I saw a shooting star this morning.
Now this is amazing for two reasons; one, I'm not usually up at 4:45 in the morning, and two, I'd literally only just looked up at the sky when it went overhead, so the chances of my seeing it were pretty slim. I was just leaving for work at the time, so you can imagine what my wish was.
Tonight's lotto has jackpotted to $80 million, so you never know.
We've been delivering junk mail for a few months now and we've seen a huge variety in letterboxes, some are great, some are really original, and some are absolutely useless for anything bigger than a postcard. I've even had a few that have fallen over or broken as soon as I touched them, must be a hard life being a letterbox.
There's a question I've been mulling over since we started doing the deliveries and I still haven't come up with an answer.
Why do letterbox manufacturers find it necessary to put the word 'letters' or 'mail' on the front of their product?
It's not like the postie is going to get confused and not know where to put the mail. Quite often the word is so big there's nowhere to put the house number, or a 'No Junk Mail' sticker. I'll admit I have seen a couple of letterboxes that could have done with a label on them, one was a metal pedal bin. I don't think I ever put anything in that one. If it had the number on it I might have, but then so does the wheelie bin.
They've found me again.
I got a letter today from the Reader's Digest Sweepstakes people to say I've got a good chance to win $500,000. I thought I'd got them off my scent years ago, I guess not.
If I ever go missing, don't call the cops, just call Reader's Digest. They'll find anyone eventually. I bet they know where Lord Lucan is.
Regular readers may remember an old post of mine about a strange visitor we had about 18 months ago. If not, you can click here to read about the red-fronted parakeet.
Well we had another visitor today that doesn't look like it's from these parts.
As you know, Donna and I look after native wildlife. We have several Rainbow Lorikeets at the moment, including one I'm hand feeding because it's so young, and we get a lot of them visiting our backyard as well. The visitors were making a bit of noise this morning and when I looked outside I saw the bird in the above picture sitting on our verandah.
If you look at it quickly it looks very much like a Rainbow Lorikeet, just with less colour and more size. The lorikeets were chasing it away from the feeder hanging in our tree, but it was determined to hang around and have a feed, so I had heaps of time to take photos of it.
We have several bird books, so I got them all out and tried to indentify it. The only bird I could find that resembles this one is the Superb Parrot. The thing is though, they have a very restricted range in New South Wales and aren't found anywhere else.
If it is a Superb Parrot, then it's a pretty sure bet that it's an escaped pet, which wouldn't surprise me. We got a call to pick up a couple of birds from a local vet about two months ago. One was a lorikeet and the other a cockatiel. When I opened the cage to get the cockatiel out, he ran up my arm and sat on my shoulder. Apparently, he was delivered to the vet that way after being found in someone's backyard.
We generally don't like the idea of birds being kept in cages as pets, but this little guy is too tame to be released, so he's now got a permanent home with us and he's been named Bruce.
