Having procured pine shavings today I replaced some of the dirty straw in the quail run with a nice deep layer of shavings. I hope Glee and Fliss enjoy it. Also stapled back on the plastic roofing that came adrift in the gales yesterday. All between rain showers.
Well, all the smart birds were snugged up in their little beds while I was trying to watch for them today. Wind, rain, cold are not conducive to bird activity. I did see 1 hawk, 3 magpies and a black-backed gull. A group of 5 birds rocketed by so fast I couldn’t identify them. 🐦
Even though the weather’s rotten I’m doing my bit this afternoon for the NZ Garden Bird Survey. There are worse things to do on a cold rainy day than look out the window and hope to spot some birds.
Maybe I’ll spot a ring-necked pheasant like this one from April 2020.
And here we have what seems to have become a daily power cut post. 🤨
Yay. 😒 Winds gusting to almost 80 Kph and the power’s gone out. I presume a line has come down somewhere. Outage looks quite widespread.
So much rain over the weekend localised flooding closed a couple of roads. The Waikawa Beach river’s running very swift — we had 43mm rain (1.6 inches), but up in the hills they surely had a heap more. The river has also managed to breach the sandbar and flow directly to the sea.
Lovely! Loaded up the dishwasher, turned it on and a moment later there was a loud pop and the house went dark. It was just us — the dishwasher seems to have blown up. We had trouble with it recently and tried to buy a new better one but supplies are short… 🦠
Last night we drove to Palmerston North to celebrate Deb’s recent birthday. Arranged Marriage provided delicious meals from the Kerala region of India. I had:
chicken cooked in fresh spinach and cashews ground together then sautéed with roasted garam masala and turmeric.
Yum.
On this cool, grey, rainy day we had our 15th International Breakfast : Churros. Yum! They were light and airy fingerfood. As usual we had to improvise a bit: an icing bag with no special nozzle, milk instead of heavy cream. It’d be interesting to add chilli to the chocolate.
It’s a Big Cuddle day for Oshi. 🐶
Hmmm, coming later in 2021 is NCIS: Hawaii:
NCIS: Hawaii stars Vanessa Lachey as Special Agent in Charge Jane Tennant, Yasmine Al-Bustami as Lucy, Jason Antoon as Ernie, and Noah Mills as Jesse.
I’ve always enjoyed NCIS (original). I mostly sorta like NCIS: LA. NCIS: NO is 🤔.
I check the global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions every morning. Today’s map shows an amazing air stream that flows down from the sub-tropics, across Aotearoa New Zealand and then right down to the Southern Ocean.
What a great short read: Send in the Bugs. The Michelangelos Need Cleaning.
The team washed [Night’s] hair with Pseudomonas stutzeri CONC11, a bacterium isolated from the waste of a tannery near Naples …
The local Canada Geese seem to be stirred up by the full moon. They’re flying around honking mightily. Volume up.
I watched the documentary Lift Like A Girl
On a busy, noisy high-traffic street corner in Alexandria, Egypt, a seemingly vacant corner lot surrounded by chain link fencing is the training site of Egypt’s most elite champions – female weightlifters.
👍 🎬
I can understand why an online film festival like Doc Edge Festival 2021 needs to know my birthdate but why on earth was I required to select a gender? As a matter of principal and as an objection I selected Other.
I thought I’d give Arepa de Queso a try. I had a few glitches, like forgetting the oil till a later step, having the heat too high so it’s a bit burnt / raw, wrong kinds of cheese. Worth a try though. Plus, perhaps I should have flattened them more.
I suspect this is a slightly more distant neighbour’s cat. Such a beauty! A very hasty photo through the window as it turned back for a moment while running away.
Dammit. A Covid+ traveller spent time in Wellington last weekend, so now Wellington region has to move to Alert Level 2. Luckily we live outside the region, but Deb works in Wellington several days per week. Fingers crossed there has been no community transmission.
This 6 minute Tom Scott video is well worth a watch: History forgot these old fireworks. We recreated them.
Around the old mining areas of North Wales, you find rock cannon: old Welsh firework sites. Most of the world has never heard of them: so we recreated them
🧨
