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Wednesday, 06 January 2010 23:49 |
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There are so many spiders in our house & garden we considered renaming it "spider cottage" for a while! I'm going to stick some of the weird and wonderful ones I've seen on this page for posterity.
Woodlouse Spider (found 06/01/10):
I found a cool-looking spider on the floor of our kitchen today. It had a brick-red thorax and legs and a yellow abdomen and I'd never seen one like it before so I duly went on the web to find out if it was indigenous to Ireland - seemed unlikely with the crazy colours - but it turns out it is! Its a woodlouse spider and feeds exclusively on Woodlice which is why it has such huge jaws. According to wikipedia and The BBC the jaws are big enough to bite humans but there's no venom. Seemingly they sleep by day and hunt by night under rotting logs and suchlike so humans rarely see them, so I'm pretty chuffed to have had the privilege. Below is a photo Aine took of him in a box on our kitchen counter: 
Its hard to see the detail of the spider in that photo (Aine was lamenting not having a macro lens for the camera) so here's one I found on the web of a Woodlouse Spider eating a Pill Woodlouse: 
And here's a photo I nicked from the BBC website that shows the crazy colours a little better:
They also have good shots on wildaboutbritain.co.uk, wildaboutbritain.co.uk again, and bugsandweeds.co.uk
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Thursday, 13 August 2009 17:00 |
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We recently bought two Soay Sheep to cut the grass in our 1/2 acre garden and everyone has been quizzing me about them so I thought I'd put them up on the web. When Áine was looking into the various options for our garden she had a hard time finding anyone who had simply used them as lawnmowers so hopefully this will help someone.
Massey (left) and Ferguson; our two live-in lawnmowers
Executive Summary:
For those of you who aren't bothered reading all this and just want to know whether you should buy Soay Sheep to mow the lawn the answer is: YES! They are tiny, almost zero maintenance, can be very entertaining, and most importantly of all they do a fantastic job. So if you have a half acre buy two of them and wave farewell to your lawnmower-pushing days. Make sure you buy Soays though, as other breeds are far more labour intensive, less hardy, and do more damage to your garden.
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Friday, 15 May 2009 23:50 |
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We recently got Solar Panels installed by Activ8 Energies, and since a lot of people are asking me about them I figured posting photos was easiest. I was well impressed with the Activ8 lads to be honest, in and out in a day and very clean. If you ring them for a quote tell them you saw the sign in Loughshinny! =) (Oh, and if you can't find their website you might be making the same mistake as I did and spelling their name as Active8, not Activ8)
Photos below: |
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Monday, 06 April 2009 17:49 |
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A previous company were chucking out an old Northern Telecom wall-mounted rotary telephone so I brought it home and stuck it in my games room. The idea was that I would hear the phone ringing when the volume on the XBox360 was cranked up to ninety (as it invariably was when I was home alone and my wife was trying to ring), as the phone has an old-fashioned bell ringer. The only slight fly in the ointment was that this vintage phone didn't ring. |
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