is for a reason,

there is a purpose behind everything that happens to us,

so I say goodbye to Aspects of Self,

and wait to see in what direction my other work is now to go in.

 

 

 

 .... and our river, the Adour, now getting full, but not full enough to come on to our land yet.

....and the Pyrenees in the distance.

(click on the photo to get a fuller view of those mountains)

 

Need to go do things,

lovely day here,

so things will dry out enough for the pigs to be let out to carry on with their 'Let's get the weeds dug up in the veg plot' project.

The sheep....we are still waiting the arrival of the first lambs. Since the culling of the flock last November and December the remaining sheep have been a bit 'off' with us, so hopefully they will cheer up soon once the lambs arrive.

And Boolie? He is still in good spirits, and in fact seems to have more energy lately than what he has had for a long time. The tumour on his ear continues to grow.

The chickens....they are still roosting up on the fig tree. They have got soaked, covered with frost, blown all over the place when the winds were blowing fiercely, but they are all still here.

The cows....... both have had artificial insemination again. Both are content, happy to stay indoors to eat and sleep the winter away. Lester put them out in the field the other day so they could stretch their legs. They were not impressed, and complained loudly all the day long about how cold, wet, and muddy it was, and 'When the hell are you going to bring us back indoors'....

 

 

Meanwhile, the day ahead is beckoning me,

so bye for now,

Vx