One thing about keeping budgies..you see more birds of prey

Here is my second successful hawk shot. It was on the top of the cage this morning. Dad missed taking a photo of yesterdays hawk - possibly the same one. It slammed into the side of the cockatiel cage and left a dint in it

Bindy is broke!

I have somehow managed to spend all of Bindy's money. This tends to happen when I focus on crafting. Bindy is broker than he was as a lvl2 character. He has 20 copper pieces left. Of course, the reverse happens when I focus on completing deeds where its "kill 500 wargs/goblins" style. Perhaps it would be a good idea to deed crunch for a while.

Melaleuca linariifolia

The council have replanted trees on our footpath after cutting the old ones down when they fixed the gutters. We hadn't had a tree on the footpath before. The original one died of malicious neglect many years ago I think. The old trees weren't suited to the position, they grew too tall and into the powerlines. As a result they were weirdly and probably not effectively pruned. The new one looks like it will be gorgeous and grow to 10m.....what? why plant trees under powerlines that are recorded as growing 8-10M tall? Maybe its the 'shrubby' version that only grows to 2.5meters. The neighbour was told they'd grow to 4m. Stay tuned and ask again in 5 years or so.

my new toy

After doing some research I bought myself a video/DVD recorder combo with an SD digital tuner in it on the weekend. I'd priced it everywhere at $500 & went somewhere with a sale on. I got them to knock $20 off the sale price & saved myself $40. Woot! Now I can use the money to buy some good quality DVDs for converting all my irreplaceable videos & some DVD ram disks for general recording. As a plus, the non-existent reception for WIN is now perfect. My mother thinks I'm rubbing it in.

In other news, instead of playing with my new toy last night, I got all my characters in LOTRO up a crafting level after Chris kindly bodyguarded them through their respective purple crafting quests. Bruse ended up emptying 1/2 of his bank to read all the stored master armoursmith recipes. BTW if any of my kin are armoursmiths with master level, let me know, I have 1/2 a dozen double recipes to pass on now.

huh, what? free time?

Well, not actually free, just free of short term deadlines that I have to work to. At least today.

This means I can cast my eye around my office and do that 8 hours of marking that is sitting there. Also I can organise my accomodation for the conference in July in Cairns. Then there's that gel tank I was going to try to bodgy up the platinum wire electrodes. Hmmm maybe I could take an hour off and go price VCR/DVD recorder combos. Since I've been working long hours and weekends.
While I'm out I could post Caillan's present. For those of you who are supposed to send him something - his Birthday is later this month!! This is your friendly automatic reminder service. I would have forgotten only I put my calendar back on my door after it was painted and there was the reminder on it.
BTW I now have mid colour blue doors in the house rather than brown. Much cheerier.

This free association written blog was brought to you by the number googleplex and the letters R for relaxed and D for delusional.

oh...I forgot to mention

I went to the 50th Anniversay of Pimlico open day. They had colour coded name tags for decades. Lots of the 1st year people turned up (1959) and masses of the 60's. After that the numbers steadily dropped by decade. A sign of the employment demographic I think. We all moved away and only a few of us are still around. Of the 1983 cohort, I saw Sean Mullins, Sandor and Tiffany....and thats it.
After I went home it occured to me I'd taken no photos of any of them, or any photos at all for that matter in spite of taking my camera - I guess you miss out on my happy snaps.
Theres a bunch of new buildings & where we sat for lunch is now reserved for grade 11 and 12 students. The library still looks identical. The Home Ec teacher did recognise my name - because she taught my brother Doug. I was rather invisible in Home Ec, Doug became a chef.

>(

For two weeks I've been getting a practical up and running for next Monday. First one of the reagents was off and it made the results look good when they weren't. I found it, fixed it, tried again and got good results. So I made up more of the samples to run and checked them - not working. Went back and used original samples again -now they're not working....argh.
I'm going to try once more under really careful conditions with every control I can think of. If it still doesn't work, I may be scrounging round for Monday.

There goes my weekend.

Shades of Tolkien!

While watching Midsommer Murders on Friday night, I suddenly realised that the protagonist was played by a young Orlando Bloom..."Hey!" I said to everyone in the room "thats the elf from Lord of the Rings!". "Surely not" they said. But the credits proved me right. (he was skewered by a pitchfork btw.)
The really weird bit was where the killer turned out to be a resident of a property called Lothlorien. The coppers even commented on knowing your lord of the rings content.

So - zero degrees of separation there I think.

typing with trepidation

mainly because I don't want to jinx things.

I did step one of the fix - opening the box, frowning at it and prodding the video card. I also sprayed air on it to remove any dust.

My computer hasn't frozen since. The front audio ports no longer work, but I'm not desperate enough to open the unit again and risk the much more vital video card right now...give it a month or so.