HAPPY NEW WEEK!
Last week's chat thread is HERE.
I hope everyone has a wonderful week, especially OG and Eagle-Eye, who are on holiday.
I had a wondrous experience on Thursday. Temps had cooled a bit, and it was very windy. I went outdoors, just to check my patch. I saw R. T. Hawk come from the direction of the creek flood plain. He was riding the thermals and soaring around and around. If a bird can look happy, he did.
Shortly, his big pale mate came from the same direction. She, too, was floating gracefully on the thermals. She saw me and stared at me for a minute or so, then she started soaring downward, floating in circles in my direction. She kept watching me and moving closer. I froze and made sure she could see my open hands (so she'd be reassured that I didn't have a gun).
She descended quite close to me, and I thought for a moment that she was going to come to me. I thought about holding my arm out to see whether she'd land, but I was afraid I'd scare her. She never screeched at me, and she wasn't diving aggressively -- just floating above me and looking at me curiously. Finally, she caught a thermal and lifted back up into the sky.
R. T. Hawk had been unconcerned, and he was soaring over the creek. His mate followed in his direction, and then they flew toward the ridge together.
I was very honored to see her so close.
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The annual Perseid meteor shower will appear on 11-14 August. The waning crescent moon guarantees dark skies, so the meteors should be dramatic. Folks in the northern hemisphere should see 50 meteors per hour, with a third of that number in the southern hemisphere. Most of the meteors can be viewed in the wee hours before dawn, but you could get lucky and see a beautiful earthgrazer in the earlier part of the night. Info HERE.
NASA government photoLabelled public domain (copyright free)
Diane: Thank you for starting us off. I managed a nice nap and - yes Heather - with a book close by. I keep meaning to look out for the Perseids, but never seem to actually do it. How nice to gave the RTHawks as regulars over your plot; wonder what would happen if you had a critter in your hand...
Heather: I've got the book by Stephen Hawking's first wife - Journey to Infinity. Will let you know how it goes. In the meantime - and in a panic coz no book on hand - I got Gone Girl from the library. The characters were sleazy, which sort of put me off, but the idea was clever. Stuck with it all the way until the absolutely infuriating and ridiculous ending. I really wouldn't have bothered if I'd known. Grrr.
Lovely peaceful day, temps and humidity back to normal, but they're forecasting a high pressure area the end of next week. Look for cranky posts from yours truly at that point. :-)
Major Hugs to Margo.
Good Morning, and Thank You to Diane for starting us off again, and in such a lovely way: great description of your encounter with your RT Hawks, Diane. How great it must be to see these birds even fairly close. We have a whole family of Buzzards living in the woods near us, and this year their youngster is piercing the silence with his shrieks - he has not got his adult voice yet, but we always know when he is circling - I said to my OH he may find it hard to make killings if the prey can hear him coming! We love to sit in the garden and watch the Buzzards hanging onto the thermals, they use so little actual wing power, its awesome.
Annette: I do hate it when a book ends unsatisfactorily. I feel like rewriting it! Last night we watched the film on TV "The Duchess" which is about the Duchess of Devonshire, starring Kiera Knightley. Shocking how women were treated in those dark days, how lucky we are, in the western world at least, to have the freedoms and equality we do have. I saw the film at the cinema when it came out, but had forgotten how some of it panned out.
Had a warm night last night after a lovely sunny warm day yesterday: more showers predicted today though. We got some pruning done and tidied up the front garden some more: it looks a lot better now after our efforts lately plus the new hedge, we are very pleased with the results.
Off to visit sis-in-law today, she needs some advice on her fencing and Bonnie is looking forward to playing with the two spaniels she is looking after at the moment. News of how we got on, later! Have a good day, Everyone, and especially dear Margo.
Good Morning Everyone, Another beautiful sunny day again. I am about to prepare my food contribution for another bowls tournament day, lunch. I usually go at 8.30am to serve tea and coffees for the players as they arrive, as some have had a long journey from other Counties, but I thought it was time somebody else took a turn at the early start. It usually means I spend the full day there, which I don't want to do today. My recent bug has still left me feeling rather lethargic.
Diane, Thanks for starting our week. That must have been a fabulous experience, to have had RT Hawk's mate so close to you. You are obviously trusted.
Annette, I have bought Stephen Hawking's, ex wife's book, but I haven't started reading it yet. My daughter has given me a few books to read, which she keeps asking, have I read them yet, so I have felt obliged to read them first !!
Linda, Sounds like your OH will be doing some fence work at your S-i-L house. Did you find out exactly how Bonnie was getting out of your back garden ?
Hello all
Thank you DIANE both for starting the week off and for sharing that wonderful experience with RTH's mate. Just magical.
I'm glad, BRENDA,that you had a later start today and hope that this coming week will see you getting rid of that awful post viral lethargy.
ANNETTE- I put Gone Girl on my Kindle but haven't yet read it. Maybe I'll not bother.. It is no big deal, I only paid 99 pence for it:-)
OH and I are pondering about what garden work to do today. We should be sweeping up fallen flower heads etc but it is quite windy. There will be twice as many tomorrow, though. We found several pots blown over when we looked outside this morning. Whenever we shake a fist at the wind (!) I think about an old friend of mine, a Falkland islander. We met many years ago when she had moved to the UK after marrying a Royal Marine. They are now back in the Falklands where wind is wind and then some!
Have a good day,everyone
Brenda: Don't blame you for thinking someone else should take a turn at doing the early shift. I'm sure you've done your share over the years. Hope, as Heather says,that you can get over your tiredness, which often seems to follow that sort of illness.
Heather: Sorry you've got the wind. It's quite still here, and has been warmish - we were able to sit in the garden which was just as well, when we visited sis-in-law, as she not only had two spaniels but also had for the weekend, a very large, off white colour Labradoodle type monster dog!! Monster in the sense that if he sat on you, you would not be able to get up again! Poor Bonnie was so surprised to see all these interlopers that she ran back to the car to start with, but after five minutes was playing "chase" quite happily with them all. One of the Working Dog Spaniels went to sit down after a while, but the Monster played on, happy to have someone to lumber around after. Sis in law has had a company in to "sort out" her garden as it was very overgrown and needed some serious pruning, however it has now had the opposite and looks quite devastated, as they pulled out yards of ivy which was decoratively discouraging the weeds from the flowerbeds and now she has lots of bare earth. Also, you can now see the back fence which is not a thing of beauty. She has to decide what to put up, instead. My OH was able to console her that at least the fenceposts are very solid, so she could put up a few new panels without too much expense.
Brenda: Bonnie was escaping by peeling back a tiny bit of the wire mesh from near the shed, and crawling under it. This took her to the front of next doors garden and thence into the street! I rolled a large heavy (empty) flower tub over the gap until my OH came home, then he got some extra mesh and nailed it to the inside of the shed..... We await to see if she is enthusiastic enough to make another break for freedom......
Saw some newspaper cuttings which made me laugh:
One a quote from someone we mentioned on here recently, Isaac Asimov - "People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do."
A German poet, Heinrich Heine, stipulated that in order to inherit his fortune his wife must remarry "so that there will be at least one man to regret my death!"
Joke: "Did you hear about the shoplifter who stole a calendar? He got 12 months."
Morning all: Scotland is the cover story/destination on the Travel section of today's Los Angeles Times, so gird your loins if you're north of the border! :-)
Lindybird: Don't recall having seen The Duchess. I have a Netflix DVD - The Trip, with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, which is hysterical, what with their wonderfully silly imitations of Michael Caine ("She was only 15"). Now I've got The Trip to Italy, which I've heard is as funny, then the entire last season of House of Cards lurking on my Netflix queue. Thanks for the smiles.
Brenda: Just started the Jane Hawking book and like it so far; much more accessible than Alan Turing: The Enigma, which was so heavy with discussions of various mathematical and computer theories that even my similarly disposed OH floundered in parts. Good not to push yourself too much - funny how those bugs can take the edge off for longer than you'd think.
Heather: You might like Gone Girl's ending. Do you look at Amazon's Customer Reviews? (My OH always does; I tyically don't.) If you check "See all 41,175 reviews" (eeek!) you get The Most Helpful Positive Review and the Most Helpful Negative Review side-by-side The latter gave Gone Girl 4.5 stars for writing and 1 for the ending. The reviewer asks "Does the ending of this book leave you a) wishing you hadn't read it in the first place, b) asking 'where's the resolution?" c) feeling thoroughly unsatisfied or d) all of the above. The correct answer, he says, is d. Go to Amazon for more (good and bad) reviews. :-) What passes for wind here (no pun intended) blows absolutely everything up against the patio and front doorsteps.
Just went for nice walk. Pesky sciatica acting up so doing exercises to counter it - onward and upward. Then out to garden to sort out a few things....
HEATHERe OH knows all about the Falkland winds and tells of the nightmare when it was too windy to open the hold door for the mail and so everyone had to wait for the much anticipated "bluies" (airmail letters)
LINDY rather liked this one posted on a Scily Isles police facebook site. "as you will all know PC Webb has broken her leg when the horse she was riding became the horse she was no longer riding" I couldn't stop laughing.... but apparently the poor PC had broken her leg in 12, yes 12 places.... ouch
Good evening, all - Diane, you certainly know how to start a thread with style! I would have carefully stuck my arm out (and possibly regretted it afterwards!!).
What a fantastic week we have had. Helen was at Pony Club camp for a few nights so we headed off to Dyfi for a few days! We were exceptionally lucky in where we stayed - it's the yellow house in the distance when you look at the Dyfi webcam, called Morben Isaf. We had a four poster bed with views of the nest and a scope attached to the window sill. We visited three nests in total - we made it to Glaslyn and we also saw where Dai Dots is nesting - a beautiful spot, especially when it briefly stopped raining. I really hope we make it back there next year.
Our herring gulls are red listed birds. Think about that the next time you hear some flaming idiot calling for a cull of them.