Anniversary

We forgot to celebrate our 1 year anniversary, I guess we are not very celebratory people: I’m not known for liking parties that much and Hannes isn’t one to care about dates… (it’s not as bad as it sounds) Although we are aware of the achievements these past 12 months: we moved in, Hannes built a kitchen, a barn, a cheese kitchen, renovated the guest apartments, we take care of a dog, sheep and goats, I found pastures for them, I made cheese, we were well booked all season long… It was a perfect start seeing that most of this was breaking new ground for us.

But a sense of normality has also gotten hold of us, and so sometimes I’m suddenly overwhelmed by the realisation that this is exactly where I want to be for now or rather what I want to do… It’s hard to to put into words and obviously we have our ups and downs, (my) family and friends are not always around and it can get lonely, but it’s all worth it for the experience of gazing over a landscape of fields and woods, over the setting sun on the lagoon, wild geese and cranes flying over our heads, our (!) little herd happily grazing and begging for cuddles, and Kasimir running around hunting an imaginary mouse… and this almost every day in another shade. That’s pretty close to my recipe for happiness

Winter has come upon us again, although it hasn’t frozen yet and I’ve been able to keep the animals outside in the orchard until now. Jean-Claude has taken up his duties with the sheep with a lot of enthusiasm and verve. He gets along very well with the goats too (they are probably more fun than the sheep), a little too well sometimes, but apparently that shouldn’t be a problem: sheep and goats rarely manage to produce offspring or ‘geeps’. We failed however to recognise when Ursule was ready to fall in love, turns out we missed the symptoms: wagging of the tail, repetitive bleating (although ‘meckern’ in german gives you a much better idea of what it sounds like) and encouraging behaviour… This should happen for 1 day every three weeks from appr. September to December. On that day you need to recognise the situation in the morning, transport her 1,5hour to the ram and hope that she is not too traumatised after that to still be interested in males, then drive her back on the same day… I must admit that that plan was not well thought through. So now we’ve arranged for the girls to go on a 3week holiday at the goat farm where we bought them, the ram there is now available and will probably be more competent in recognising what to do than we were. This also means that we’ll have to wait for the month of May before having the kids, and that’s a bit late in the year…

Hannes has reconstructed a scene of WW1 for the 1914 anniversary we now have a trench across the whole garden… he is laying out the pipes and wires for water and electricity to the barn and to one of his new projects: ‘the garden house’. This should serve as a useful and simple guestroom for friends and family who want to stay for a longer while in summer and potentially also for a Wwoofer (willing workers on organic farms) starting next spring. We’ve officially been taken up in the German Wwoof-network so hopefully we’ll attract plenty of willing workers! This might also be increasingly necessary as I am now working part-time at the University as (surprise surprise) EU-caseofficer for EU funded research projects. We’ll see how I manage to combine everything once the milk-season starts again…

That’s all folks!