Climate Emergency

I don't belong to Extinction Rebellion but I do share their fears for the planet. I have grandchildren and I want them to be able to live happy, healthy and productive lives on a world that provides for them and every other creature here. We cannot keep acting as if everything is going to be fine as climate change ramps up. Last week a temperature of 38° C (100.4 °F) was reported in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk which is situated within the Arctic Circle. If this is confirmed - it still has to be checked although there seems no reason to doubt it - the planet and every living thing on it is in grave danger.
This is quite frankly terrifying and is an example of why I asked a family member who is involved with Extinction Rebellion for this poster. It's on my bins so on rubbish collection days it is visible to anyone coming along my street. We've all been understandably somewhat distracted by the COVID-19 pandemic but we cannot afford to ignore the other equally urgent emergency we face in climate change. It's not going away unless we act now.

My Birdbath

                                         New Holland honeyeaters
                                       
                                         Image by Andy Ballard from Pixabay

A while ago I was talking to a friend who, before he retired, was involved in a lot of business negotiations with Chinese businesses. On one occasion he was taking a visiting businessman around and showing him the sights and asked him what he found most notable about Perth. He was told it was the sound of the birds.

When I think about it this is very true. There are large numbers of birds in our city, due to the many bushland reserves and parklands. Living as we do in an area surrounded by bushland and with several nearby parks we get to see and hear even more than most.

Yesterday as I went out into the veggie garden to plant the seedlings I'd acquired that morning at the garden centre I could see and hear the evidence. A willy wagtail flew in to inspect what I was doing. These are feisty little birds, not the least bit afraid of taking on anything no matter the size, and he jitty-jittied at me. Since he's a resident here - he has a nest in next door's garden - he was probably suggesting I stir up some insect life for him. After he decided I wasn't very interesting or useful and moved on, a young magpie arrived to sit on the fence until it saw a snack in another neighbour's yard and abandoned me. That was followed by a couple of ravens arguing as they strutted on the roof. While all this was going on I could hear more magpies and lorikeets in the tree in the park behind the fence and doves cooing nearby. This was all in the space of about five minutes.

But this is nothing compared to the afternoon rush on the birdbath outside my office window. The photo at the top of the blog gives some idea of what happens starting at about 4:30 when a mixed flock of around twenty to twenty five small honeyeaters arrives. The majority are New Holland honeyeaters with a scattering of both white cheeked honeyeaters and the smaller brown headed honeyeaters. They flit in, dip, shake then fly out for a further shake on the fence before doing it all again. Occasionally their bath is disrupted by red wattlebirds or their slightly smaller cousins little wattlebirds, sending the honeyeaters to scold from the top of the nearby banana palms. The wattlebirds are less interested in bathing and more in taking a drink and are soon gone. More annoying from the point of view of the honeyeaters is when a raven decides to bathe. They are big birds and water flies everywhere leaving much less for the baths of the waiting honeyeaters. Sometimes a laughing dove will drop in for a drink as well. The whole thing lasts for about ten to fifteen minutes and then they're done and the birdbath is quiet except for the odd visitor wanting to quench his or her thirst until the next afternoon.

Hmmm.

I had a few things in mind for today apart from going out to lunch with friends for the first time since the beginning of March. Then I saw the news headlines in the morning paper which Pisces still likes to get although this - our only local paper - has headed largely down the less than reliable and sensational tabloid route recently. That was depressing enough but then I opened up some of the news sites I read to get a more balanced view and that did not help. In fact it was even more depressing.

So in the interests of my sanity I took this photo of my cat sleeping in the sun.

He is super special because he was rescued as a kitten and before he came to us he'd already failed at rehoming. He was very afraid of everything and especially men and it took a long time and lots of patience on our part before he settled in with us. Then he was diagnosed with a  mega bowel when he was six. The vet told me then that most cats with this were unlikely to survive even twelve months after this diagnosis and all the research I did confirmed this. We decided to give him the best life we could for as long as he was happy and not suffering. Seven and a half years on he is still happy and healthy as long as he has daily medication and we are grateful for every day. We know everything could change any time but for now we just enjoy having him with us.

Reading - 'Girt' and 'True Girt' by David Hunt

For some reason, apart from virtually inhaling Elly Griffiths' Dr Ruth Galloway series early on, reading, which I usually do at quite a rate - it's not uncommon for me to read 6-8 books in a week - has just not been grabbing me recently. I read a few pages then I wander off and do something else altogether.

That was until I happened to pick up a book lent me by a friend who knows of my interest in history, oh, so long ago when you could actually meet friends. This was True Girt - the Unauthorised History of Australia Volume 2 by David Hunt. Hunt has a very unusual - and irreverent - approach to history, sprinkling wry, witty commentary among the facts and had me entertained from the beginning. What he was describing was not new to me - part of my university studies back in the day included Australian history up to World War One - but the way he does it bears no resemblance to the mostly dull books and documents I had to study. You just have to look at the title to know you're in for something different. (True Girt is a reference to the Australian national anthem Advance Australia Fair, the words of which were written in 1878 and which replaced God Save the Queen only in 1984. One line of this refers Australia as girt by sea, the meaning of which, since 'girt' fell out of use over a hundred years ago, has puzzled much of the Australian population ever since.)

I enjoyed True Girt so much that I bought the first volume Girt - the Unauthorised History of Australia. It has also not disappointed. In these volumes convict history sits along side the attempts - some well meant, others less so - to 'civilise' a land with very much a will of its own and in so doing we hear the gossipy details which certainly never showed up in my studies. (Things like how Edward Gibbon Wakefield, whose tract A Letter From Sydney, the Principal Town of Australasia published in 1829 provided the governing principles used in establishing the colony of South Australia, never even visited Australia and wrote this tract when in prison for abducting a seventeen year old heiress and tricking her into marrying him. Her family took exception, had the marriage annulled and Wakefield went to prison. His first abductee was not so fortunate. She died soon after her forced marriage. Apparently abducting heiresses as a way to get funds, either by gaining control of the girl's inheritance or by being paid off with a substantial sum, was a not infrequent occurrence in Ireland at the time, too. Go figure.)

If you want a lighthearted look at Australian history this is a great place to start. We have much darkness in our country's past history and there's no way to change that but this is a way to find out some of the things we did not learn in school and which would no doubt have made the subject much more interesting if we had.

What I Did Today

Handsome, are't they, but they very nearly didn't happen. Let me tell you what happened.

A while back I decided that kneading bread was starting to get a bit much for my hands so I invested in a whizz bang bread maker. Stuff happened and so I didn't actually get to try to use it until today. It was not a success. You are supposed to be able to dial and select what you want according to how big a loaf you're making, how dark you want the crust and so on but no matter how I tried and followed the instructions it would not let me get past the default setting. I called on Pisces - I was clutching at straws here given he's very much a technophobe and so unlikely to have any useful input - and he wasn't able to offer any suggestions either.

At this point the ingredients were all sitting in the pan and in preference to letting them go to waste I decided to tip them into my bread-making bowl - yes, I do have one - and finish it off by hand. It's been quite a while since I made bread by hand but I was back into the rhythm in no time.

While my loaves were sitting out on the veranda in the sun to rise I went to look up customer support for the machine. Guess what, I'm by no means the only one who has had this problem with the settings. I got onto a website - not the company one which had nothing more than the same instructions that had failed me so far but a review site where company representatives are supposed to give answers - where there were a number of plaintive requests for help for just this problem. I only found one reply which was a rather patronising suggestion that the person should look at the instruction manual - and for good measure the instructions were quoted direct from the book. This was, of course, useless, since we had already been following just those instructions. By now I was pretty frustrated and decided to simply forget the machine for now and call the company when I was less irritated.

Meanwhile my bread was rising beautifully and continued to behave as it should.  It was too late now to have for lunch - the original plan - but I just tried some slathered with butter and it was fine although not great. This recipe was one from the bread maker book and I think maybe it works better in the machine. That said it's still tasty enough to eat for now.