Aberdeenshire & London

 

 

P.S.  Although on my camera, I’m pretty sure the London picture was taken by my good friend, J.H.  (You know who you are.)

 

Me. Eleven years ago.

Yep. I’m on a postcard. Petting a cow. An Australian cow and an Australian postcard.

Did you know that I loved living in the outback so much that the man who is now my husband had to come to Australia to get me? It’s true. Umm…well…what I’ve just told you is actually the Disney version. Think of the real story of The Little Mermaid. And now picture the Disney version. Exactly. No way you’re getting the actual story out of me. All water under the bridge, right?

(Click on the photo above to be taken to Jacqueline Curley’s postcard website. If you wanted any of her postcards as an actual print, I’m pretty sure she’d be amenable to that. For a gander at the Curley’s Gipsy Plains stud website, click here. )

And this next one is the first postcard I bought when I was in Australia, never realising I’d actually live with and become friends with the lady, herself. (I’m talking about Jacqueline, people, not the cow.)

And see this last one? I’m on the horse in the middle. His name was Jim. I say ‘was’ because…well…he wasn’t exactly a spring chicken when I knew him eleven years ago.

Can you tell I don’t have a frickin’ clue what I’m doing? That’s me trying to get out of the way of the stampeding calves. Of course, by the time I left three months later, I was a dab hand. Those calves wouldn’t have had a chance if they’d tried that three months later. Me and Jim: we were like this.

 

Prepare to feel old.

If you read this blog, you’ll remember all of these.  You’re children won’t, but you will.

 

 

Gordon Highlanders at Castle Crathes and a Dog…

…or, Why I Love this Country.

 

No More Floor

I finished pulling up the floorboards in the croft-house last week, all except a narrow walkway along the middle length.

While pulling up the section of floor over what would have originally been the living room, I found that the underside of the boards were white-washed except where they were nailed onto the joists, meaning that the second story floor used to be the first story ceiling — in Canadian terms, that is.  In UK terms, the first story floor was the ground floor ceiling.  (That’s right.  Over here, the elevator buttons read: G, 1, 2, 3…  It makes no sense to me, but neither does the inside lane of a round-about being called the outside lane.  Caused a few fights between Graeme and me, that one did, during my driving lessons phase.)

I am really enjoying finding little quirks about the house that have been hidden for goodness knows how many years.  First there were the feedbags, and now the whitewash.  Another one is a wee fireplace on the South wall of the second story that was hidden behind these wall-boards (picture to come later).

What intrigues me about the underside of the floorboards, is that some of them were lined with newspaper and then nailed down.  Were some of the floorboards originally wall boards?  Why else would newspaper be glued to the board?  Why put all that work into something and then hide it? I’ll never know, I guess.  I do wish there was a date visible on the newsprint to help me with the timeline of the house, but no luck there.  An answer never did come back from the feed company about the likely date of the feedbags, so I keep hoping for something else that will help me nail things down in time.

 

 

The Boiling Point

Gas Combi(nation) Boiler – British

Mini Gas Boiler – Canadian

* * * * * * *

And, in looking up these photos, I found that if you Google ‘boiler’ under Images, image number ten may look familiar to a few of my Canadian friends:

If you’re too lazy to Google the image you can click on the picture to be taken to the webpage and have the secret revealed! (And you’ll also find a couple of good articles about a piece of the Canadian past.)

And for you GPS freaks the location is

N46°35.4222′
W084°17.0634′
(Thanks Matt.)