A song for you: The King of the Boars

This song is based on two boar stories.

One of the boars is Twrch Trwyth from Welsh Mythology.


The other is Torc Triath from Irish Mythology.

Were they the same boar?  I posited so in this song!  

Autumn catch-ups

At last the weather is turning towards coolness.   Things are going on as normal around here, though I am just getting over a crappy cold of snotness.

The chookies are having a nice life as usual. Guinevere went broody again, and since none of her fertile eggs survived the heat while she was sitting, I bought her four day olds. Three Silver-spangled Hamburgs and one white Cochin, which were what the local stockfeeder had hatching that day. I like Cochins, but I think Hamburgs might be a bit flighty for me, so we'll see how they go.

At any rate Guinevere is happy, though she only has three now because one chick died two days after arriving. It was a very hot day. I gave them an ice bottle but Guinevere isn't the smartest chook and she didn't take them over to it.  She's a sweet mama, though.

Morgana and her singleton child Mordred are still hanging out together.  Luckily she hasn't gone back to broody again!  Mordred is quite pretty, a cross of Silver-laced Wyandotte and black Australorp, and a hen thank goodness!       

 

As usual, the dogs and cat are hard at work.

You can see these two are related!  :D 

I've been playing lyre and guitar pretty much every day (till I got sick).  I'm getting a few songs up to scratch ready to join in Bardic circles when we go over to South Australia for Damh the Bard and Cerri's concerts and camp. Weeeee!

We bought a caravan and have been getting it set up to drive across the Nullabor. We've never done it, and it seems like something every Aussie should do once, so we're going to do it.  It's a Jayco penguin camper.  I really like Jaycos and it is the thing we looked at that didn't smell of outgassing plastics.
   
The biggest hassle has been trying to remove all the left over perfumes in it.  We've had to buy new foam to put in the mattress and kitchen seats because the one that was in them had some hideous chemical in it to keep it fresh.  Bleagh.  What a toxic world we are creating. The new foam is European standard and has no chemical outgassing or perfumes in it.  Thank goodness!  This chemical sensitivity drives me nuts.

Not that i had far to go to get there, as the next photo shows.

That's me embroidering my design on my ceremonial tabard.  Jarrah leaves and blossom one side, oak leaves and acorns the other, and the Awen in the middle with the colours of blue for Bard, Goldy-brown for Druid and Green for Ovate.  i love it now it's done but I will not be taking up embroidery for a hobby!  Head torch, 2.5 times glasses, and still I tired my eyeballs out.

Kitty liked to help me. Help me not embroider!  
               

Other current projects include a t-shirt design for the Druids of WA group.  We put out the call for anyone in the group to design a shirt, and i figure someone else will make a more serious one, so I let myself be as twee as i wanted, and this is the result.  Now being watercoloured.

Black swan,  black cockatoo, blue wren, and a non-gendered druid.   :)

We had a fun games night here not long before I got the snots. This pic came just before Thor crashed the Jenga pile.  We'd already played three games of Forbidden Desert by then and died every time. Apparently the five player version is very hard to win, so we didn't feel too bad.

I'll leave you with these pics of a creepy place I found when walking a local reserve I'd found in the street directory.  Turned out it was a whole big old granite quarry area, now abandoned, and it was one of those really weird moments to come upon it all out there when I'd expected just ordinary bush.

It had very odd energy and i found myself Druidly blessing the torn up land, and blessing the restless spirits of those who had laboured here, perhaps the convicts who built the railway lines in the area.    

This was the deep and black lagoon I came across.  A hole cut while chasing the dark granite into the ground, and now full of black water even so late in a dry summer.  It reminded me of nothing so much as the pool at the gates of Moria.  Brrr!   Didn't even dip a toe!   

 
  

Me bad!

How do you go from blogging twice a week to blogging never in a few short months?  I dunno.  I am still saving photos, but not blogging.   I know I'm going to regret it down the track because I forget stuff and this blog makes me remember it, and take photos of life too.  I like that about blogging.

Ah well, we'll see. Maybe my holiday has done me good. In the meantime, here's the pics I've been collecting...

Druidy meditations with the help of a kitty.  It is not conducive to concentration when a cat comes and sits on you and peers under your hood to make sure it is you before settling in to purr.  

Pretty Cyrano. 

Me blacking out at a burn.  Those Xanthorrea really go up, but soon they sprout new greenery and away they go again. 

Photo taken by local paper to add a local element to an article about a show on cable tv called Bushfire Wars.  Our shire and brigade were part of episode 2.  We were actually blacking out a fire when they came to take the pic, so we were authentically grubby.  Yes that's me dead centre.  Only lady on the fireground at the time!  

At a training day, slacking off in the back of the truck. 

Blacking out at a hazard reduciton burn with our wonderful new brigade.

Andrew crew leading on our first fire call of the summer. 

Andrew trying to find the Oxfam trailwalker trail as a crew safety support officer.

My three new Sussex bandits, Blue the Light Sussex, Powder and Puff the Coronation Sussex.  

My way cool new chook shed built almost totally by me!  

Mama guinevere and her singleton chick, a rooster of course. 

That is one scary fierce mama gaze!

Art, of the back yard.  

What i found next to my ear on the back of the shed door when i peered in looking for something one day.  

Jarrah blossom on a tree I planted some years ago. 

The sun setting high above perth at the oxfam trailwalk. 

Neighbours' bonfire, with high winds, in dry spring conditions.   Yep, horizontal flames are ok aren't they? (Answer: NO!) 

Pretty sunset over perth. 

Tuppy in the cone of shame after having a cyst removed from her eyelid.  It looks great now!

More drawing practice.

Gorgeous wildflowers on Perth scarp.

May you all have a lovely Christmas season, no matter what you call it, and to my Druid friends, I wish a very merry and fruitful Alban Hefin! 

Here's your gift from me, a new story.  It is not Christmassy at all, and yet somehow it is.  I hope you enjoy it!  It's called Mistress Munchkin & the Plutonium Dragon. 

 

Fun with olden daysy stuff

We've been having a good time today messing around with the ways I want to treat my two lyres, which are currently at this stage:

 Holes all drilled for the zither pins to go in to hold the strings.  Phew that was a bit of a mind bender but with Roo's help it got done.

As I said before, I want to use watercolour stain on one and then paint on it, and kolrosing on the other.

I think both will work!

The blue stain is just to die for, and the kolrosing is so lovely.  It is amazing how, once oiled and burnished, you can't feel the scratches full of cocoa or coffee or cinnamon any more.  They become once more a part of the wood, and yet they stay dark!

Andyroo made these while messing around deciding which of our tools worked best and which dark powder to rub in for best effect. How cool are they?

So, I will go ahead and do both as I'd planned, so long as the varnish over the watercolour stain and paint works.

It will be easy to slip during the scratching of the kolrose design, but I think a little roughness is part of the charm of such an ancient technique.

The blue-painted one will now be the boar one, Torc. With 8 strings, it isn't traditional anyway, so it might as well be fully modern, and with six strings, Fréowine will be more trad in style.

Torc's design currently looks like this: 

I'm still not quite sure how it will look when on the lyre.  More working out to do yet on colour use, line work compared to solid spaces, etc.

In other oldy-timey news, we got a couple of photos that were taken at the Norse storytelling night.  I just adore them, especially the one of us both!

They're dark but that suits the theme of the evening.  We off to another one soon, this one about medieval tales of King Arthur's court.  I'm really looking forward to it, especially since some more of our druid mates will be coming too!

          

Chickens and Lyres

Ah well only one day late this time!

I finally got a couple of better pics of my chookie babies...

Pellinore and Guinevere

  All five about to make a hasty exit off the table because Rover has arrived!

Rover looks a bit scruffy.  She has been moulting lately.  She's still terrifying if you are a baby chookie!

Eeeek!  Flee! Flee!

The self-seeded fig tree out by the front gate has been attracting plenty of birds.  (And Tinas!  Yum!)  This morning there were quite a few 28's (Ring necked parrots) eating figs as we came back from our dog walk, and later it was full of magpies instead!

Can you see the 28 in the fig tree?  (I'm guessing 'she' because she has a pinkish area above her beak where the boys are blue.)   She stayed back when the others flew away because her fig was just too good.  They are mostly green with a yellow band round the neck, black head, and some blue, black and aqua in the wing feathers and a blue tail.  They are quite common, but I still appreciate their varied calls and beauty.         

Here you go, I zoomed the pic above for you and changed the colours so she shows up.

Their bright colouring is surprisingly good camouflage.  They are colloquially known as 28's because their alarm call sounds like they are shouting, "Twenty-Eight! Twenty-eight! Twenty-eight!"

Fréowine is going to be surprisingly bright too.  I am eyeing off watercolour dying for this second lyre.  It might be going to be blue, if the test-dying of the wood looks good.  The soundboard is safely trimmed and now I am at the sanding stage.  I still don't know what design is going to be on it.

My marvelous OBOD Ovate tutor, Mike, who just happens to know Anglo-Saxon, tells me that Fréowine translates directly as 'wine friend,' meaning someone you would go drinking with.  I think that is a great name for a lyre, but what decoration does it call for?

Am trying to justify the expense (to myself) of buying a pyrography pen for doing the design work this time!

 
 Or should I try to do Kolrosing, scratching the wood, then filling with charcoal, oil and wax, as was done on the original Trossingen Lyre?  Each new thing to learn is always interesting!

     
This image comes from the site of Michael J King, whose pattern we are using to make my Sutton Hoo Lyres.  One day I will try making a Trossingen and a Kravik style one too!  He is always helpful to people 'doing it themselves'!

I am enjoying the music of this artist, fellow Druid Gwilym Morus, right at this moment, as I type:

So peaceful and hypnotic, a little bit wistful and then suddenly full of optimism, mostly sung in Welsh.  This album, Awena, is currently free to download.

So generous!  If you download his music and enjoy it, please do buy some more, or plug it to your friends!

     

Bad Bad Blogger!

I don't know, I was so good for more than two years, writing two posts every week.  Now all of a sudden I've fallen off the wagon!

It's not that my life is being boring, far from it.  I just don't seem to find time to do it.  I'll be better, I promise. 

So this week, we have had a Norse storytelling night at a local sound temple.  It was great!  Someone took a photo of us but now have no idea who took it or how to get it off them!  D'oh!

We also came home from that to a lot of branches from a large Bushy Yate tree that had fallen over on the chook pen and dome!  Yikes!  Our Firey mates came over first thing and worked so fast that I didn't get a chance to take a photo of the downed branches, but here is the poor squashed chook dome with what is left of the offending tree in the background. It still has an equal number of branches to dump next time it feels like it.  We may have to take it out totally before we bother fixing the chook pen.  Sorry tree! 

           
Here we are posed in front of the propped up remnants.  It is working fine with a few additions of pillars inside, cut from the insulting tree branches themselves!   Best news is that every single chook escaped that event unscathed even though they were all asleep in there when it went over!
Amazing!

From L to R: Smutty, Fast Attack Brock, Dave the photo guy, Tigger (Jen), Thor and Blaze.
(Yes, Smutty is me.  Blaze is Andrew.  We jokingly gave each other those nicknames after a particularly grubby fire.)    

 
We called mum into the pic because she made us yummy cake!

Our favourite Lieutenant, Angus, was there too but he took off to walk his dog, Harley, before weekend scheds started, so he missed being immortalised.   Here is his orange-clad backside hard at work, though, just to prove he was there. (Don't you hate bloggers and their cameras?  :D)

As you can see, the fence took a beating as well, but the sturdy gate we put in some years ago with jack-hammered holes into the rock has stood firm!

Last week mum and I took a 'cut lunch and a water bag,' as they say, and did a big drive north and west of the hills to visit mum's cousin, Lorraine.  A couple of other cousins came along too in Greggy and Cheryl, plus spouses and two second (?) cousins in myself and Lorraine's son, Andrew.  We have a lovely family.  So jolly and funny.  Short, though.  Definitely short. 

My two new lyres are coming along.  Both have now been clamped and glued and have their soundboards.

Torc

Fréowine

 
Yes it used nearly every clamp we had to do just one of them at a time.  If you don't clamp a lot,  you might get gaps.

Torc has also been trimmed of extra soundboard and sanded ready for the next stage, which is perhaps drilling the holes for the tuning pins, and for the tailpiece to attach to, or perhaps putting on the design.  Not sure yet.  The design for this one will, of course, be a boar to match its name.

Rosie caught in the hole of the lyre while wandering by.  Nice work, me!

All smooth and boxy!

Do you see the baby chickens up on the compost bins behind Fréowine?

I swear to you, I've taken dozens of pics trying to get good ones of these little wrigglers, and it should be easy since they are forever underfoot, but I barely have even a half decent one.  Baby rooster, not sure which one but quite dark so maybe Sir Grummore. 

Baby rooster showing his growing hackle feathers and cute little puffy baby rooster tail.  Looks smallish so maybe Sir Ector.  I'm going to get them leg bands, because I need to see who it is who has been having goes at my feet so I know who ISN'T staying! (And who gets picked up and humiliatingly cuddled for his pains.) When you see the boys all together you can tell them apart, but not one at a time.  

 

 

I met my sis, Jen, at a local cafe for lunch on Sunday.  We were in the beautiful garden of Mojo Cafe in Mundaring, and it was lovely, including these adorable two lassies who were playing piano accordion duets for us.  My fave tune was the one from the movie, Amelie.  It always evokes whimsy, quirkiness, and happiness for me!  

See you on Friday.  (I promise!)