Athena, finished

Athena, in progress

Maybe it is the bubonic plague

Yesterday on my way into work, I noticed a dead bat--the Sydney bats are huge "flying foxes" and wonderfully cute and batty--still hanging from the telephone wire they sometimes sleep on when they don't make it back to the Botanic Gardens (or so I imagine). It had mostly decayed, but a skeletal arm was still clinging to the wire. Nasty, nasty, nasty. I would not want to be around when the tendons finally give way and the corpse falls to the street with a thud of decayed bat.

Ick

There was a dead rat on my patio this morning. I am hoping dearly that it was a random unfortunate event and not that my backyard cat has decided to start bringing me gifts.

Wow

I just made a currency transfer (AUD to USD) and my AUD4000.00 bought me close to exactly USD 1100 more than it did at the depth of the currency crash!!

Hot!

It is something like 39 or 40 degrees C outside, which is well over 100 degrees F. Happy Thanksgiving week y'all!

Victory!

After 2+ years, my backyard cat has finally let me pet him/her. It only lasted a few pats, but there is a bright and shiny future for the two of us...

A new and gross creepy crawly

I had a seven inch or so version of this guy on my kitchen floor this evening. Boo. Apparently, they eat earthworms. And amazingly, they are actually called hammerhead worms, which meant that it was an easy google to learn about it.

Yuck!

There is still a hole in my heart

Birth of Athena

I think I want to fuss more with the coloring, but it is basically done. Think it will keep the students away?

Not-quite-so-scaredy cat!

The shy cat that I have wished I could woo for the past two years, the one that lives in my back yard, actually ate some of the food I put out for him! Right next to my door!

A huntsman in my kitchen

The eloquence of compassion

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8212153.stm

Spring is here!

I just killed my first mosquito, erm, mozzie, which makes it official.

YouTube Art

The Kiwis are coming!

The Kiwis are coming!

Do ants sleep?

A question I often ponder, given my excellent view from the toilet of a swarm that refuses to eat the ant poison.

Thanks to the miracle that is the Google, I now know the answer.

UPDATE:

The world's biggest ant colony was discovered in 2002. This supercolony has billions of ants living in millions of nests. It stretches 3,600 miles, all the way from Italy to northwest Spain.

!!!

Yikes

Apparently, Australia is not immune to the very worst of American cultural mistakes.

Slugs at the trough

It turns out that slugs really do like beer. I don't know what it does to them, but at least they gather around the beer dish rather than hanging out in the middle of the floor where I am likely to step on them and have them squish between my toes.

The rain

never stops. My house is full of slugs.