Weekly Chat (Non-Osprey), 24 May 2020

Thank you Diane:   I see severe storms in the Mid-West again.  Assume you're okay?

Lindybird:  Is this the stage version of Cats you ordered?  I gather the recent movie version was universally panned.

No sign of AQ so far - is she busy binding logs together for her trip across the Pacific??

Brit friend who has stayed with neighbors in the past is in town for 10 days; she came by to borrow my ancient Raleigh bike today and we spend three hours chatting in the garden. She's off to Denver next Saturday and then to Israel (Covid permitting) before heading back to London for a few months  She seems to have family all over....    Her sister in Costa Rica told her that they used vehicle license plates to determine which days rsidents can go shopping. Apparently if you're caught shopping on the wrong day, they took your car and you had to walk home!   She also heard that a lady who'd just arrived in Israel and defied the 14-day quarantine was spotted by a drone - yes a drone - and found herself facing the police who imposed a $1,500 or 1,000-plus pound fine.    

Annette: Yup, I'm fine. A big storm hit early this afternoon and knocked my power out for a few minutes. I was busy working, trying to finish a project to get paid, and the outage jeopardized my document. Luckily, Microsoft Word rescued my work. I expressed many creative swearywords during the process, though. I get more foul-mouthed every day. LOL

Hope you all are okay. I will post more after I finish this project. Deadline is Monday.

DIANE – Thank you. Good luck with the project, and the power.

ANNETTE - Google has (or had) a description of travelling between 2 places. Years ago OH, for some strange reason, asked to travel from our fair city to a US city. He was directed by various routes north to Asia from where he was advised to “take a canoe” across the Pacific. So “canoe” is now a travel joke in this house.

LINDA – In the UK I was surprised to see so much Aussie wine on menus. I usually opted for unfamiliar wine, mostly it was S African. When travelling I try to avoid the familiar and try “foreign” food & drink. But not too strange!

Next-door renovations apparently completed with the front garden landscaped. A photinia in lawn, 2 prunus (?) outside bedroom window (too close I suspect) and a row of all-the-same-small shrubs. We don’t see them owing to tall abelia on our side of boundary. Quick peeps when I go to our letterbox. I don’t want to be caught staring!

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not. {Mark Twain)

I hate when my body gets sick. “I gave you a vegetable last week, how dare you”.

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables. (Gertrude Stein)

Facts must be faced. Vegetables simply don't taste as good as most other things do. (Peg Bracken)

Vegetation & wildlife returning after 5 years of drought in NSW. See here.

Hello! (Rushes in, breathlessly) Thanks to DIANE for starting us off again. Good Luck with finishing off your project, Diane x

Back later!

Forgot to say, our garden was very busy with birds yesterday teatime - one part of the day when it wasn't raining. They all took off when Magpie came to visit. This was our first ever Magpie at this house! Jackdaw screeched at it and it soon left - a magnificent bird! We used to have Maggies (and Jays) in Lancashire, but here (now our seventeenth year) we have never seen one in the garden - we see them just South of Gretna when we take the back road to Carlisle, and we see them around Lockerbie, when travelling north, but never here in Annan! I can report that all the other assorted birds did return safely to the feeder!

We overslept: I think our brains knew it was our day off!! But several messages to reply to from friends & relatives, plus laundry to hang out in the breeze we're having. Daren't hang any out yesterday or it would have blown away!

Also washed my hair which has now dried in strange shapes - teach me that now its longer, I need to use the hairdryer!

Annette, the DVD film was of the actual film which we saw last winter. Sue and I absolutely loved it, as did all of the audience in the cinema that day, who clapped heartily. No idea why a few critics were so down on it, but it stopped people going which we thought was a great shame. Soo looking forward to showing my OH the film at home, as told him he'd missed a treat at the time. He loved the film made of the stage show.

OG - Laughing, I'm afraid, at your magpies! When we moved here there were a pair in the garden. Then another. Then they all reproduced. Not unusual now, to look up and see about 7 or 8 on the neighbours roof and aerials. Think there could easily be a dozen or so in the vicinity. We used to remark on seeing more than one when I was a child.

It's gone very grey here with some quite black clouds. Um. Thought it was supposed to warm up today.