On my camera.

I've been very busy of late. Very, very busy and this week I've spent much of my time in bed having long afternoon naps.  I had not been able to upload images to blogger for awhile so have a backlog.  It's a bit of a hodgepodge and I'll go into more detail in later posts.  Are you ready for a peak?  Some of the things that have been filling up my days and nights of late......

Monopoly

 An unexpected visitor on the back door. 

The best waterslide EVER.  Happy birthday to Lily and Kayden!

 Happy birthday Miss R. We love you!

Helping the neighbour harvest her jaboticaba fruit.

 Starting to study portraiture.

 Participating in my first 'professional' art exhibition. 

Second portraiture lesson.

I'll elaborate more on all of the art including our art exhibition in subsequent posts.  Mma Tembo is still in progress as are three more canvases of intuitive paintings for my Flora Bowley e-course.  Now that I seem to be back in business with blog access I'll be able to fill you all in.  

Hope you are all well and happy!

love Sandy xx

Why my mail is still in my mailbox

Today is wet and dull, the kind of day where you are tempted to snuggle up lazily with a good book and joyfully listen to the rain on the roof.  One of my favourite sounds.  During a storm earlier today we lost power.  The resulting darkness put an end to my painting efforts and to any thought of reading so I decided to head out during a lull in the rain to collect the mail.  I almost made it..... This is what was between me and our mailbox.

Can you see my protagonist hidden at the bottom right of the image? Having trouble?  I'll help you then with a close up.

It's a carpet snake eating some large rat sized creature.  Could be a bandicoot or small possum.  Wasn't able to see properly.  He was right where I had to walk (the first photo was taken from on the road), so I left him to his lunch and headed back inside.  I wonder if it's my piddley friend from my previous post.

You have got to be kidding me....

Oh my, I had an interesting, bizarre, gross thing occur today.  After a busy morning going to the gym, doing chores and preparing for the pest man I finally sat down to have a cup of tea.  Suddenly I heard water running in the wall behind me.  WHAT?  There are no pipes in this wall.  Am I going crazy? I jumped up and moved the couch away from the wall to see water pooling on the floor as it ran out from the wall.  WHAT?  Ok, no plumbing, too far away from the air-conditioner pipes to be them..... Sniff said liquid, no smell.  Wipe it up thinking.....this may just be snake pee.  Do snakes pee so loudly that you can hear it run like a tap?  Hmmm.  The running water stopped, I cleaned it up and kept it in my mind while I got on with my day.  The pest man arrived to spray the house and I told him about it so he and his offsider grabbed their ladder and set off up the manhole to investigate.  There they found Cedric the Carpet Python (snake) sound asleep across the top of the wall cavity. All 2 meters plus of him.  Don't mind him in the roof eating rats or mice but peeing down my wall and out onto my floor is stretching the friendship and a bit gross actually.

Kingfisher

 

This sweet kingfisher has been lurking around in my photos for some time waiting to be included in my blog.  He's smacked himself into one of our windows and rather dazed himself so we gathered him up and kept an eye on him. He was quite dazed and very placidly sat in Jeff's hands and even sat near us in some old rags and made no attempt to fly away as we went on with business.  After quite some time with no apparent improvement Jeff took him off to Australia Zoo's animal hospital where he spent the night getting some professional TLC.  We were thrilled when the zoo called us to say that we could pick him up and release him back into our yard.  It took him awhile to fly off and for a few days he stayed near to the house but I've not seen him now for a couple of weeks. Hopefully he's out there well and happy somewhere.  I so love living where we do.

Wildlife in the garden

Living in amongst the trees, and having extensive gardens means that something is always going on just outside our door. A couple of days ago I caught this stick insect being born at our front door. I'm amazed that he fit inside that little cocoon!
The King Parrots come daily to the bird feeder on our front verandah. These photos are taken from the lounge room through rather grubby windows. We can sit on our lounge and look at them as they feed. I love it. We also get galahs, cockatoos, rosellas and even the odd magpie or two at the feeder. Will have to remember to clean the windows in order to get better photos!
This photo was taken at Christmas a couple of years ago on the fence that divides our back yard from our section of land that is bush and holds a dam. The snake is a carpet python and is a very healthy specimen. They are non venomous and we see them off and on in the garden. They sometimes sun themselves by hanging in our hibiscus plant.