Sometimes the simplest weekends are the best.
Saturday turned out to be wall to wall gardening. It wasn't planned that way but that's what happened. Grass cutting, which involved the usual battle to coax our recalcitrant Victa into life, hedge cutting, pruning, shredding the prunings and hedge cuttings for compost and then finally the great destructive pleasure of ripping out some strange invasive purple flowered vine that seems intent on both strangling the ceanothus and the raspberries.
Amazingly, the raspberries seemed to be forming a second crop of fruit. (Given it was four degrees this morning I have doubts whether they'll ripen.)
Good honest grunt, followed by a pizza and a decent bottle of rose.
Sunday we were up early and on the road well before nine for a day at Pebbly Beach. The tide was in, the sea rough and uninviting so we contented ourselves with the bushland walk to Snake Bay and back, followed by a paddle - well you can't go to Pebbly and not get your feet wet.
Despite the fact they've now sealed the road through Durras North to Pebbly - something we didn't realise at first and we took the old dirt road down from East Lynne - it was really quiet with only a couple of other cars there when we got there, and less than a dozen when we got back from our walk mid afternoon.
After that, coffee on the beach at Depot Beach and fish and chips at the Boatshed in Bateman's Bay, followed by the inevitable drive back up Clyde mountain arriving back in Canberra just as the sun was going down.
Even though I was as stiff as buggery this morning a good weekend ...
Monday 28 March 2011
Thursday 24 March 2011
Mouse fun ...
The third member of the household, aka the cat, has discovered his true nature and has taken to massacaring the local rodent population and leaving half chewed mice over the driveway.
In one sense we're sort of pleased about this - there have always been mice about, but this year we seem to have had something of an explosion of the local mouse population as a result of the ending of the drought, the wet summer, and consequent massive increase in the amount of grass seed available to support the mouse population - which have also irritatingly taken to fanging the last of our tomato crop.
This is a complete contrast to last autumn when we had mice in the house. On one occasion, the cat was lying on the sofa half asleep and a mouse ambled across the floor. J prodded the cat, expecting him to leap into action. Instead he opened one eye fully, looked at it, as if to say 'yes it's a mouse - seen them before - don't do mice' and went back to sleep.
The upshot of this was that when we went to Coonabarabran last April, and the cat went to the Cat Motel, we ended up buying and leaving mouse traps out.
Probably the only cat keeping house in Canberra with mouse traps, but there you go.
This year has been totally different. He's discovered his inner predator. One afternoon he killed three mice one after the other. However there's a downside - he likes to share. I've tried explaining to him that we don't eat mice, and that I've asked the bank, but they don't accept mice as part payment for credit card bills. But he still likes to show his caring sharing nature.
This morning he decided to bring us a mouse for breakfast. It was a bit early, about half past four in the morning, and we don't normally have mice for breakfast - muesli, fruit, yoghurt and fairly powerful americano is more our thing. So we declined politely.
On his way out he dropped the mouse, which turned out to still be alive. So I ended up chasing it round the kitchen with the broom to help him catch it again (technique's fairly simple - open back door, get mouse out of corner where its hiding with broom - guide it towards open door with broom - cat rugby tackles mouse and takes it out).
So, these things happen. It's what cats do. However this morning was clearly a special mouse morning. I was just sitting down to breakfast, when the cat reappeared with another live mouse, which he offered to me for breakfast. Cue rerun of scene with broom, much shouting of 'Christ above', including chasing the mouse round the bathroom while J was drying her hair, and eventually the cat took the mouse out.
However, he clearly wanted to get some protein into our diet - five minutes later he was back with what I assume was the same mouse, and again he dropped it, still very much alive on the kitchen floor. More broom work.
This time he got the message and proceeded to kill and eat the rodent on the kitchen step - not quite what you want as an accompaniement to breakfast.
However the SMH's fetish for coming wrapped in half a metre of industrial clingfilm came in useful for disposing of the mouse. And they are mice - not native critters, which might have been a worry - as an ex lab scientist I've seen mice before as well, and I've been checking what he's been killing.
Given that the hill above us turns into bushland reserve there's obviously a concern that he might be going after small furry native animals, but no, just good old fashioned mice.
The good thing is it's getting colder at night as autumn draws in, and hopefuly that'll see an send to it, with the mice hibernating, and the cat turning into a furry lump that spends the day lying in front of the stove ...
In one sense we're sort of pleased about this - there have always been mice about, but this year we seem to have had something of an explosion of the local mouse population as a result of the ending of the drought, the wet summer, and consequent massive increase in the amount of grass seed available to support the mouse population - which have also irritatingly taken to fanging the last of our tomato crop.
This is a complete contrast to last autumn when we had mice in the house. On one occasion, the cat was lying on the sofa half asleep and a mouse ambled across the floor. J prodded the cat, expecting him to leap into action. Instead he opened one eye fully, looked at it, as if to say 'yes it's a mouse - seen them before - don't do mice' and went back to sleep.
The upshot of this was that when we went to Coonabarabran last April, and the cat went to the Cat Motel, we ended up buying and leaving mouse traps out.
Probably the only cat keeping house in Canberra with mouse traps, but there you go.
This year has been totally different. He's discovered his inner predator. One afternoon he killed three mice one after the other. However there's a downside - he likes to share. I've tried explaining to him that we don't eat mice, and that I've asked the bank, but they don't accept mice as part payment for credit card bills. But he still likes to show his caring sharing nature.
This morning he decided to bring us a mouse for breakfast. It was a bit early, about half past four in the morning, and we don't normally have mice for breakfast - muesli, fruit, yoghurt and fairly powerful americano is more our thing. So we declined politely.
On his way out he dropped the mouse, which turned out to still be alive. So I ended up chasing it round the kitchen with the broom to help him catch it again (technique's fairly simple - open back door, get mouse out of corner where its hiding with broom - guide it towards open door with broom - cat rugby tackles mouse and takes it out).
So, these things happen. It's what cats do. However this morning was clearly a special mouse morning. I was just sitting down to breakfast, when the cat reappeared with another live mouse, which he offered to me for breakfast. Cue rerun of scene with broom, much shouting of 'Christ above', including chasing the mouse round the bathroom while J was drying her hair, and eventually the cat took the mouse out.
However, he clearly wanted to get some protein into our diet - five minutes later he was back with what I assume was the same mouse, and again he dropped it, still very much alive on the kitchen floor. More broom work.
This time he got the message and proceeded to kill and eat the rodent on the kitchen step - not quite what you want as an accompaniement to breakfast.
However the SMH's fetish for coming wrapped in half a metre of industrial clingfilm came in useful for disposing of the mouse. And they are mice - not native critters, which might have been a worry - as an ex lab scientist I've seen mice before as well, and I've been checking what he's been killing.
Given that the hill above us turns into bushland reserve there's obviously a concern that he might be going after small furry native animals, but no, just good old fashioned mice.
The good thing is it's getting colder at night as autumn draws in, and hopefuly that'll see an send to it, with the mice hibernating, and the cat turning into a furry lump that spends the day lying in front of the stove ...
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