Meowch...

Oh dear I think we must have had summer. It’s definitely a lot cooler and wetter. So much so that the hosepipe ban might be lifted soon. So people will go back to their old water-wasting ways. 

We’re watching Springwatch again tonight and one of the topics they are chatting about is to do with cats and their propensity for catching ad despatching feathered critters. Funny how they don’t seem to mind about them catching small mammals.

A suggestion was to give the cats a curfew and keep them in overnight, as they are in some towns in Australia. It reminded us both of keeping cats in PNG. Several of our friends had pet cats and there is no way that they would let them outside. Well they could go outside in a fashion. The cats had a large almost room sized cage outside accessed from within the house by a caged in tunnel. This set up was more to protect the cat than the wildlife.

Behind our unit was a compound where a lot of the National hotel staff lived. We used to see lots of cats and quite a lot of kittens, who we thought must have found good homes because the feline population never seemed to get out of hand. How wrong could I have been?

One afternoon when I was having a quiet afternoon in with a good book I heard an awful screeching noise coming from the compound. I just had to put my book down to investigate. I was horrified to see a woman in the compound holding a cat by the scruff of its neck. She had the cat in one hand and was hitting it over the head with what looked like and axe with the other. Moggy was obviously destined for the pot. Oh dear it made me feel quite ill to think about the fate of the poor cat.

 But then I had to take a step back and think about the whole picture. I might not have approved of what she was doing but she was obviously feeding her family as any good mum would do.  Low local wages meant that food was quite expensive and in the end it was not much different to us rearing animals for our own consumption.

Meow tweet tweet

Back to work today after a four day weekend, hard transition. Thank goodness my back is so much better today.

A couple of weeks ago my local Starbucks closed its doors for renovation. Very clearly on the shutters that are enclosing the store frontage is a sign that says re opening on June 4h. What do I do this morning but go there to have my usual morning coffee and internet chat with family. What did I find? Well the signs are still up and the store is still closed. So back to my second choice store where not surprisingly no one knows when the store will re open. Goodness only knows what the staff are doing.

There is an interesting programme on TV called ‘Springwatch.’ It really appeals to me as it is about the critters and birds that live in the local garden. They have nest-cams and is lovely to see the baby birds growing day by day.

It reminds me of when my beloved Siamese discovered that a daft thrush had built its nest on an easily access able fence line.  Cat caught and dispatched one, and then another and then obviously fully fed caught the third and was playing with it on our front step when I went to investigate the noise. Unfortunately it was too late for that one, but when I heard the nose again I was quick enough to save it. So what to do with a helpless hardly feathered baby bird. My oldest daughter ably took on the role of surrogate Mum. Bird took up residence in of all things the cat cage (the one we used to take him to the vet in). Daughter did an excellent job and pretty soon bird had recovered from its feline ordeal and grew into a very handsome male. She would let it out regularly to exercise and when it was tired it would snuggle down in her hand or on a convenient lap.

As it grew she decided that it was time to introduce it to live food, so dug up some worms for a tasty meal. Daughter took bird from his cage and set him down on a few sheets of newspaper and popped  a wriggler down in front. Well it was so funny to see bird take fright at the sight of a tiny squirming worm. It did make us all laugh. Squeamish daughter had to cut the wriggler into segments to feed her baby. After a while bird got the idea and would scoff down the wriggly offering as fast as they were presented to it.

Now we were presented with a problem. In rescuing bird we had inadvertently removed its fear of humans and in fact pretty much everything that it should be wary of. What to do? If we released bird it would most certainly soon become a meal for something.

I remembered going to a bird show a few years before and seeing blackbirds and thrushes on display. A phone call to the local cage bird society led us on to one of their members who kept British songbirds. The bird fancier was pleased to give bird a new home in a spacious aviary and we were pleased to see it go to a safe home.

A walk in the park...

I have to be pretty pleased that we didn’t actually get away for the weekend. The weather has not been great and it would have been no fun at all to be tourists in the rain in York. Instead we have made a few future holiday bookings and no I’ll not be writing anything about them until they are absolutely definite.

Yesterday I gave my back a bit of a tweak and did wonder if it would upset my night’s sleep, but fortunately id didn’t. It’s bad enough that I don’t sleep that well anyway without adding to the reasons for me to wake up. It was a bit tricky getting out of bed, but once I started to move it got better. After a very late brekky we decided that a walk was the order of the afternoon and turned left out of our gate and kept going. Past, well almost past an old church and cemetery. I say almost because I find them just too hard to walk past. The Man and I wandered among the gravestones, stopping to read the stones. Many bearing the names of several children in the same family. Dying young in those days was pretty commonplace. I think it is sad that there is no one to take care of the stones and say their names aloud anymore. One very well cared for grave held the remains of a chap Called Robert Fitzroy who died in 1865. I looked him up on Google when we got home.

Briefly: On 25 June 1831 he was appointed commander of the Beagle, sparing no expense in fitting out the ship.Very conscious of the stressful loneliness of command...he approached someone in the British Admiralty…to find a suitable gentleman companion for the voyage.Such a companion should share his scientific tastes, make good use of the expedition's opportunities for naturalism research, dine with him as an equal, and provide a semblance of normal human friendship.Fitzroy eventually approved Charlie Darwin for the post.
 Not only that, he has a connection with NZ. Following the death of NZ’s first governor, Hobson, Fitzroy got the job. Commemorated in may place names, and  In 2010 NZ’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) named its new Supercomputor "Fitzroy" in his honour.

 Further along we found a very tranquil 

wooded park to wander through,

and in the middle was South Norwood Lake.

 It is man-made and was originally intended to

 feed water into a canal that inked Croydon with

 London. When the canal had passed its useful

 life it was filled in and became the railway line.

 The lake itself was pretty much neglected until

 a water sports body revitalised it in 1881.

 Now it is the home of many water birds

 and shares the water with the local sailing club.

Here on the left is The Man, enjoying a spot of bush walking

The Lake is a very pretty spot 

Home to lots of different waterfowl and their babies.

I spotted this interesting sign as we were leaving the park.

Game, tin and ouch...

Not much to write home about today. Another nice lie in this morning. I think these four day weekends are great, and  we still have another day to go. Woohoo. So today was a quiet one too. Started off wet so not really wanting to go out. Not yet anyway. After a late lunch it had cleared a bit so we donned jackets and grabbed the bag to pop around tot supermarket. Then we came home in a very roundabout way. Instead of turning left we turned right, on purpose to extend our walk and wandered down the hill, past a couple of very low key street parties. It was so wet yesterday that they must have been put off until today. Up ahead of us in one street we saw a group of five men playing what looked like some sort of dice game. Gambling perhaps I thought. I had to chuckle to myself as we walked past as they were actually well wrapped up in the kids board game of Ludo.

Then home for afternoon tea of coffee and chocolate fingers, yum I bought a commemorative tin of them. For the tin, really. Honest… well for the bikkies actually.

We did watch a bit of the jubilee concert, poor old Duke of E is unwell and missed it. The crowds in the Mall had to be seen to be believed. And it turned out to be a nice afternoon for them too.

We watched a very orange moon rise tonight. As orange as a street light , and it was full too. There is such  lot  pollution in the air that the moon has to get quite high in the sky before it appears its regular pale yellow.

Was putting something in freezer tonight and oh oh pain in the back. Couldn’t get up. The Man has been great and finished off getting tea. I’ve taken all the pills I can and have a  heat pack on it. Fingers crossed it is better by morning.

British Reign...

A right royal day for the UK. Why? The royal gent down the Thames to mark Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee. That’s an awful long time to hold down a job. Pretty rare by today's standards

Three years in the planning the river pageant the only  thing that was out of their control was the weather. And it rained. A remark by one of the commentators at the end of the TV broadcast said that the rain had in some way made it even more British.

The Man and I had excellent seats to watch the watery pageant sail past. No. Don’t be silly. There was no way either of us was going to be daft enough to get caught up in that kind of crowd. We watched it from the  comfort of our living room couch. 

And pleased we were that we did, it has rained all day and been quite chilly too. It would not have been very pleasant for the small watercraft  rowing along the Thames for several hours At least they didn’t have o contend with the strong tidal flow. Canute may not have been able to hold back the tide, but the  organizers of pageant succeeded, in the Thames at least. Working in conjunction with the maintenance crew at the Thames barrier the pageant organizers arranged for the once a year raising of the barrier to be done today. What a clever piece of forward planning. 

Thames Barrier on a lovely sunny day August 2010

Wavy box hedges in what must have been a waterway near the Thames barrier. The modern looking building it the background is actually  railway station

Lazy saturday...

The day didn’t start of very nicely weather wise so what better way to begin a long  bank holiday weekend than a sleep in and a snuggle with The Man.Very nice thank you.

With the routine housework out of the way it was high time that I put away the winter clothes, well most of them. Good opportunity to have  sort out too and put together an op shop bag.

After a nice lunch of spuds in their jackets we took the op shop bag to the closes charity shop, and horrors they are closing down. It is sad to see that high rents are driving  them out.

 Not only  that but the interior of  very favourite store where I bought my pretty painted giraffe was empty. Perhaps a refit we thought as a there were a couple of chaps working inside. But no they told us that the owner was moving to bigger premises. Good for him, but not us.

Oh well such is progress I suppose.  Good thing there is another charity shop around the block for us to leave our bag of goodies.  That done and feeling pleased with ourselves we topped up the grocery shopping, mushies for tomorrows cooked brekky and some fresh fruit. I store they were handing out red white and blue themed cakes, nomnomnom.

On to the library next. It was under threat of closure, but public opinion prevailed on the powers that be and there has been a stay of execution. It would be such a terrible shame to see it go.

I’ve been trying to get my head around Photoshop elements for ages without much luck on my own so today I gave in  and found a basic book in the library. We also bought a music CD of Norah Jones, which is playing as I write. I bought a movie as well. Haven’t had a great deal of luck with them lately, the titles I have chosen looked OK but some of the movies were pretty nasty. I thought The Last King of  Scotland might have been OK. It was not. It was about the dictator Idi Amin. Not a nice chap by any ones standards.

I think I have mentioned before that there is a jig saw in the lounge in our building that The Man has been slowly working away at. It’s about three-quarters done now so he bough a jigsaw from the library so that he will have something to progress on to

Planes trains and automobiles...not today...

Yesterday I booked, or thought I had booked a weekend away in York. I say thought I had because that is exactley right. This morning the girl at eh agency where I  booked phoned me all apologetic saying that due to technical problems what she thought were vacant seats on the train wee in fact not vacant at all. She did comment when I first spoke to her  that the website seemed to be experiencing problems. She was right. Seems as she was looking the website was being updated and those apparently vacant sets were actually filled. Oh dear how sad, never mind. I thinks she was expecting me to explode, which of course didn’t. She offered to search t see if there was somewhere else we could go, but phoned me just before lunch with the news that she couldn’t find anything.

It reminded me of when we were on our home from our last trip to the UK. We were checking in at the airport and the man just happened to comment that that would be the last we would see of our bags until we got home to NZ. NZ! The check in girl said, your  going to Hong Kong. No we said we re going via Hong kong to NZ. It was a multi page ticket and she hadn’t tuned the page. Well, The man was off like a shot to retrieve our luggage. Fortunately we were traveling with packs which had to go in the outsize luggage section and had only just been taken off in a trolley rather than going down the conveyor with the ordinary bags.  That done he returned to the check in and the poor girl behind the counter was so flustered and obviously upset at her mistake and fully expecting us to tear strips off her . Not even. We hadn’t lived in PNG for three years for nothing. Hey we said to her, we can still get on the plane, no harm done, we can still get on the plane. And we did. And she leaned a valuable lesson to turn the tickets over .