3rd January

[byslantedlight]

It was a grey day today, and the colour in this dusk sky (5.02pm) was as much as I seemed to see all day. The bright light to the right is actually the tractor working away at its evening jobs - I suspect mucking out the cows, who are a mostly inside while the fields are so wet and muddy. And the wee square light nearby, at the bottom, is my house, waiting cosily for me to get back from my late afternoon walk!

On the bright side it didn't actually rain, and I managed to make a bit of a sloping ledge for my bathtub pond with stones and pebbles, collected a few pond plants from a friend, and placed some other stones around the very edges of the bathtub to help stop soil eroding in. Oh, and filled it with water from my water butte! The plants aren't looking terribly happy at the moment (well it is winter), but I'll take some pics in daylight tomorrow.

I also managed to get through to mum this morning, who was sounding cheerful, so that was good.

Bu-ut... I'm not convinced about this 2022 lark yet. I decided to make a nice healthy Spanish omlette for dinner, and was congratulating myself on having finally found a nice sharp serrated knife for cutting tomatoes and the like, when... eek! eeek! eeek! (that's the knife sound in The Shining, in case you weren't sure) - I manage to slice into the top of my thumb instead of the tomato, across towards the nailbed... blood everywhere! And how hard is it to staunch a bleeding thumb with only one hand, while trying to get your first aid stuff out, and undo bandaids and antiseptic and all? Really hard! Also, ow, ow, owwww! It's still stinging under the bandaid now, which I'm hoping is a good sign of healing rather than a bad sign of infection-gangrene-sorry-we'll-have-to-take-the-arm-off...

Okay, I'm being a bit dramatic, I don't think it's a very bad cut really. *g* But it was quite dramatic at the time, and it does still hurt, and it was distracting enough for the rest of the evening that did I manage to get on with my writing for Thursday as planned after my nice active garden-based day? No... *headdesk* I have a back-up story to post, but it's not the post I want to do, which is actually the post I wanted to do last Christmas! And tomorrow is back to work, so that won't help either... *sighs*

But to end the day on a more cheerful note - I can hear an owl whoo-ing away just outside as I type this, which is always a cool thing. Oh, and there is a squirrel who's coming into my garden from the big farmhouse garden next door and stealing my half-coconut birdfeeders! I hung up two the other day, on big S-hooks from the branches of an overhanging tree, and yesterday I found one of them on the ground with the fibrous-string hanger eaten through. So I replaced them, and today they were both entirely gone! I'm still at the amused phase of this, as I watched the squirrel from my office shed the other day, running along the wall, climbing up branches to the coconuts, and then picking them up and putting her face right into them for a feast! But clearly I will have to find some way to combat this, because while I don't mind her sharing, they're for the birds! I thought the half-coconuts would be better since there's avian flu around, and they could be taken to the farm's burn pile rather than having to be carefully cleaned, but I suspect I'll have to get my rubber gloves out and clean the metal feeders after all... Oh - here are some pics I took of her the other day (from a distance, through a plastic window)!

Comments

[sc-fossil.livejournal.com]

Darn on cutting yourself.

Squirrels! I gave up fighting with them and now they have their own feeder. It seems to work but they are indeed destructive.

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Oh, I was wondering about some kind of squirrel feeder to distract them - I guess you have the kind of food in it that they like to eat best...?

[sc-fossil.livejournal.com]

Actually I buy the cheapest bird seed I don't give the birds and they seem to like it. I do have those bird feeders that automatically close if a squirrel hops on it. They also seem to work. The squirrels will eat under the bird feeders but no longer try to get to them. They can't jump from the fence onto the feeder. It's too far for them. They are very smart and will figure out how to eat no matter what! Good luck!

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Belated replies... already this year!

My squirrel has now been caught making off with half a coconut, so I changed my bird feeders to the cage-type - we'll see if she works out a way to deal with them! *g*