Happy Canada Day!

We are not Canadian, but at least once a year we like to pretend we are.

We spent the first two years of our married life living in Alberta and also own a Canadian dog... Clearly this is reason enough to jump on the bandwagon and celebrate a nation other than our own's national day.

Every year we like to baffle a new selection of neighbours with a patriotic flag display and liberal distribution of maple flavoured treats. In Cyprus we still had some of our old BATUS colleagues to help authenticate our celebrations, but this year we are lone lunatics in the middle of the Scottish Highlands.

I'd like to think that should we ever decide to move countries, points will be awarded on our immigration application for the diligence we have shown celebrating the nation's birthday, as well as the (frankly ludicrous) number of Canadian flags we own and the gallons of maple syrup we consume each year.

Talking of which, maple syrup is also quite obviously an obligatory ingredient in anything you choose to bake to mark Canada Day. This year I picked banana and maple syrup muffins, topped with a rush order of toothpick Canadian Flags. You don't have to be as tenuously Canadian as we are to enjoy them, so if you have the time and the ingredients I urge you to give the recipe a try, as my Canadian friends would say, it's awesome.

Margaret's quilt

After too many distractions, my first quilt of this year is finished. As I hinted in an earlier post there is a bit of a story attached to the making of this quilt.

I have made it for my HypnoBirthing coach, Margaret. Many years ago, before I had even met my husband, somewhere online, or in the papers, I came across the idea of hypnotherapy being used in natural birthing and I decided when my time came, I too would use it.

Many years and countries have passed us by since I first heard of it and with each new posting I have researched where the courses were available locally, just in case. Sometimes great distances would have been involved, sometimes the prices were high, but always there was a way we could have made it work - just. But our baby knew a thing or two, and it decided to wait till we got to Scotland, just 10 minutes down the road from a HypnoBirthing coach, before it would be born.

Margaret is a retired midwife with a great gift for making people feel at ease. The midwifery team locally know her well and fully support her method of teaching and everyone I have met who knows her, responds with a great deal of enthusiasm when her name is mentioned.

Where my official care has been a little haphazard (partly due to moving countries, partly due to the modern NHS) Margaret has provided some old-school consistency of care. We've had 5 classes with her (and another couple) and will have another one shortly before the baby is due. I have also asked, and I am hoping, that she will also be able to attend the birth.

I won't know for some weeks if the HypnoBirthing will deliver the calm easy birth that it promises, but I do know that I have enjoyed every minute of the course and that we are both better informed and more confident for having attended it, so this quilt is just a small way of saying thank you. 

Now the quilt-related info...

This is a single size quilt, made with Moda Arcadia charm squares and cream cotton, in half square triangles and it's bordered with Ecru linen. It's actually exactly the same fabric and squares as this quilt, I have just arranged the blocks in a different way. I have a circle quilt I'm working on next, but I think I'll be coming back to half square triangles for the quilt after next, they are so verstaile and easy to work with.

Summer... at last.

Yesterday my new home and I had a little bit of a falling out...

While nearly the whole of the UK was basking in sunshine, in Northern Scotland it poured with rain... all day.

And although there is more to life than good weather, it's hard not to be a little glum when it feels like everyone else is enjoying a party you haven't been invited to.

The radio, the newspapers and facebook were full of stories of people enjoying the sunshine further south, while we looked out of the windows and only saw grey skies and deepening puddles.

In London it was 30c and on the Moray Firth it topped out at 15c.

But this morning something magical happened. My husband awoke me with the words "It's a beautiful day outside" and he wasn't (as I thought initially) being ironic! The skies were blue, the temperature had risen and Scotland was having a day of summer!

I grabbed the camera and headed down to the beautiful beach at Hopeman, just along the coast from us. The sea was shimmering in the sunlight, the beach was deserted and dotted along the shore was a brilliant rainbow of beach huts.

A few hours of sunshine and Scotland and I are friends once more!

Doggy update

A few weeks ago I told you the story of the dog behaviourist who visited us to try and sort out a problem we were having with our pups.  Since arriving in Scotland we have been able to give the dogs a great deal more freedom off the lead, but we were increasingly finding they would run off at great speed with no regard for us, and then it would take us up to an hour to get them back.

The dog behaviourist recommended trying to reclaim our position as head of the pack by making the dogs make eye contact with us before they take their food, and by walking through the door first. She also told us to monitor the dog's excitement levels, only letting them off the lead when they were calm and to change direction when we were walking, recalling the dogs as we did so.

A lot of this advice was useful and effective, even if it did result in a lot of very teenage like behaviour from our Big Dog, who was the ring leader, and did not want to reliquish her position as boss of the pack! She started refusing to come in from the garden, destroyed one of our sofa cushions and sat around the house sighing a lot! As a final measure we also bought a remote control pressured air collar which has been brilliantly effective and both dogs quickly worked out to return to us when they hear it beep and before we have to squirt them with air.

All the training and the collar means I can now happily take both dogs for a fairly stress free walk without worrying about them ending up in the middle of a main road (as they did a few weeks ago) but there was one small problem... When we walk them on the beach, we can't use the collar in case it gets wet, but with their behaviour so much improved, last week we thought we'd risk it...

At first there were no problems, they ran around diving into the sea and climbing up the sand dunes, burning off lots of energy and returning to us frequently...

And then suddenly the madness took hold of Big Dog! She realised she was free, and that ahead of her lay miles and miles of sandy coastline, so she started running and she didn't stop...

We thought she was still in the dunes, so paced backwards and forwards calling for her. Eventually after an hour with no success, we had no choice but to come home. A fretful couple of hours hours later, we had a phonecall from a man who had been out looking for his own lost dogs and had discovered Macy, FIVE MILES down the coast in the middle of a (thankfully inactive) rifle range!!

She was apparently quite reluctant to be coaxed into the man's Land Rover and even less impressed when I turned up at his house to collect her. In her opinion she had been having a rather brilliant time until we all showed up to spoil her fun.

None of this is really entirely surprising when you consider Big Dog spent the first 3 months of her life living in a stable on a rural Albertan farm, while her mother spent her days running freely over the Canadian prairie... We have learned a lot about dogs since that day 3 years ago when we were blinded by her cute fluffy good looks...

...And clearly we have a bit more training still to do!

PS - Blogger has been having a few problems since I changed the URL of this blog at the beginning of the month. The only way I can see to get round it is to stop following the blog, and then reselect "follow" on the top right of this page, you should then get the new posts appearing in your reading list.

Some Scottish sights...

No photos of a finished quilt yet, I have been distracted this week by visitors and runaway dogs! I think the runaway dog story probably deserves a post entirely of it's own, so I'll save that tale for later, but still lots to tell...

On Friday we took our first boat trip on Scotland's famous Loch Ness and saw the ruins of Urquhart Castle. It's by this ruin that the majority of Loch Ness monster sightings occur, but sadly Nessie didn't come out to play for us on this particular day, maybe next time...

 

This trip happened to be Bella the Beagle's first time on a boat, and she decided to use the opportunity to make friends with a family of German tourists... All those sad puppy dog eyes and cute looks, it was really quite shameless!

Yesterday we stayed closer to home and walked along the old railway track between Elgin & Lossiemouth. The track was ripped out 45 years ago, but there is still 5 miles of dead straight deserted gravel pathway that takes us from our home to the coast.

The track was closed as a result of a massive overhaul of the UK's railways in the 1960s. Over a period of 10 years about 4,000 miles of track and 3,000 stations were closed across Britain to cut costs. There are abandoned tracks like these all over the British Isles in various states of decay. It's quite eerie that this one looks like the sleepers and track were only removed yesterday.

When we arrived in Lossiemouth we were treated to a military parade in honour of Armed Forces Day. We vaguely knew that the parade was coming through the town, but not that they would be marching right past the table we were having lunch at...

And then my old friends the Red Arrows did a display over the Moray Firth for us. This must be about the thirtieth time I have seen them this year. The skies weren't as blue as Cyprus, but I did manage to inject some colour into the photo, thanks to some spectators!

Our visitors have left today and so we have a bundle of washing and housework to get on with, then tomorrow it's on with the quilt binding.... Some results this week I promise!