Stop fighting or I'll TURN this AROUND!

I'm typing this with a bird on each shoulder. Occasionally one of them walks around to the shoulder that is occupied by the other bird and they start squawking and pecking. So I pick up the one that was originally there and move it to the other shoulder. Ah, the stress of life in general.

Today was odd. My Dad is stiff off from work and managed to get a particularly nasty dose of flu that has him wlaking around like a zombie, sneezing and sniffling and being hugely productive and rather sensitive about things. My mom and I went off to breakfast and he got highly offended that we hadn't invited him on account of his being in bed with a thermometer sticking out of his mouth. By the time we got back he'd done two loads of laundry and a gigantic pile of ironing. He just doesn't know how to relax!

Anyway breakfast with my mom was marginally less awkward than usual. I'm not sure why but we're actually getting along relatively well lately. After that we split up and went shopping and I ended up buying clothes (as if I didn't have enough) which are very different to what I usually wear. I like them though. I had to rush off to work to get approval for them right away, so I went and had lunch with Jo and Lara. They had Steers, I had celery and mango. for some reason I've been craving celery and mango so much that I haven't eaten very much else for 2 days so now I feel a bit sick. But mango is amazing! I love mango.

We were also talking abut a leaflet I picked up while I was shopping. it's for a part-time course in being a field guide and covers stuff like:

• Taxonomy,


• Grasses


• Trees


• Earth studies


• weather and climate


• astronomy


• Ecology (savannas)


• Geology and geomorphology


• animal studies


• mammals (biology,taxonomy and behaviour)


• amphibians


• reptiles


• arthropods (focussing on insects and arachnids)


• birds(biology and identification)


• fish


• guiding


• signs of the veld


• bush navigation


• plaeoanthropology


• and ecotourism

From what I understand it's a one-year course with a weekly lecture in sunninghill (which is close to where I work) and it has weekend field-trips for practicals. And it looks like they may go to the REAL desert. I was talking to Jo and she was saying that if I do it she'll do it with me, which would be so much fun! I'm very tempted to go for it, so I'm waiting for them to send me the information pack thingie. The frustrating thing is that you can go all over the website (www.africanaturetraining.co.za) and there is nothing about the price. It's so so annoying!

anyway I came home and caught up on a few hours of sleep and now I'm probably going to work on my CV for the Edinburgh application. Or maybe I'll just have some more mango (MANGO!!!) and go to bed.

Oh yes, and I'm happy to say that all of the people I know in matric (except for Sarah whose surname I kind of forgot) has passed and done really well. YAY! And my mom came rushing in this moring to throw the newspaper at me and show me that my friend Lynne got 6 A's and that there was a whole long article on Luke's sisters (which mixed them up a bit too. I guess that's an occupational hazard of being a twin). She also told me that I would be in all kinds of trouble if I didn't phone and congratulate them RIGHT AWAY. It was a pretty awkward phonecall... but quite amusing at the same time!

Here's a picture of some books. It was in this old rickety shed that we used to store our animals in Darling (there was a lot of cool stuff, like huge saws and bear-traps and a baby bird that liked to fly into your feet whenever you were feeling mildly unsettled) there was a pile of dusty books. Eventually curiosity got the better of me and I looked inside them. It's basically an acocunt of every day on the farm for over a century. The netry would say something like:

16 January

Killed 1 goat

Took Martha to Worcester

and so on. the writing was illegible most of the time, some of the older entries had been done with a quill pen! I intended to take a picture of a page but I forgot. I'll have to go back there someday and get one.