Friday 16 February 2018

Voldemort Lives!

This is a very exciting photo, allow me to explain.  You know how we call all our King Skinks Voldemort, they abound in our shed and woodpile.  But we have one special Voldemort that has lived inside this old settee that is just outside our bedroom window for about a year.  He/she has become relatively tame as I feed him (let's call him a he for simplicity) banana and he is quite used to our presence.  We aren't on touchy feely terms with him but he will happily allow us within a a couple of metres of him. 
 Anyway, just after Christmas, Paul and Sam were returning from the beach and they saw a great hullaballoo going on on the other side of the driveway.  There was a huge Wedgetailed eagle on the ground battling with Voldemort, and the eagle won, carrying him away to be devoured.  We were rather devastated about his, and mourned him for quite some time.  Well, look who's back!!  The skeptics among you will say that it is a different Voldemort, but we don't think so.  He came running up when I threw some banana and gobbled it up (it took me months to get him tame enough to do that), and he is behaving the same way as always, doing his cruise around the outside of the house, sunning himself in the same spot, so we are happy to say it is him, and the eagle grabbed one of his relatives.  Anyway, we are very happy to have a King skink back outside our bedroom window, giving Neo the shits....they have staring contests through the glass. :-) This photo shows Voldemort atop the settee and Gerald the girl magpie hanging out with him...she has learned there is food to be had when Voldemort is out.
 Speaking of birds, this is another exciting photo for us.  In case you are wondering, it is the bums of two female Red Eared Firetails, a beautiful little bird that fossicks on the ground but we rarely see them near the house.  So the fact that they were on the grass in the back garden makes us very happy indeed.
 This is yesterday's harvest.  The peaches have all but finished now, gosh that's been a treat.  We are starting to get some of the Italian Sugar Plums, the oval purple things.  They are often dried to make prunes apparently, ours are not lasting long enough for that ha ha.
 The peach on the left is from a small tree that blessed us with about 15 fruit.  It is an Elberta peach, a freestone yellow fleshed variety, and boy was it yummy.  The nectarine on the right is a white fleshed Goldmine variety, we got the grand total of two because we ran out of nets so the green parrots got into the heavily leafed tree and secretly scoffed the lot!
 Our friends Mel and Sheila came to stay this week, we have seen them for three years so it was lovely to catch up.  Here they are at the ever beautiful Shelley Beach Lookout.
 We drove down to the bottom of the cliff and had a wander on the beautiful Shelley Beach.  It really does have shells now, for quite a few years the shells disappeared, but there are huge piles of them here and there now.
 Such a lovely, photogenic beach it is.
 Back in the paddock we have the chicken who thinks she is a kangaroo once again.  She is so funny, she just loves hanging around with them.
Speaking of kangaroos, have I ever told about how I name them?  Their names are always very sensible, to do with how they look usually.
Lucy, the old girl, is so named because she has the most amazing, long, curled eyelashes, so she is named after Lucille Ball.
Patience, the slightly younger old girl is so named because she patiently waits outside our bedroom window every morning for a breakfast snack of a handful of rolled oats.
Growler, another female, is so named because she does!
Split, another female, is so named because her right ear is split in two from tip to base.
Elsa has a very faint, very long triangle on her forehead, it reminds me of an ice tower, so she is named after Elsa, a character from the movie Frozen.
Quirrell, another female, has two dots and a line on the back of her head that looks a bit like a face, so she is named after Professor Quirrell in Harry Potter, who had the face of Voldemort on the back of his head.
Rabbit, Lucy's daughter, is so named because she was the scrawniest joey we have ever seen and looked just like a rabbit.  She is easy to identify now because she is missing half an ear.
Julius, one of the dominant males, has a distinctive roman nose so he is named after Julius Caesar.
Floyd, one of the younger males, is very very beautiful so he is named after an American bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd.
Professor Moody had a punch up and had a revolting eye injury and now he has a distorted eyelid, so it seemed most apt to name him after the eye patched Prof Moody from Harry Potter.
The new, huge alpha male is called Ano.  He has an enormous body and a tiny head which reminds me of the cartoons of overly muscled men on steroids, so Ano is short for Anabolic Steroid Boy.
Nash is a two year old male who got himself caught up in wire when he was little.  My neighbour freed him and he thanked her by biting her, so Nash seemed an approriate name for him.
I will stop now although there are many more, but I thought you might be amused by the way my mind works.  :-)

Until next time xx

Wednesday 7 February 2018

The Moon, She Hid

Our attempt at losing weight continues.  We are trying to walk as much as we can, heading down to Cosy Corner at the crack of dawn some mornings.  This was last week, very early with rain clouds gathering, so beautiful.
 It brightened briefly as the morning progressed, the oyster catchers were scurrying around, waiting to see what the wave wash brought them.
 Then when we were at the furthest point of our walk, the heavens opened.  We got absolutely drenched.  It was rather fun actually although we had to take care with climbing back over the rocks....we laid bets as to which one of us would have to be airlifted with a broken leg, but fortunately we both remained unscathed.  Here we are back at home with Steve putting on his best unimpressed face ha ha
 A few days later it was the night of the super/blue/blood/eclipsing moon so we toddled off back to Cosy Corner about 7pm, admittedly with a generous lack of excitement as the whole day was really cloudy.  As expected there was a massive cloud bank completely covering any sign of the moon rising, but instead we were blessed with the beautiful sunset colours on the rain clouds.  We admired the photos of Perth people's view of the moon on the news the next day, you had a great view up there in the capital!
 Our garden continues to bring forth its harvest.  The runner beans are starting to tail off now, the tomatoes are just revving up, the rhubarb is a constant glut, the Bramley cooking apples were the first off the little tree, and our chickens continue to be marvelous girls and reliably give us 3 or 4 eggs a day.  The peaches came to an end last week, 10 kilos is nothing to be sneezed at!  The next tree with ripening fruit is the Italian Sugar plum...they are small, oval, purple fruit that are often dried to make prunes.  This is the first year we've had these so we are rather impatient for them to ripen!
 A big pot of rhubarb and Bramley apple stewing, yum!  Our diet dessert is a blob of this with a blog of home-made yogurt, very nice.
 For our records, photo of the water tank level at 1st February, just over half full.  It's going according to plan. 
Which is just as well as the *&%$# bore pump shat itself AGAIN, this time it wasn't iron bacteria like last year....we had just done a $200 water treatment to eradicate that.  No, this time a tiny piece of something that looked like fibrous root had got inside the submersible pump 50 metres underground, jammed in the impellers and wrecked a couple of them, causing the stupid thing to cease up.  It's just come back from the repair shop and is now behaving itself thank goodness. 
 The garden has coped with minimal watering whilst the stupid pump was away, the more delicate things got a sprinkle from the hose with rainwater.  I thought I'd take a photo of these lovely flowers.  Mum, do you remember giving me this plant as a gift about three years ago?  It's a dwarf Canna with beautiful, bright, orange flowers.  It sulked for the first two years and I thought it was going to die, but this year its roots must have found a nice spot underground as it has grown massively.  It's such a cheerful looking plant.
 I was messing around on Google Earth today, first time for a couple of years, and I was thrilled to see that our area has really up to date imagery.  We reckon this was only 3 months ago and we are mega impressed with all our bits and bobs around the place.  I told Steve he should be well proud of himself with all his construction and fencing, it looks great hey!
Until next time.... xx