Baa!

I had a hard decision - to post more snow or not today! Most of the snow is gone, but there are quite a few patches up the hill out of the sun where it is still over a foot deep - I know because I sank into it! But here are some of the hold out escaped sheep hiding in the woods behind Catacol Farm. I suspect it's the same ones we avoided up the Glen two weeks ago.

Coming through Lochranza yesterday there were lambs, which I was surprised to see, it's a bit early for this part of the island. My sister said there have been quite a few early lambs, and not all are making it, we think because their mothers have been so stressed out by the snow and couldn't get enough food, so are weak and can't give enough milk, especially for twins. Lochranza sheep aren't in fields, but roam around so in the snow it will have been very difficult for the farmer to find them and get decent feed to them even once the road was passable again. The sheep at Catacol are all last year's lambs, so sadly there aren't any cute wee lambs in the fields here. The farmers in Shiskine and their sheep have had an even worse time, with the huge drifts there meaning the loss of a lot of animals.

My mum's neighbour came down to her holiday house yesterday to find that she had no electricity. When they put Catacol on generator power, the generator was so small the engineers just took the mains fuses out of the unoccupied houses to limit consumption as it kept tripping the generator when they were trying to get it working at first. When we went back on the mains they replaced them, but they seem to have forgotten that one house, so an engineer was out within about half an hour (at 9pm) to plug it in and get everything checked. It is a good thing it was this person, who had no problem with what had been done, and would actually have been quite happy to have waited until today to be reconnected, and not one or two other holiday home owners. I was hearing that one of the other holiday home owners was furious when he heard that his house had been disconnected, even though he wasn't there at the time. If no-one had told him he'd have been none the wiser because it had been reconnected before he came down. He got precisely zilch sympathy from the locals who had spent 5 days without power while they actually were in their houses!

It has been nice to be home, but am heading back up this evening, so it'll be a civilisation blip of some kind tomorrow.