A pandemonium of parrots

Or Parakeets, I’m never sure which is which. They were very noisy at several times today, pausing briefly  at one point for a shouting match right by our verandah. I didn’t manage to get an angle for a shot before they shot off again, only this from a distance, when I took the dogs for a last walk before we came back down the hill.
 
The first part of today blended too seamlessly into yesterday. I couldn’t sleep, even when I moved to the sofa, and wound up reading till about 3.30 a.m. Interesting book, though – the biography of an old friend, written mainly for his family. He reckons it may be of more interest to his great-grandchildren than to any descendants living now. He didn’t write for publication, although he has several published novels as he didn’t expect anyone outside the family to be interested. However, I’m finding it fascinating. Strange how interesting, and perhaps surprising, the minutiae of other people’s life can be. What I have read of his childhood and background is not at all what I would have expected.
 
I slept on the sofa till 7-ish, then moved back to bed and stayed there till nearly 10 (9 a.m. old time, but the clocks went forward overnight).  I may have to admit to HH that the bed I bought to replace the waterbed really is a bit too hard. Great loss of face there.
 

The late start meant many of the things I had planned for today didn’t get done, though others that weren’t on the list did. Still, it was a nice, pluttering sort of day. I’m really so much happier in the countryside. And great excitement just before we left. Duke, who was tied up because he’d been trying to dig out some poor animal from it’s lair behind the gate, suddenly went frantic. Then Kayla , who was loose, joined in and rushed over to the birdbath. I grabbed the torch and saw the sweetest little chap trying to get a drink. It wasn’t too clever at making a run for it and was lucky it only had Kayla to deal with – as a retriever of some sort, she didn’t know what to do with live prey. She actually caught it, but then fumbled around, with me shouting at her, and lost sight of it long enough for me to grab her collar and drag her away. I thought the animal might have been an opossum, but on Googling it now, it seems it may have been a juvenile skunk (not really a skunk, I believe, but a gambá, a type of opossum that protects itself with a pretty bad smell).  Ah well, it lives to see another day – and it seems they kill snakes, so maybe it’s welcome after all.