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Wednesday November 28, 2007
Cunning foxes and broken pots
At the weekend, I made the Christmas puddings - one for me, one for my sister; maybe a bit early but next weekend is the cake... As part of this annual exercise, as usual, I went through all my dry goods and evicted all the out of date items especially those "Best before 2001" (OK so maybe I don't do it annually). I found two packets of desiccated coconut and rather than throw them out I thought "little birds like coconut" so I put little piles outside the house - for little birds or little squirrels. In the early evening, there was a terrible clatter from outside - and I went out to find one of my flower pots in pieces, and earth everywhere. It seemed very strange that it would spontaneously explode, and I had my suspicions....
10 minutes or so later, I cautiously peeped out of the window from behind the curtain and as I suspected there was a jolly fine looking fox chomping away at the coconut. In his initial enthusiasm he had knocked everything over in order to get at the tasty snack. Not what I had planned but glad some wildlife got to eat it (wildlife that was not, for example, rats, which is always a consideration when you leave food around your house!).
I've been putting off releasing this entry as I had hoped to get some pictures, but the garden mayhem was cleared up before I managed to get my camera out....!
Last night I attended the farewell "do" for my customer Sheelagh in Oxford, as she is leaving it all behind and becoming a lady of leisure. So she has now transitioned to be "my friend Sheelagh", which I guess will be the least of the transitions she has to worry about. The evening was very pleasant, and I drove home in the early hours (in my new mini) but was stunned to find the M25 London orbital road utterly stuffed with a traffic jam which delayed me by 35 minutes - I would have thought it very bad luck to have hit something like that during the day never mind at 1 in the morning. (Turns out they do roadworks at night when the road is full of lorries).
Other than that, I seem to be having continuing issues with technical "stuff" breaking. My phone broke, and I had the BT engineer out to my house fixing it (pretty quickly I might say, though it was their fault, as they disconnected me while doing some other work in our road). My brand new car of 2 weeks reported an engine failure, which the local dealer was able to look into, and hopefully has resolved. Two weeks ago, my computer notebook broke, so I have been working on a temporary machine, and I find the new one they had delivered for me is also broken (!).
I am hoping this is the end of the trend of broken things.
Posted by Christina at 10:24 AM. Category: Oddments and stray thoughts
