Lola at the Coffee House

kinda boring out in the barn, maybe Ill make a virtual visit to the cafe place and get a how sweet espresso.

6 more lambs toniight

I old timey days, the sheep were left out on the hillside, and the lambing went on unassisted. That's why the English went mad for fox hunting--they were protecting their investment.

90% of sheep will deliver unassisted. That last 10% includes those who must be aided because the lamb may have been too big, all the way to a few percentage wherein the lambs are presented back first or breech and tangled with the umbilicus.
I think weve seen em all.

Victorian Brits were never great herd managers , whereas the Spanish andNZ/ and AUssies are. Today, The industry tries to produce multiple births and we all know that controlling diet before and during gestation is a key (not genetics).

The wealth of England was founded on wool, but i'd agree that they weren't too solicitous for the welfare of their flocks. The Romans brought in other breeds to improve the quality and quantify of the wool produced. It remained a minor industry, however, until the 13th century. When Roman imperial control collapsed in the west in the 5th century, the southern part of what we call France became the industrial heartland of Europe, as the latifundia collapsed along with imperial authority. In Languedoc, and right across the southern portion of coastal western Europe, the production of wine, olive oil and wool made them rich. From northern Italy through to northeastern Spain, the majority of the wool of Europe was produced, along with large proportion of the olive oil and wine. But the Albigensian crusade in the early 13th century put a stop to that. The region never recovered its dominance. The production of wool cloth in Flanders grew dramatically in response to the unfilled demand, and England began to supply the wool that the Flemish demanded to meet their increased production. England grew rich, but they still left the flocks out on the hillsides. The fox kits born in later winter were fed by foxes and vixens who raided the flocks on the hillsides in the lambing season, and the kits born the previous spring began to hunt for themselves. The English response was to organize fox hunts in the autumn and winter. Now fox hunting has become a hieratic ritual--as Oscar Wilde had it, "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable."

HERES A GREAT ARTICLE FROM THE bRITSall about its ancient and modern sheep industry. We always have given the introduction of the Delane Merino breed to have resuscitated the waning wool industry in the late 1700;s. Wool for export was their ultimate resource and the Delane Merino ws the softest animal fibre known to that day. (Today only silk and alpaca/vicun'aare softer). Getting rid of kemp fibres rom the wool breeds was what the Australians and New Zealanders accomplished and then returned "soft wool" breeds to Britain. So having sheep on the hillsides" became a sizeable investment
There were quiet revolutions in developing the raw sheep product ever since the Romans liked Brit wool
http://www.sheepcentre.co.uk/wool.htm <br />

Today there are so many genetic developments in breed conformity that really soft wool is obtainable so easy, so all those "carpet breeds" like Romney, Karakul, Jacob, Suffolk and teeny wool staple breeds like HAmpshire etc, are no longer even wanted for wool production. (The armies take anything and then blend it with a weather proof cotton/wool blend for field clothing.
We still make carpets and wool felt industrial vbelts from KArakul and Romney.
Although most felts are mixed with lastic fibres.
Production of lambs to approach 200% is the difference between making it and losing money nowadays.

Im gonna take a shower anbd crash a bit, Ill take that to go.

PS, anybody who wants to know how to turn an outside barn or outbuilding (must have electrical service from the main house), into a wireless "node". Send me a PM and Ill give you the recipe.

Here's sheepy joke.

A good few years ago, I took my son (aged about 15) on a training hike (because he was going on a trip to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, but it's not necessary to know that in order to understand the joke) and it was a very cold,wet spring day.

There was a flock of sheep, newly shorn, shivering, huddled together and trying to get some shelter under a leafless tree, and looking very miserable indeed.

"Look at those sheep", said I, ever the observant father.

-"Yes", he replied, "They've lost the wool to live."

brilliant! brilliant!

Very good sheep info/hiking morning. Putting muddy boots in wash room and grabbing a nice large coffee with almond milk. Sitting down to read for a few minutes. Then I have to go run a boring and necessary errand.

"Average" in Tulsa can mean no snow one year and 20" the next. Year before last, we got 18" in one week. Add high winds, which are typical here, and you can get 5' drifts.

So nice to see the old place up and running again! I've missed it.

Well, Lola, I hope it is not as boring as reading about cups of coffee with slight variations in additives designed to clarify one's station in the class hierarchy, one's aesthetic tastes and one's likely reading material.

I do hope so because that's pure agony. A year from now somebody will be asking for coffee with 6 drops of WD 40 just to sound original.

What is the creative origin, the First Cause, of the errand. If young readers here knew that they might have a chance of avoiding boring and necessary errands and thus justify their presence on A2K.

And, in case you don't know, that is the question on which the plot of Titanic is based.

Perhaps you missed my explanation of the First Cause, being realistic I mean, of my writing this sentence. It is somewhere in bowels of this fiendish machine.

It was Tom Finney hitting the post with a penalty in the last minute with the score at 1--1. Which was a very unusual event.

has it been snowin?

brilliant!

evenin all.

i'll have a tea with a smidgen and a half of cotton wool please. and a toasted memory card with a side order of radiator please.

glad it's not just us that can't handle a bit of snow. at least everyone else is just as pathetic

Actually Jock, I'm old enough to remember how coffee was sold to us. It was when TV advertising first came in and countries like ours with no coffee of our own were targets for market penetration (if the sensitive here will excuse such a lewd expression), and American swish was exciting all the young girls. It became "smart". Coffee mornings came in. In suburbia. (see Daddy's Gone a Hunting by Penelope Gilliat.

If you looked into the long-standing Kardomah coffee house, now swept away, and into the Espresso bar when it first appeared you saw an entirely different type of female person. In the one there was solidity and aroma and discreet lighting and the conversation centred around stock prices, births, marriages and deaths and washing up liquids and in the other there was gleaming chrome, neon glare, froth and incessant chatter about how good the coffee was which translated into how smart they were for being sapped by a series of ads linking coffee to getting shagged by a handsome thirty-something chap in a quasi-romantic setting. Men were very slow to take up coffee. Still are I think.

Once TV arrived, and I saw it arrive, I'm that shagged-out, and especially after colour, the curtains began to close on a way of life. It was epochal. It was a way of life with good and bad sides to it but the good side has gone forever and the bad side can be avoided. Or hopefully so.

I would like a coffee please. Make it original, if you don't mind. No oil. Just the good stuff. Put some of that wd-40 on spendi's pate. Maybe it'll grow him some hair.

I have a good head of hair ed. I put it down to avoiding soap and barbers.

Lemme just try this....ahhhh....

....arrrgggghhhhh....

...somebody with a sick sense of humor put coffee in my coffee!