Introducing Scooter

Or Scoots, for short, the newest member of our little family. He's a purebred moggy we adopted a little over a fortnight ago from the Lonsdale RSPCA.

At about six months old he's still very kitteney and a complete menace to house plants (see exhibits A and B), but possibly also the most affectionate cat I've ever met.

Exhibit A: Cat in Norfolk Island bird's nest fern. Prime perching position in the bathroom, apparently.

Exhibit B: I quite liked this little Dracaena, and it was doing quite well from a $3 Ikea pot. Now sadly diminished.

Being a cat-loving Greenie, I intend to keep him inside most of the time; the birds have only recently started visiting our garden (now that there is shelter out there for them) and I've been enjoying watching them: the cheeky magpies, impossibly beautiful rainbow lorikeets, and adorable silvereyes. Scooter can enjoy watching them, too... from the living room window.

Poor Poss!

FIL has been busily removing the old wall cladding on our little cottage, and the stuff under the eaves too, and look what he found when he took out the piece from the corner of our bedroom!


Actually, I must confess I didn't take that photo. I found it on the Internet over here, at a gallery by Ákos Lumnitzer. My own photo, frantically taken by my phone which I happened to have in my pocket, is of a blurred furry possum bottom with white-tipped tail retreating into the distance along the fence. It's a cute bottom, though.

So as I was saying, FIL was taking off the cladding/ceiling stuff from the eaves, and as he pulled down a big piece he found a little ringtail possum, and the remains of it's grassy drey, sitting petrified in the middle of the board. It had frozen on the spot - as you would, if your house suddenly dropped out into daylight beneath you - so he was able to carry it down the ladder and take the whole lot over to the shrubbery, where the creature sprang back into life. He (or she) paused for a few moments to take stock - while I snapped my picture - probably thinking 'WTF just happened?' and then trundled away into the neighbour's yard (he picked the yard with all the bushes and trees, so a good one I think). But now I'm left thinking poor bugger, where is he going to go now? and that train of thought takes me to thinking about possum boxes, and where could I put one or two since we have no trees (yet) and if I put a box under the eaves would that tempt him back into the roof? - which we don't want since possums wear boots at night and go dancing - but maybe I could put one under the eaves of the shed which has no ceiling for a possum to build a nest in ... and so on. I really think that humans should be making spaces for wildlife to live in, since we've taken so much of it away already.

A garden for birds

I have been trying to photograph the Firetails that hang out just outside the kitchen window. Firetails are small, very fidgety birds, and needless to say, none of my pictures so far have been particularly fabulous. There are a couple of bird feeders outside the window, and they skitter into them, and skip about the wires, and scatter the seed into the violets below (there's a bit of alliteration for you!). Then they jump about in the undergrowth looking for the lost seeds.


They like to hang out in the fuchsia patch, the shrubbery gives them good protection and a safe roost. They don't actually nest here, I've never seen a nest anyway, but they must stay nearby somewhere since they are 'largely sedentary' (according to the link above).


Lorikeets have been visiting the bird feeding stations too. This photo is the best I could do. It's not such a bad shot of the feeding post, the hydrangeas and azaleas and the senescent wattle trees, but click on the photos and you'll see a larger version with brightly coloured blurs that represent the birds.


When I mentioned the bird feeders to a guy I worked with briefly a few years ago, an Uber-Greenie I didn't particularly like - unusual for me, since I like almost everybody - he smugly told me we shouldn't feed the birds but only provide water. To that I say, 'Sod You.' If birds come into our garden it seems only fair to me that we provide something for them to eat, since we've not left much natural habitat for them out beyond the fencelines.

Trouble shooting

Do you ever have plants that don't do well? That seem limp, flat and lifeless, or fail to grow? You wonder if it's a deficiency: not enough nitrogen, not enough sunlight, not enough water. But, perhaps it's not a deficiency at all. Perhaps something is in excess, like aphids, or mealy bugs, or scale . For example, you may have an excess of cats' bottoms in your plant pots.

[This has been tagged under wildlife, but this is Cally, MIL's cat, and she's not really wild, just grumpy.]

The Pile.

Time for a renovation update! A story in pictures tonight... lots and lots of pictures!
Over the last week, FIL has been busy building the formwork for the concrete footings. Our extension is not going to be built on a slab, but on 'bearers and joists' to match the older part of the house. This means that our formwork is in a big hollow rectangular shape up against the house.

So we arrived this morning and took our 'before' shots while we waited for the truck to arrive. 

 

Apparently, the truck was driven by a pirate. 

 FIL loaded up the bobcat scoop with the concrete and tipped it into the wheelbarrows.

 

 

And in went the first barrow load.

  

We had a bit of an issue with the formwork bowing...

So we frantically shored it up.

Even the pirate helped.

 

We used barrows and bobcats around the sides the truck couldn't access, 

and got our pirate to tip the concrete into the formwork directly on the driveway side.

A neighbour wandered in to see what all the noise was about

before high-tailing it over the fence (or, at least, he would have high-tailed if he had a tail to high...)

Then we decided not to take up any more of Cap'n Boral's time and unloaded the remaining concrete onto the driveway, thereby making a giant cow pat.

We smoothed it off; leaves drifted from the ash tree into our neat foundations.

While we cleaned up it began to rain. 

SP arrived to sign off on the job.

Company in the shower

Sometimes we forget that our houses are not impermeable, and that we have built them smack-bang in the middle of various habitats, so it's good to have a reminder from time to time of why we should be looking after the Earth in whatever small ways we can. My reminder came yesterday, when I found I was sharing my shower with a little friend. I got out, wrapped myself in towel, took a few happy snaps, rewet my hands, and then, gently gently gently, coaxed him onto my hand and took him back outside. Dear little Southern Brown Tree Frog, I hope you find our yard safe to stay in.

Ecology meets glamour.

I keep on seeing a blue tongue lizard in the garden. In fact, it seems to get around so much I am starting to wonder if there is actually more than one of them. Tonight I spotted it loitering under the agapanthus, and whipped inside and grabbed a bottle of 'My Chihuahua Bites,' by O.P.I., and dabbed a wee bit on it's back, so now whenever I see my scaly friend I'll know if there's more than one, or not. I hope it's a girl and it appreciates the colour.

(And I'm also hoping it will wear off eventually and I haven't given the poor bugger a permanent orange-red splodge. It's a very harassed lizard, I accidentally poured half a bucket of recycled laundry water over it tonight, not realising it was sitting in the strawberries).

Not the best photo, I expect she was annoyed and refused to face the camera for me.

More storms

The sky fell in over the weekend and we had more rain in one go than we've had in 10 years. Pretty damn cool, provided you were inside and not out in it. Our backyard was awash, fortunately our drainage is quite good (as you'd expect, considering we live on the side of a hill) and there's not left to show for it now apart from lovely damp soil, and some very happy plants. If it was warm, it would have felt like the tropics but, alas, it was icey cold at times. The hail was quite dramatic but didn't hang around long enough to get a photo.



During one of the brief dryer periods, I heard a crashing about along the fence line and went to investigate. I found we had a special fluffy-eared visitor, with a lovely white-splotched bottom and beautiful red-brown fur on his shoulders and the top of his head.