Clearing up.

Here’s a bit about us not boating. We were planning to go out on Herbie this week, but we decided to enjoy a few days peace at home now that the family have departed back to their own places after messing ours up.  The house is wonderfully quiet and now we can walk across the floor without tripping over wires. People who know our Peter won’t be surprised at this picture of him spreading his toys all over our front room. I did offer him desk space upstairs but he prefers to get under our feet.  Bless!

It’s like this every time he comes home.  He’s the only person I know who buys a new electric guitar (just out of the picture) and instead of playing it, plugs it into an oscilloscope (which he just happens to have with him!)  and starts messing about creating distortion circuits.  No, he doesn’t work in electronics, he just likes toys. We’ll be getting resistors out of the carpet and microchips down the side of the sofa for weeks I expect.

Still, there was an upside. In tidying up after he went back home to Cambridge I found a missing piece of my camera tripod, so I was able to set it up in the garden by our bird feeders which are getting lots of visitors at the moment.  It’s so dark lately that I’ve had to resort to using the flash.  I thought it might scare the birds off but they seem to get used to it, and using flash gives an opportunity to take high speed images like this one of a blue tit.

I’m triggering the camera remotely from inside the house.  Shots worth keeping are running at about one percent.

I’m in a constant battle with the squirrels who try to pinch the peanuts.  The peanut feeder hangs on a longish wire from our lime tree. The thieves hang upside down from a twig, reach down to the feeder with their front paws and lift it up so that they can gnaw at the nuts.  I extended the wire today and after a few failed attempts the squirrel skulked of in disgust. Hah!

Another thing that likes to eat upside down is a nuthatch that has been showing up recently.  I’m still trying to get a good picture of him /her.  Here’s the best I’ve managed so far.

Now the Christmas decorations are down and the Christmas tree has been chopped up for disposal, and once we have overwhelmed our local recycling centre with bottles, cardboard, bits of tree and holly and ivy, we hope to get out to Herbie in a few days, especially as the threatened Beast from the East mark II doesn’t seem to be showing up.