Birds in the gloom

It's a rather grey old winter day in Canberra. Has been for a while, and it's been grand to get the rain.

Last night DS came running in, saying there was an owl sitting on the clothesline. Hard to see in the dark, but he was right, more or less. Not an owl, but a tawny frogmouth, which feeds on small animals. Like frogs, I guess. Or at night in our back yard, mice eating the food scraps in the compost pile. During the day he would pretend to be part of an old dead tree and you could pass within a metre of him and not spot him.

Second is a couple of parrots from my bird feeder. Winter is a thin time for parrots, and they hunt out sources of food. They come in from the mountains for the comparitively rich pickings in Canberra and sometimes they don't go home again in the summer. Hence the great flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos.

( Photographs here, about half a meg total. )

King parrots

Quick note. Here are some King Parrots, feeding on the spilt grain. Male, female and juvenile all have different combinations of red and green, juveniles often having shaded or mottled regions in a transitory stage.

Getting up to date

First off, I thoroughly approve of a star for NetStation, as reported in the latest BookCrossing newsletter. Steve is AWESOME. A more generous, funny and friendly man it would be hard to find. He is loved by all, and rightly so.

It's Thursday and it's been a fairly dull and grey week.

Monday we sold a few shares. Our Asian Value Fund wasn't performing, and the P/E ratio of P&O wasn't what it could be. Had to post the certificates away for P&O. Actual stock certificates! Today we got the advice that our broker had received the certificates, so we sold them and bought a bunch of other stuff. Kerri really loves doing all the research for shares, which is more than I do.

Tuesday we hired a trailer, took a load of stuff to the dump - a couple of old metal bed frames, old boards and about a tonne of other stuff. I don't like throwing stuff out, but Kerri is ruthless. And we brought back a cubic metre of Eucalyptus mulch, to spread here and there. That was pretty much the day gone - they were having all sorts of problems at the dump and we had to wait a long time in a queue full of trucks.

Yesterday I dragged out the ladder, got on the roof and replaced a few tiles. We have a leak into the carport ceiling, and although there wasn't anything more than a couple of minor cracks, I replaced anything that looked like it might let water in. On the other side of the house there was one tile which was in about ten pieces, and another one missing a chunk, so I fixed those. All in all it's in pretty good nick. We got it repointed a couple of years back and the company employed these huge Pacific Islander fellows who broke more tiles than they fixed, just by walking around.

And today, well I haven't done much of anything except for a small BX support job which will presumably show up in the next newsletter. Just me adding a bit to someone else's hard work, really. And a support issue from a young lady who hadn't yet met pre-numbered labels. Not quite the thing to release books with these things in when they haven't been registered. A lot of people must catch a book, see the error message and give up.

Just to go off on my run. It's about as warm and sunny as it's going to get, which isn't saying a real lot!