Billhook

I am familiar with ticks so I do not think so. I would not be carrying on about this if it was not for the second lump appearing at the same time with different symptoms. The first wound was clear neat and the blood was clean and there was no pain ,swelling or redness. I was only aware of it visually. It scabbed then healed The second one I became aware of only when it started itching. There was no central point or bite mark and the skin was intact. Over the next few hours and area the size of a 5 p coin became raised and hard Nothing scabbed or burst and both have healed now. All this is good practice for the time when we can never see a doctor again and all consultations are done over the web!!

I was once driving my car when I felt something on my eyebrow, just a feather like touch. I raised my hand to brush it gently away and the terrible , blinding pain which followed caused me to swerve onto the verge and stop. Luckily it was a minor road with no traffic. I jumped out of the car expecting to find a wasp but nothing, no buzzing ,no insect but I did have two puncture marks on my eyebrow so I concluded that it was a spider. Took ages to heal.

No time for that to happen I would think as the itching started soon after I saw the nick with the blood. Also no wire around no blackthorn, no hogweed, some figwort but that is meant to be medicinal and used to cure scrophula or tuberculosis, hence its Latin name. A lot of fuss about nothing really but I was just interested to know if there was an insect that could anaesthetise the skin before depositing an egg. Anyway I will let you know if I have an alien popping out or you will hear about it on the news!

Blandford fly and Stone spider are both good calls, especially the former being around water at this time of year. The only problem is that I never felt anything bite me and it did not develop into anything bad such as the times when I have been bitten by Horse flies, Spiders and Ants. Giant hogweed I know is a devil if you have been strimming near it. Is it not called “The devil’s hand?”

Horrible grizzly hand result of years of arbwork ! The little scab at the finger end is the site of the initial nick and bleeding slightly now. There has never been anything but clear blood, no pus. The bleeding was not bad, just a gentle ooze same as a doctor would make taking a blood sample The pinky area an inch to the top of the photo at the wrist end was much more swollen but never any redder than you see there. The swelling felt hard but did not hurt and was never angry just itchy. The area that went hard would be the size of a 5p coin. All healing now but slowly

I went down to the lake to sit on a log with a colleague and drink a bottle of beer. He pointed at my hand and the blood that was seeping from a very small nick on my knuckle. I had absolutely no feeling of being snagged on a thorn or stung or bitten by an insect. Indeed there was little opportunity for this to happen on the short walk from the car to the bench The wound was very small and the cut looked as if it had been performed with a surgeons scalpel. I did not think anything of it apart from it being odd that I had not felt anything. When I arrived home I sprayed it with dry iodine powder. It did not heal normally and turned into a blister but there was no redness around the wound. Now there is a scab which looks ok but is taking more time than usual to go About two inches towards my wrist a small lump appeared which grew larger and itched like hell. The lump grew hard but was never red just itched. More iodine and both wounds have nearly healed I thought at one point that some parasitic wasp had laid an egg. Perhaps a spider bite could have injected some venom which anaesthetised my skin Anyone had anything similar?

However, blackbirds nests and eggs can be easily confused with Mistle Thrush nests and eggs Chris Grady Photography | Mistle Thrush WWW.CHRISGRADYPHOTOGRAPHY.CO.UK Chris Grady Photography

Also Thrushes line their nests with a layer of mud, whereas Blackbirds do not.

Song thrush eggs surely

Further search comes up with cowling controls JSTOR: Access Check WWW.JSTOR.ORG JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

How do I prove it?!

Classic Airedales

There are all different kinds of people at any age! A friend and I cut up some dry firewood for an old man in his village. He wanted a certain length and thickness for his stove so it took a bit longer to produce. The old fella took out a garden hose and started sprinkling the wood with water, said it made it last longer...............

So old and creaky now that I need a red hot Radox bath each evening to relax my aching muscles! Been very cold here in Lincolnshire with North NE and NW winds, even the swallows came and then disappeared shortly afterwards. Very few insects about. My wife lights the Aarrow Stratford each morning, so easy with the branch loggings after I have brought them in the night before together with enough firewood for the day. We both really enjoy the whole process. Wood heat is so easy to enjoy as you have done all the work and now is your reward, unlike oil, electric and gas where you will receive a big bill eventually for the same amount of heat!

If it came from around the engine, it could have been a shaft to control the cold/hot air intake flap.

Yes you are probably correct but copying these recommendations off the web, I cannot see many UK customers bothering to do all this. In America it is a way of life and I am sure people show their log piles to each other with a sense of pride To help season wood as fast as possible and to keep firewood dry in the winter, the firewood should be: Stacked up with one side of the logs fully exposed to the atmosphere. Located under some sort of overhang to provide cover to the wood for the majority of rainfall and snow. Placed on a dry and impermeable platform such as concrete, or raised off the ground The UK is a damp place in Winter compared to US and Scandinavia where it may be cold and snow a lot but much less rain and fog. My only hope for all firewood producers is that it will become so expensive to heat .yourself in the Winter using electricity, since coal and gas and oil will be banned in the name of Climate Change, that firewood again will become valuable and there will be a lot of pressure on the Government to make it easily available especially after a few power cuts have nailed a lot of the elderly and vulnerable.

I think we called it Lady’s Smock when we lived in Norfolk

Cuckoo Flower and Lesser Celandine both signs of May

The problem was worse if we had to sell the grain early to make way for more storage. To do this we used heat in the early days before we had enough grain store capacity . When we eventually built enough capacity we were able to dry the grain slowly over the Winter to benefit from higher prices in March/April. The initial blowing of air after harvest in a wet year would take the grain down from say 24% to 18/19% quite quickly . (It was very difficult to harvest grain at high moisture content without losses at the combine) This would prevent the grain from heating up as the cooling effect of the air was just as important as the drying. Because it was so wet we could keep the fans going even if the relative humidity was high to keep the grain cool. As it dried to below 18% we had to be careful not to run the fans with humid air so the fans were controlled automatically to hopefully reach the 15% which meant the grain could be safely stored with less worry of heating or pests. Later on there were vertical auger stirring systems which improved air flow and broke the layer of damp grain. This would work well with sawdust and woodchip but obviously not with firewood! You can see how quickly things heat up if you put your hand in a heap of lawn cuttings after a week or two. Yes I suppose blowing dry air would dry firewood a bit quicker but the cost would be huge and I am not sure it would have much more effect on the inner wood.than just leaving it to dry in the conventional way. So air coming in at below 70% RH will dry corn down to 15% and oilseed down to *% Bulk Storage Drying of Grain and Oilseeds (HGCA Topic Sheet No.16) ADLIB.EVERYSITE.CO.UK This is where I have some difficulty with these new rules on firewood moisture content. I do not sell wood to the public and the only way I can make any sense of firewood production is to use it myself after producing it with my own labour which I thoroughly enjoy (for some bizarre reason!) to save on gas, oil and electric heating. If I spent all this money to dry wood down to the required percentage and sold it to someone who stored it outside in a badly ventilated shed, and who lived in a damp hollow, the wood would soon take the moisture out of the air and become damp and the customer might then come back and complain to some inspectorate to fine me

I have three corn stores with Challow wooden fully vented floors which are not being used at the moment as the grain from the farm is taken away by the contractor to dry in his barn. Having operated these on floor stores for many years I would be surprised if they worked for wood especially wood in crates. I have never done so. Then there is the massive cost of running the fans (electric) let alone the cost of heating (gas? wood?) which I would have thought would come to more than the value of the wood. We never used heat ,just ambient air and it could take several weeks in which case you may be better just storing it in a Dutch barn with open sides When we had a wet harvest, if the corn was too deep ,say over eight feet and you were not too vigilant there might be a layer of wet corn gradually making its way up and eventually forming a bridge to block air flow. With oilseed rape we never stored it above four feet. Very important to have a relative humidity switch on the fan to prevent blowing wet air through. Wood chips, perhaps or even densely stacked firewood even more perhaps. Having said all this I would be interested to hear the result.

I was thinking that I should have offered it for the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral to save having that special one made. As a Sandringham Six made by Hotspur Cars of Sandringham the name would be correct and the crane would have helped the pallbearers!

Forget the Easy Start, just give the man on the handle a squirt of this!

Like this you mean, tipper as well as 3.5 V8 Stage 1

Goslings doing well on lake so far, they have a lot to deal with in the coming weeks, crows, magpies, stoats, mink, cats, foxes, hawks, buzzards maybe even pike.

Nah, it’s not dead it’s resting! There I saw it move