Kittens - July 6th, 2006

Kits gave birth to four kittens this morning. All except one kitten are well.

The Tornado - July 17, 2006

So this is why I have started this section, but it was a bit of excitement anyway, given that tornados are a fairly rare occurrence around Longford. We have just had our meadows mown and it was a scorching hot day - hitting around 29C. The theory is that the high reflectivity of the ground spawned this off.

We were sitting inside and all of a sudden a children's play tent - luckily empty of children - shot about 200 feet into the air and started spinning round. There wasn't a bit of wind anywhere else. It stayed up for about 30 seconds while I ran for the camera. Then it dropped into the next field, dawdled there for a while. Then as the cows came to investigate, it shot up again. It was eventually dropped beside the road about 500 m away.

I managed to shoot two reasonable pictures of this. These are in our miscellaneous gallery.

The Flying Tent