Dawn Chorus

Rather a gray damp start this morning but the birds didn't seem to mind. If you don't see an audio file player just click on the title of this post you should then be taken to another page with a sound file.

rainbow morning

Two lovely rainbows within about 20 mins this morning ...

This one seemed to be ending in our garden when we first saw it but by the time I had grabbed the camera I was too slow with my shovel to get that pot of gold.

Writing

Stephen (there is a link to his blog on the sidebar of this blog) returned from a few weeks away in New Zealand a few days ago and we had a chance to catch up today and do some more work on a paper we have been working on forever.. well for a couple of months at least. It feels like we have written about four papers as each major redraft has taken us off on a slightly different vector. Yet again we worked our way through word by word from the start deconstructing, rejigging, shuffling, honing etc etc and got through the first couple of thousand words after a couple of hours and some more hours. We ended up pretty much at the same point we always get to but this time we really know where we are going with the rest of it. Hopefully Saturday morning I will rebuild our vignettes and Stephen will sort some of the theory then we will meet to finish the beast off so it is ready to send off for some peer review on Monday. It is a painstaking process honing writing and seemed rather appropriate that we should be doing this on the same day Cohort 10 of BA LTR are finalising their first assessed work in time for their hand in deadline tonight. Writing papers to a deadline is as near as I can get to gaining an experiential insight into the student experience; its easy to see why students sometimes feel like giving up when they are so near the goal; there is a lot of stress and some of it comes from the sort of baring your soul to the world kind of feeling also a bit like hanging Art work on a gallery wall - exposure and vulnerability are two key words underpinning my own stress at such times but there is also quite a buzz kicks in about two thirds of the way to finishing...strange mix of emotions I am really looking forward to seeing the completed artifact at long last.

The Third Man

Our third scarecrow took shape today, we had a van and some driftwood
and I had 20 mins free at lunch time.....

Not sure if he will scare many Jabali away though.

boys girls and Baleo

Lorena, Stanley and Orion gave our van a thorough inspection a couple of days ago, I think they all approved eventually.

The boys managed to do some climbing at Baleo beach, Rowan a tad more confident than Callum but they both made it up and back down again.

lizards

we found a pair of lizards in our garden yesterday, the male has a blue head and they both have a green body and brown tail and were about 30 cms long, no idea what they are at the moment possibly ocellated lizards but I have not seen any photos of those ones with blue heads. In the pic above you can just see the male's head to the left of the female in a red circle. Below they are side by side and his head is clearer I think we might have disturbed them at a rather intimate moment. We should really buy a better camera.

hatched

Snowbird is back fighting for 1st place on the perch at night now, despite being half the size of the other hens she is like a Yorkshire terrier in that they always think they are huge dogs able to take on all comers. I hatched her kinder eggs for her a few days ago and after a brief sort through the opened eggs and a hunt for some chicks she decided she has done her job and is back eating properly and fighting with the other hens again. She has a very effective technique; by ducking low and pushing under the other hens she shuffles her way along the perch despite a barrage of pecks to her back and tail she usually gets as far as 2nd place, last night the leader was standing on top of her but she held her ground and would not give in.

egg rolling

We managed to do egg rolling in the sunshine at Valdovino beach and the boys took a 20 minute dip in the sea afterwards while I remenisced about childhood egg rolling at Allenheads in Northumberland in a beautiful snow covered world. We had found a flattened and frozen road kill rabbit the day before and my 5 year old logic asked if that particular Easter bunny would come back to life the next day like Jesus did. My grandad set his alarm and walked a few miles to move the rabbit so when I woke we could go and check out the miracle. No dead rabbits at Valdovino in fact we have not seen any wild rabbits at all since we have been here but we did see a few lizards basking in the sun on the way back to the car.

snowbird's clutch

Snowbird is very proud of her Kinder eggs.

paddling, hens and our beach

The boys can't keep out of the padling pool and are getting through far too many sets of clothes each day just now, a couple of days ago young Stanley was very keen to join them, Ruan and Bindle are inspecting one of the two new scarecrows in the background. Bindle was the main architect while Ruan and I spent a couple of days uprooting and moving a fence that used to separate the trees from the rest of the garden but now runs across the bottom of the garden to try and keep the jabali at bay. I am going to try and finish the fence at the top of the garden today but the ground is full of stones and progress is slower.

The boys discovered the new PhotoBooth effects and actually appeared to get on with each other for a few mins the other day. Rowan has been cutting his hair again.
Some hens are happy with ordinary eggs...

Snowbird is sitting on some special ones and is very proud of them although the other hens keep laying proper ones next to her and she takes them in too... not sure what she will do when a load of little Kinder figures hatch.

The boys now think of Pantin as 'our beach' it is only a few kilometers further than Vilarrube and is a rather wonderful place although also has a lot of dangerous water but it does not have the sinking quicksand that we keep finding at Vilarrube. There are some lovely sand dunes and pretty patches of hotentot fig.Great places for boys to jump off.

And for dads to rest.

time... changing

Well I think our local clock struggled gamely on for a little while clinging to the old time... the sensible time, it can go two ways when the mess with the clocks either almost as if nothing has happened but there is an air of something important in the air for a few days or it all gets a big surreal and mixed up, this year was kind of the first until a neighbour talked to me. She said "The local clock is sticking with Portugese time." or more accurately she said bos dias yadda yadda yadda blah tiempo yoddle yooo yoddle whooo portugese dibble dobble iglesia yodda no no....no yodda portugese faldafalda faldeedidaaado. During some of it I noticed some of her teeth, the others were far away by now not noticable by dent of being put wherever tooth fairies thought best to put them a long time ago. The sun glanced across them and there was a kind of bar code effect maybe different teeth configurations for different family names hmmm 'she has her fathers teeth' or rather doesn't have the same ones he didn't have, anyway what was happneing oh yes I was listenting and trying to understand and while the missing teeth took my attention she had stopped talking..was it pride or distain, perhaps admiration or frustration that now flickered across her face? There was stick waving but not of the aggressive kind, directed alternatingly towards Portugal and the local Church then doing a finale hovering somewhere between and pointing at a cloud that I hoped might by shape or colour help us out with the transference of meaning but now the stick was slowly wilting like Big Blue Running Horse tailing off eagles crying on his flute so not a very important cloud, now pointing at a field, at the verge, at the road, at some gravel and touchdown the pointer is at rest acting as a leaning post again. "Hrrrr Que errrrrr valle errr ai oh mm" I manage to utter with great fluency while examining the road surface, then I tried something new. "Moving I am...fence...for wild pigs" I tried to say. While I wondered if I should have said "Moving I am...for wild pigs...fence" or even "Moving...for wild pigs...I am fence" she looked impresed, or possibly amazed even "oooooohhh jabali si no si falda falda yadda yadda" and we made some other noises that let us leave the rest of the conversation hanging there like a film that broke but left the audience happy anyways. I think the church bells did OK and possibly Portugal weren't so bad either but the correct time strayed a bit for a few days after. I wonder what news she took home to her family about the strange English folks..one day it will all make sense poco a poco they keep telling me manayana o uno o dos anyos no problemio scorchio fal de dah falde dah. Tomorow is the day Ruan and I are going to try and relocate a fence to keep the wild pigywiggys out of our garden and in particular off our hand dug potato patch to which the local Jabali or xabarin are rather partial. Lets hope tonight is not the night the piggies decide to visit us.