Last month

The fourth of July came & went, followed by more working on setting up the house. I managed to set up some of the hammer together shelving from the garage at the old house, & now have all of the stuff that doesn't need to be inside, but still needs to be under cover, stacked away neatly behind the carport, as well as some shelves in the shed. A man's just gotta have his stuff organised!

The webcam has moved (again), this time to our bedroom window, facing out into the back yard, & very successfully catching the action at the bird feeders. We have a pair of Crimson Rosellas who feed several times a day at the one right next to the window, & today caught sight of a pair of Eastern Rosellas in the one in the tree. Still trying to get some decent resolution on the camera though.

April & Duncan left a bedtime message on my voice mail at work ( at lunchtime) one day this week. "Hi Poppie, lub you, bybye." Really made my day it did.

More on the bird population. One afternoon, I managed to get some decent photos of the Crimson Rosella pair with the sun behind me. The size & variety of the local bird population continues to amaze us, especially Julie. She just gets blown away by the fact that we can stand there about 20 feet from a pair of wild birds. Today, as we were watching, the pair of CR's, another 2 CR's arrived & they quickly left. The newcomers appeared to be young males, who of course couldn't be seen dining together!

Meanwhile, our social life has picked up a bit. In preparation for KAZ Ball coming up in a couple of weeks, we attended the Annual Frock Swap, where Julie borrowed an apricot number. She still has to figure out whether it will fit & allow her to breathe. She may just have to resort to wearing one of the 5 already in the wardrobe. And we joined in on the Ten Pin Bowling night on Friday. Great fun, but stiff the next day!

Back at the bird feeder, our suspicions that the pair of Eastern Rosellas is also feeding at the basket were confirmed by some grainy photos in bad light from the webcam, followed this morning by my successful capture of them on camera on the way out of the carport gate on the way to work. The second shot caught them taking flight as I moved in too close! The other photo is that series was taken at the back of my workplace, where the nature reserve comes right down to the road. And proof that the Starbucks Bears have each found a niche. And I hope you all like the new style of slideshow.

July here in Holder certainly finished with a bang. I came home to find a dead Rosella on the path, no power, the house freezing cold & my mobile phone not working. So where's the correlation between all of these? Turns out there isn't one. I dealt with the parrot by wrapping him up in some towels & putting him out of reach of the puppies on the chest of drawers in the bedroom. He was at least still warm, so the process is that if we keep him immobile (wrapped up), warm, dry & quiet, then if he's going to recover, he will, overnight. In the morning, either he flies away, or he's dead.  And if he is, then at least he died warm & comfortable.

Now to the heater. It was off because the power was off & so there was no juice to drive the controller & thermometer. OK, so why's the power off? Check the switchboard. The earth leakage circuit breaker has tripped, which means that something has leaked current (to earth) i.e. has had some sort of short circuit & so the safety cutout has cut out. Ok, switch it back on. It cut out again within a few seconds. Hmm, into troubleshooting mode here. Switch all the circuits off, put the breaker on again & then switch them back on, one by one. Aha, one power circuit is tripping it all of the time. Ok, start switching off power points on the line that is dead (runs up one half of the house, so it's not too hard to find)  & keep testing it. Hmm, I've got almost everything switched off AND pulled out of the plugs, & it's still tripping out. This is starting to look nasty. It also makes sense that the webcam hasn't been updating to the website since about 9:40 this morning. Duh, the power's been off! Not only the wireless network has been off, the whole bloody house has been off.

Called the electricity supplier & had a chat with one of the guys. Yep, you're doing all the right things, unplugging as well as switching off. OK, there is one that I haven't pulled out yet because it's buried behind the desk in the study. Thank the guy & wonder why the hell my mobile can't make any calls. OK, pull the desk out & pull out the one remaining power board from the power point down there.  OK, so now it's not tripping out. One by one, start plugging in appliances & turning them on again. Hmm, we might just ditch that power board. Then went to meet Julie off the bus with the dogs (as we do most nights) & explain to her that the bundle of rags on the dresser is in fact a wild bird & the house is only just now starting to warm up again. So then we used the speaker phone on the home phone to call Telstra & be told that there's a national outage on the network that we use & that we can switch to the less powerful one if we need to. So there is nothing wrong with both of our phones, or our account, after all. See, none of them were actually related!