More Frost, New Year Tidying Up

A frosty morning but clear skies after the greyness of the past few days. we had a fall of snow on Wednesday night but it had all gone by Friday which was a day of miserable cold rain.
Walking the dogs this morning was lovely, with the landscape silvered and silent broken only by the crowing of a neighbour's cockerel which rang out clearly across the valley
Yesterday was reasonably bright and the Farmer & Younger Son were off beating again with the dogs and came home later than usual having had a good day with lots of good food at the end of it.

This time last year we were gearing up for lambing and the sheep were in. This year we are not lambing until March so the daily work load is a little easier not having to take the ewes out to the field or having to feed them in the poly-tunnel.
Work is continuing on the new shed which has almost reached completion and it will soon be filled up with machinery, straw and calf pens I think.

The house is now back to normal having taken down the Christmas tree on Twelfth Night and cleared away all signs of the festive season.
The start of a new year is a good time for a general clear out of the mountains of paper that accumulate in the office and on the kitchen table (which to seems to be an extension of the office!) and so I spent an afternoon armed with a bin bag going though 'stuff'. Do we really need to keep back numbers of the 'Farmer's Weekly' for the past year & the little scraps of paper with anonymous telephone numbers or cryptic messages about machine parts scribbled on them? But then one comes across another tatty bit of paper with a long lost address on it or a recipe torn out of 'The Field' for doing something interesting with game birds and windfall apples, so they are kept to form the base of the 2011 mountain of 'useful' bits of paper and it was ever thus.

We have a busy week ahead of us with a tv. film crew arriving for three days to film a project that should be very interesting & fun (I will keep you posted) as well as the usual round of farming and family life. I just hope we do not have horrible weather for the filming, it just makes everything more difficult, contending with a morass of mud & soggy kit.