Green caramel

Yesterday morning I woke up at about 3am with the wind and rain lashing the windows, resulting in a dash to the landing window to see if my plastic greenhouse had been blown into the next county. It was fine, as were the ducks and bunnies as I shone my torch down to them. I then realised the power was off, and it remained so until about 10am. Nothing like the prospect of no morning tea to make one appreciate electricity!

Today was bright and cold, and I decided to let the ducks out for a leg and wing stretch, and some water play in the big tub. I've finished administering antibiotics to Jean but her husband has not forgiven me for such flagrant disregard for duck protocol and now shows me who's boss by waddling up and tugging at my boot or trouser leg; quite brave of him given he is only slightly larger than my boot.

The plastic sacks are an attempt to protect my grass! Needless to say, although they have the run of the garden, they prefer to gloat to the other ducks that are shut in:

We went swimming this morning and then this afternoon was spent at home. Tristan did his Latin homework and the girls made a cake. It was meant to be a graffiti cake which has squiggles of caramel around the edge but my ability to make anything to do with burnt sugar is still coming in at a big fat zero, and the fact we only had green food colouring didn't help:

Exactly. It didn't taste any better than it looked I'm afraid so we ended up with something remarkably like a Victoria sponge:

The rain we had the previous day has really helped the crop in the field - there's now a green haze in the parts that were drilled first:

Rose joined me in the garden and brought her favourite hen, Peggy, out for a cuddle:

Luckily Peggy is very accommodating although the cuddle bit didn't last long.

Tristan's Blitzen hat is coming along well:

So I'm hoping to get it finished in the next few days. My new OU course officially starts in a few weeks so I'd like to finish some of the more urgent projects before it does. Although I am about to put in a yarn order with Stash! :-)