Salt and corrosion

This morning I put some Milo in a mug and got the milk out of the fridge, then went away while the kettle boiled. I was away for a while, I suppose, making the bed and putting away laundry, then I thought the kettle should be nearly boiled, so I came back out to the kitchen. And found...

A full, steaming mug of Milo. No milk bottle. And no kettle.

It was all very strange. I found the milk in the fridge and I was standing with it in the kitchen feeling, like the police so frequently are, baffled, when my mother appeared in the garden, waving at me with one hand and swinging the kettle about the other.

It turned out she had come in the back door while I was at the front of the house, found the kettle boiling, made my hot drink, put the milk away and taken the kettle out to pour boiling water on some weeds that she had seen growing in the driveway. Which solved the mystery, but is quite sobering. What if she'd been a burglar? She could have stolen my kettle and I wouldn't have known a thing.

In other news, the Australian dollar is very nearly equal to the US dollar for the first time ever. Woo! When it finally gets there, I am having a parity party at Amazon.com to celebrate.

For the last week or so, I've been hearing snatches of "Greensleeves" on the wind, played in that unmistakable Mr Whippy van chime. Only I haven't actually seen a Mr Whippy van anywhere. So where's it coming from, hmm?

It just occurred to me that Mr Whippy might not be a global company (and in case it isn't, I should say it's a mobile ice cream van franchise), so I googled and came to the official Australian Mr Whippy site, which has a capital letter-filled page devoted to how there is actually only ONE Mr Whippy van in Australia and all the rest are IMPOSTORS called Mr Wippy or Mr Hippy or Mr Yippy or Mr You Get the Picture-ippy and the public should stop calling them Mr Whippy AT ONCE because the REAL Mr Whippy van is an environmentally and health conscious alternative to the other OLD-FASHIONED VANS. And that may be the funniest thing I've read ALL WEEK.

Ahem. So, collections (sorry, parcels) of birds. Some of them are quite negative, aren't they? An unkindness of ravens, a murder of crows, a piteousness of doves, a darkening of jackdaws, a quarrel of starlings, a siege of bitterns, a dread of terns, a scold of jays, a trembling of finches, a deceit of lapwings... balanced out by the exultation of larks and shimmering of hummingbirds, I suppose. And now I've put my collective noun collection away, so that's the last you'll hear of them, I promise (although anyone asking what to call a group of rattlesnakes or weasels would not be disappointed).

I've lost a mandarin. I remember picking one up this morning - and I know I did, because there were three mandarins in the fruit bowl and now there are only two - but then when I was ready for my Mid-Afternoon Mandarin I couldn't find it. It wasn't in my lunchbox and it wasn't in my bag and it wasn't anywhere on my person. Hmph.

So after work I kept an eye out for any flashes of orange on the footpath between my office and the car park, and I made a thorough search of my car and, when I got home, of the kitchen and nearby rooms, and I still haven't found it. I think it's fallen through a gap in the space-time continuum. That's the only possible explanation.