Salt and corrosion

Working quietly in the office this morning, I heard a shriek outside. Investigation revealed my mother standing in the garden.

"It just missed me!" she said, pointing at a broken hen's egg on the ground next to her.

"But where did it come from?"

"The crow! It was flying over when I came out and I must have startled it and it dropped the egg it was holding."

So that was unexpected.

Spring, and this week the lawn is littered with tiny, empty eggshells. Incy ones, white with speckles: sparrows. Thumbnail-sized pale blue ones: starlings. Slightly larger, green with brown speckles: blackbirds.

I was going to say, chocolate with a toy inside: Kinder Surprise, but they wouldn't be on the lawn, would they?

The cat enclosure is a big net that cordons off the patio and part of the garden so His Lordship can enjoy the outdoors in safety. It keeps him in and keeps the birds out (of his reach). Usually.

I got up the other morning and looked out the kitchen window to see Alistair sitting in the middle of the patio, head swivelling wildly as he watched five sparrows fluttering from one side of the garden to the other. So many birds he didn't know which one to stalk first, poor lamb. I put him inside and opened the gates and shooed them all out.

And then I spent the rest of the day and the day after that and the day after that doing the same thing. Usually just one at a time, mostly sparrows, but also one finch. Sparrows tend to look the same, but I've noticed that one of them has a distinctive white feather on his right wing. I've had to let him out seven times over the last two days. Now when I hear a whirr of wings and metallic rattle (the sound of White Wing landing on the net), it's my signal to make sure Alistair is asleep (or pick him up if he's prowling about), open the gate and wait for White Wing to swoop out — which he does very quickly, because he's worked out where the gate is. Which is clever of him, but I'd rather he worked out how not to get in.

When I go for my walks on the beach, there are often caravans or camper vans in the car park. They're not meant to stay there overnight, but obviously they do rather than pay camping fees in the caravan park next door. Tsk. Anyway, this morning there was a van there, and when I went down the steps, there were two people in sleeping bags on the beach. It was warm last night, I suppose, so it would have been quite nice to sleep there. I wouldn't though, because the midges would be all over them. It was worse than that, though, because when I came back, the two slightly baffled looking people were sitting up, completely surrounded by about twenty hungry seagulls.

In today's paper was a baby called Jaxon David Norman Brian, Brian being his surname. How weird that he has three perfectly reasonable names and not one of them is the one he will be called by.

I went to visit my mother today, and her partner John was looking particularly pleased. My mother has bought him a new hat. It's a baseball cap to wear when he goes into the space under the house, they explained. Very nice, but wouldn't his old baseball cap do just as well for that? No, John told me, because... he touched the cap and headlights came on (his is tan, not camouflage). As the packaging says, it has 'stealth LEDs in the brim'. I'm sure we'll all be wearing them this time next year.

One thing I have discovered about having a Kindle is that it is forcing me to read books. Meaning, all the way through. What I find happens with a lot of fiction is that I will read about a third of the book before my attention starts to wander, me being less enamoured of the characters than the author. What I do then is read the last chapter, to find out if the ending is interesting enough for me to want to get to there from where I am currently mired. Only you can't really do that with a Kindle, so I have to make the decision there and then: do I plough on or do I stop? Oh, the pressure.

It's not just forcing me to read all the way through, either; it's forcing me to read more thoroughly. I tend to skip poems (or songs or dream sequences), only to have to flick back later on when I realise that the poem contained vital information. It's a pain to do that with the Kindle, so I have to read them as I find them.

One thing that concerns me, although it hasn't happened yet, is if I ever read a book that has a map at the front. How would I manage that? I suppose I could open the file on the computer and print a screen shot of the map for reference.

Anyway, the book I am currently reading in between chapters of Chocolate Wars is The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton. This is one where I had to make the stay or go decision, because the book does seem to be taking an unnecessarily long time to get to the point. I chose to stay, but it was a close-run thing.

The book is about five generations of women in the same family, and it's jumping about between their lives, as the modern-day woman is trying to unravel the stories of the older ones. That's all right: each chapter very clear what year it is and who is the subject. The problem for me is that it starts trying to explain one unusual event and just keeps getting bigger. In the late nineteenth century there is Georgiana, the high-spirited minor aristocrat who runs away from home and has illegitimate twins and dies a pauper, and her mousy companion, Adeline, who marries Georgiana's creepy, possibly incestuous, brother. In 1900, we have Georgiana's orphaned daughter, Eliza, who sees her twin brother stamped to death by a runaway horse before being threatened with the workhouse just before being kidnapped and taken 'home' to Adeline and her fragile daughter, Rose. In 1913, Eliza goes missing, Rose and her husband die in a train crash and Rose's daughter, Ivory, dies of scarlet fever… except she doesn't, because, in fact, she accidentally boards a ship while playing with Eliza and ends up, at four years old, alone in Australia, where she is adopted by a friendly harbour master and renamed Nell. In 1975, Nell, who married an American and has now returned to Australia as an elderly widow, wants to return to England to find out about her past, only to have her plans thwarted when her wayward adult daughter, Lesley, runs away leaving Nell in charge of her ten-year-old grand-daughter, Cassandra. Finally, in 2005, Cassandra is trying to get the bottom of it all. I was going along with it all, until I got to the bit halfway in where we discover that Cassandra is moody and withdrawn not because she was abandoned by her mother nor because her grandmother has just died, but also because her husband and their young son died in a car crash and the only reason they were out driving was to give her an hour alone to sketch. That was the point where I said aloud, 'Oh, come on!' There can be such a thing as too much happening at once.

Unlike my life, which has been very quiet this week.

Day 31. Monster quilt


( Days 32 - 37 )

( Extras )

Unstable Cliff sounds like a person.

A baby sparrow has spent the day perched in the avocado tree, chirping madly.

My house smells of gingerbread and mangoes and hot pink lilies.

My mother and John arrived for lunch just as I was filling in a quiet moment by taking photos of a gingerbread man in the garden. As you do.

According to the ABC news, Christmas in early nineteenth century Australia was celebrated by eating ham and cockatoo pie.

I had a mishap with some green food dye. It got in under the top of the nail and cuticle of my right ring finger. I've got a bright green circle around the nail and no amount of scrubbing will get it off.

For Christmas, I got a large, framed photo of a man looking at a listing shipwreck. This isn't the photo, but it's a similar sort of thing. I love it: 'Let's go look at the shipwreck, chaps! We'll take a picnic and make a day of it!'

I also got a lovely bag in bright pink and orange and green leather, and Professor Layton and Pandora's Box, which will keep me quiet for the rest of the day.

And it wouldn't be Christmas without bad jokes from the bonbons, so here are mine:

Q. What do lawyers wear to court?
A. Lawsuits

Q. What did the winner of the race lose?
A. His breath.

Is it possible that they are getting worse with every passing year?

Our day is winding down (we're into the long, lazy afternoon part of it), but for those who are just starting, merry Christmas! And now I'm going to have a slice of pavlova topped with raspberries and strawberries and cream. Would anyone else like some?

Today while I was out and about I ran into a friend of my mother's, who recently fell off a ladder and dislocated both shoulders. Both arms are in slings. How awful (and awkward) would that be?

I have been given five questions by land_girl, and here are my responses. Feel free to ask for some of your own, etc., etc.

1. 5 things you like about your job

1. The Limbs and Things catalogue. Today I worked with a tray of twenty rubber ears sitting on the desk next to me, spread out in a tray like a butterfly collection.
2. It's non-profit. The world is a better place with us in it. (To be honest, I think the the world would manage to struggle on without us).
3. My colleagues, even the one who occasionally drives me up the wall.
4. There is nothing more satisfying than when I run my BAS report (which shows any goods & services tax we owe the government, plus any tax from employee wages) and it adds up perfectly. Data entry is boring, but the outcome is beautiful.
5. I have freedom to choose what I do and when, within reason. This is particularly welcome after doing timesheets in five-minute increments when I worked in an accounting practice.

2. What you are wearing, and why

Grey suit trousers, an asymmetrical black mesh tunic (one side's just past my knee, the other is mid-thigh), a normal-length olive mesh top over that, black man-style lace-ups, a wooden pendant shaped like a fox and my black-framed glasses that make me look intelligent (and/or pretentious). I'm wearing this because I'm not long home from work and haven't changed out of my work clothes yet.

3. What you would miss about Australia if you weren't there

Waking up to magpie song. I couldn't find a video that does justice to just how loud they are.

My friendly neighbourhood magpies are having a bit of a sing as I type this.

4. Make, do or mend?

I like making and doing, although I am not fast, so I couldn't, say, whip up a make-shift rocket to blast my way out of a bank vault in an emergency (should the need ever arise). My making and doing is more about luxury items in that respect.

I grew up on a farm and I think that has had a huge impact on the way I approach things: reusing and repurposing, rather than throwing them out. Although, having said that, I think I keep too many things, and it is nice to have shiny new things. So, yes, I try to find a balance.

I mend clothes in the sense that I'll replace a button or stitch up a hem that's come undone, but I refuse to darn socks. Life is too short: buy some new ones and use the old ones to tie up the tomato plants.

5. Describe your nearest Sunday afternoon walk

Leave my house, turn left, walk up the hill and down the other side and turn right. Go under the railway bridge. From there, you can go straight ahead and meander through the old cemetery, or cross the road to the recreation reserve by the river bank. Either way, it's but a short-ish walk from there to the bridge or the beach at the river mouth. It's all very picturesque, but mostly uphill on the way back.

As I was walking over to get the paper this morning, I passed two baby magpies lying dead on the footpath. They seemed too small to be out of the nest, but I didn't look closer than that. On the way back, there was an adult magpie in the tree above them, making sad little calls. So that got the day off to a depressing start.

I've been getting a lot of spam recently from someone called Trip Van Noopen, who is apparently keen to tell me all about The Plight of the Grey Wolves. That's a step up from my usual spam. Back to normal today, though: I received an email that asked if I was at all concerned about my thinning eyebrows. Er, no, I'm not, but thanks for asking, spammer.

Also, I've just started a new bottle of shampoo, apparently made by L'Oréal's Random Bolding and Hyperbole Division. It features a NEW Light Reflecting BOOSTER and TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION: PEARL PROTEIN. This is what the back of the bottle says:

Instantly the micro-splits of the hair cuticle are more even. Smoother, the surface of the hair captures and reflects the light better. Perfectly nourished, the hair fibre becomes stronger and soft to the tough. Your hair looks revived.

Not just revived (sorry, revived), though: apparently I can look forward to PROVEN RESULTS of MIRROR SHINE, CASHMERE TOUCH. I... I can't even imagine what that would look like on hair.

Oh, and finally, thanks to a recent discussion with rickfan37, I found my old links to these two pages: balaclavas and hats. Do take a moment out of your day to savour them.

It's the first weekend in September, and that means Port Fairy's annual book fair is on. I made my way around the bay after breakfast and spent a top hour browsing the second-hand book sale in the Port Fairy hall. I wasn't looking for anything in particular, just whatever grabbed my attention. And what grabbed my attention was a 1967 book called Australia's Music: Themes of a New Society by Roger Covell, which will come in handy for my paper about the national anthem debate. This book was written ten years before the vexed national anthem issue was finally decided; here's what Roger had to say about the song that eventually won:

( I don't think he likes it )

I also saw a shelf containing twelve pristine copies of Law on Water: A History of the Port Philip Bay Water Police (1838-1900) and its Administrators, but, oddly, I wasn't at all tempted to buy even one copy.

After the sale, I went to an exhibition of original illustrations by Shaun Tan, which were brilliant (mostly from Tales from Outer Suburbia and The Arrival, if you're looking at that website). The entry price to the exhibition included a ticket in a raffle to win a signed print of one of the illustrations, which would be nice but I won't hold my breath. Then I took a stroll down to the civic green to watch some of the Barbara Cartland Hurl, in which competitors dress up like Barbara Cartland (well... they put on flowing pink robes and dodgy wigs; lurid pink lipstick optional) and read a short passage from one of that lady's many fine works, before throwing the book as far as they can (winners judged on artistic merit and distance thrown). I got there in time to see one lady throw her book like a javelin; it went way off course and only missed the woman running the local primary school's fund-raising sausage sizzle because she saw it in time and ducked.

Between Port Fairy and Warrnambool is dairy land and I saw plenty of calves on the way there and back, including one that was so new it was still struggling to its feet. On the way back, I went for a quick flit around the Tower Hill State Reserve. Thirty seconds in and I saw Mr Emu with a flock of stripey emu chicks straggling behind him, which was very cute. There were also plenty of fairy wrens and firetails darting about the road. All in all, a good morning.

And it was made even better when I got home and read the paper. There was an improbable story in it the other day about a family that was terrorised by a possum. A woman and her three children were apparently trapped in their car for three hours and had to call the police to come and rescue them. Possums are small, shy, nocturnal creatures, so it is extremely unlikely that one would spend an afternoon 'threatening' a family without some sort of provocation. We had a fun morning at work laughing at it. And we weren't the only ones: today's paper had a letter from a man declaring that it was the funniest thing he'd seen in the paper since the time they illustrated an article about destructive winds with a photo of an overturned rubbish bin. I wish I'd seen that.

I don't usually recall my dreams, but I was jolted awake last night by the sound of a cat coughing up a furball and had a distinct and vivid memory of a voice saying "four plus three is the same as three plus four because addition is commutative". No wonder my subconscious doesn't bother remembering dreams if they're that boring.

Hoppy the one-legged magpie landed on the lawn yesterday afternoon, over three weeks since I last saw him. He was quite skittish, and before I could bring him some celebratory oats three other magpies* chased him off again. I'm quite sad about that; I'd rather have him than the others.



* Collectively known as a tiding. :-)