Chaos Reading discussion
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Unusually Chaotic Moderator
Same question anything in sight.Also, maybe you could try audio books???
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http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDQ650...
We're on cyclone alert PLUS there's a king tide due at the same time as the cyclone PLUS we're due for 0.5m of rain over the next couple of days. So..... that's happening, apparently. I'm all prepped for my first cyclone (lucky it's only a small one) and it's very calm here for the moment, but we may lose the internet/phones at some point.
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Ohhhh shiiiitt!! Nae bother Roobs, hope all goes well!
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While most people are being pretty safe & sensible, I just heard the local mayor on the radio making her point that "what people seem to forget is, ten, twenty, thirty years ago, this wouldn't even have been called a cyclone. It was just the normal start of the monsoon season." No worries, then. I'll just grab a beer and forget about the whole "risk management" shit...!
Let us know how you (and Swanky) are.
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PS - Swanky's fine. Except she just bailed up a goanna who decided to move into the laundry while we were all on lockdown. If the damn thing starts showing up at feeding time too, I'm outta here.
That sounds like it was just the normal start of monsoon season, but your mayor sounds like she's not too concerned about re-election. If it had turned out like one of the ones that hit the Philippines last year, she'd have looked pretty stupid. In Italy, when that happens, people get charged for gross negligence.We get hurricane warnings once or twice a year, and most times they end up being nothing, but every now & then one reminds us how dangerous it is to say "but most times they end up being nothing."
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goanna"
Apologies! A goanna is a lot like an iguana. Think big, bitey monitor lizard.
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Yeah. But if it HAD been a high impact cyclone, she'd no doubt have been saying, "Well, there's nothing you can do about cyclones..."
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goanna"
..here's one I prepared earlier: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rubytomb...
So, you don't plan to make it a pet or anything?
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They don't exactly play well with others. Much hissing and rearing up on hind legs. Did I mention the poisonous bite? Or that they can disembowel you with their claws?
You don't know how lonely I am.....Oh well, I have my cats.
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So, you're talking about cats here, right?
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The fact that I fear for my cat should tell you something about how vicious these things are..
Our cats are too "humanized" they won't even hunt mice.
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Swanky thinks hunting is a "pack" activity and likes me to participate. She likes to do things like distract the baby goanna while I grab a shoebox, towel etc. Or punch a fly unconscious out of the sky then stand over it like a pointer until I pick it up. You can command her to do things like "back up", "bring it to me" and "go, go, go!" (handy for wasp situations). Very un-cat-like.
I've had to coach her about stalking prey "cat-style", particularly with the baby geckos on the ceiling. Her methodology was to jump vertically from the highest surface she could find, snatching the lizard up with her teeth, and then crashing through every piece of furniture in the room on the downwards plummet. I've been coaching her on patience and tactics, but she still loses her tiny mind if she sees one in the room that she can't reach. I've voice recorded some of the sounds of frustration from her during one of these coaching sessions - it's so sad yet hilarious at the same time.
We love our cats...well and our dogs and our horses and so on.
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Anyway, thanks for hanging in there. And at least we have the treasure hunt challenge starting again on 1 July to give things a kick along! :)
Hi, glad you're back. Hope all is well.
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For the last couple of months, I have been working very hard to get a second Etsy shop ready to open. It'll be called "Ruby & Swank" and TheSwankyCat will not only be Head Cat In Charge, but she features prominently on the logo. I'll be selling vintage fashion and handmade jewellery & accessories. The shop WAS to be launched on 1 July, and we had a photo shoot last week to try and make that happen. However, the photographs need re-shooting. And then this happened..
I got offered a job in Darwin. This is another roughly 2,000km interstate move. To a place even hotter, more tropical and more critter-laden than Townsville. It really is a fabulous opportunity though, and so today I officially accepted the job! It's ON!
So the logistics have yet to be arranged, but I expect to have to delay the launch of Ruby & Swank while I organise another enormous move, completely by myself. Yay? I think? No, definitely YAY...!
Ruby wrote: "Okay, time to come clean..For the last couple of months, I have been working very hard to get a second Etsy shop ready to open. It'll be called "Ruby & Swank" and TheSwankyCat will not only be He..."
YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH :D :D great stuff Roobs the adventurer!
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I had always hoped to try this in Darwin, however a good friend's father-in-law was actually killed by a croc a couple of weeks ago, so I don't think I'll be taking them so lightly in future.
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Sooner or later the Croc's going to figure that thing out and knock the bottom off then...Miller time (or Johnson time or Smith time or whatever).
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They're also really into the occult, it seems. At one point last night I approached the front patio to find three frogs in a semi-circle facing my chair, chanting loudly in front of a stick of (mozzie-repellant) incense. Just after that, we found one inside the house. Too creepy for me. I'm out.
The Blair Frog Project
Have you found any little "stick frogs" around the house.
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I think you're in trouble... If you suddenly vanish we'll know what happened.
Wow, Blair Witch meets True Detective. I think you need more than sage to clear the air.
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I took this one this morning.Yup. That's today's front page news.
Unfortunately, there's no stopping on the bridge to Katherine to properly frame photos, but it says, "Jesus Loves Nachos", and it's my favourite graffiti ever.
Found this outside my bedroom window. It used to be a gecko.
I can't.. even...
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LOL - Yes, we did have big goannas in Townsville, but nowhere near as big as that!
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Ruby wrote: "Jennifer wrote: "Do you have these?"
LOL - Yes, we did have big goannas in Townsville, but nowhere near as big as that!"
OMG!!! That's huge!!!
You can eat them can't you?The goanna, not the cat!
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The goanna, not the cat!"
Yep - they're edible (I think only Indigenous people are allowed to kill them though, for traditional purposes).
Not sure what goanna tastes like though. The closest I've gotten is crocodile, emu, camel, possum and the odd dugong. Turtle's much more popular up here - I haven't tried it, but it's supposed to be very fatty. They boil them in their own blood for best results. A friend of mine once went to a community where she was served what she thought was pita bread. Turned out to be turtle tummies.
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Video Here -
Some Dos and Don'ts of Amateur Bat-Catching
Do: Talk softly and try not to frighten the bat
Don't: swing a cobweb brush wildly in the air while screaming in order to keep it off your best clothes.
Do: Hold a pool scoop fairly still in the air so that he can check it out and decide that he really wants to land on it.
Don't: allow the cat to sneak out again after you've fed her supper, hence giving her the opportunity to bring you little flappy presents.
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A couple months ago, in the wild suburbs just outside Washington DC, I locked myself outside of the house alongside double-O-7 cat. He soon snatched a bird out of the air and brought it to me, but it wasn't dead and couldn't fly more than a foot or two off the ground (I was forced to finish the bird off myself out of mercy since asscat kept smacking it back down to the ground).
Lacrosse sticks and tennis rackets are helpful when trying to remove bats from the indoors, too...
This all sounds kind of horrible. Any light at the end of the tunnel?