Today I've mostly bin...

[MBH]

Just get rid of these if you need to Scurra.

A few more 'characters':

[Bunnylump]

That last one looks like me on a bad day...

[MBH]

Some with less danger.....

[Bunnylump]

Nice to see you sharing a bedtime story with Clvrlad, MBH...

[giraffe]

Good pictures.

That green one looks like me on a good day.

[Bunnylump]

Been to Butterfly World, near St Albans. I'd really thoroughly recommend it for a day out. It's in phase 2 of building but is nevertheless brilliant. It has one tropical butterfly house, but also lots of different gardens and wildflower meadows all designed to attract butterflies. Next year they are entering phase 3 when they will build a giant biome (a bit like the ones at the Eden Project) which will house the world's largest tropical butterfly collection.

Liliput.JPG (78.08 KiB) Viewed 1148 times

In case you can't make it out, that's a giant hand fork and flowerpot!

butterfly.JPG (50.13 KiB) Viewed 1148 times

In the tropical hot house...

Again, get rid if you need to Scurra!!

[Laura]

Gah! My worst nightmare! Well, maybe not quite, but I can't stand butterfly houses. When I was a teenager, I had long hair, and wore it plaited right down my back. We went to a butterfly house, and this huge ugly brown moth thing landed on my shoulder. My instant reaction was to shake my head really fast, and run screaming. My plait whacked it, and I killed it. When we got to the end of this trail, there was a sign - I think the one I killed might have been a fairly rare, possibly slightly endangered species. It's a little bit more endangered now!!!

[Bunnylump]

Oh dear!!

[LAT]

Trying to do lots of things - tidy the garden - catch up on housework - fit a new cover to my ironing board - work out a revised route and re-write some instructions for the planned garden walk for the meet.........
and I can't really claim to have finished any of them.
(and all the while there was a backdrop of really nosiy planes getting ready for Farnborough air show next week)

[Bunnylump]

Aw, poor LAT. We've ended up making more work for you!! I think you'll definitely deserve a big hug at the end of the meet day! Thank you so much for doing that.

Seriously though, don't you just HATE days like that, when you faff about for ages and achieve NOTHING? My day's been rather like that too... Although I did have a bit of fun at work today. The big head honchos have got it into their heads that they need to introduce a female staff dress code. I violently object to this. As I pointed out - in our department we would never dream of going to work in jeans or trainers, but we do look smart. However, when you move from science practical to resistant materials to art, business suits are completely inappropriate. Then it transpires that one of them has a "real problem" with seeing women's TOES!! IOW they are suggesting closed in shoes! Well, frankly the answer to that in this heat is "get lost and get over it". So, to make the point firmly, I went out and bought all my staff really stupid socks - with parrots / smiley faces / space invaders on them. We are now armed to put them on UNDER our sandals (hence covering those offensive toes!), when that particular member of staff is present. It did look REALLY funny. Oh, and I also bought them all smarties, to go with the "healthy eating" regime.

[LAT]

Brilliant! I wish I worked with you!

[Bunnylump]

You might not say that when I presented you with purple space invader socks...

[LAT]

You know I might quite enjoy that!

[giraffe]

I've had a week of getting nothing done. It's Lally's last week at her school, so there was a dance display on Monday afternoon, Sports day on Tuesday morning, Prize giving this afternoon and tomorrow there is a leavers assembly at 2pm, which I didn't know I was supposed to attend until today. So all in all I've spent the whole week at her school! F broke up last Friday, so I've had him under my feet when I have been here, and this afternoon I got back from prize giving to find he had decided to make a cake. He is enthusiastic but experimental in the kitchen meaning I came back to an explosion of cake mix and icing sugar. The cake was very nice, if a little unusual in flavour, but I wish he'd warned me.

[Bunnylump]

Send him down here - he can come and help me make lots of cakes for the party!!

Funniest thing I've ever seen cake wise was when my brother tried to make my niece a birthday cake. He couldn't find the cake mixer, so decided to improvise by fitting a bent coathanger into the end of a Black and Decker drill. I came in just in time to watch the cake mix start to drip back off the ceiling...

[giraffe]

[Bunnylump]

...this is the brother who is just installing an "information point" right at the end of his back garden. Next to the home made Narnia style lamp posts and bizarre cottage style flint and brick shed, which has its own shed to store a microwave and a hoover for the other shed. I asked him why he needed the microwave.

"You never know when you might need to warm up a pie."



Mind you, he has just made a really cool device for watering hanging baskets. It's balanced so that as the basket dries out, it gets lighter, springs upwards and trigers a siphon affair from a water butt. He's a bit of a mad inventor. Some are a lot more successful than others...

[LAT]

Wow, that sounds a brilliant device. But I suppose it does need the water butt to be near the hanging basket?

[Bunnylump]

Yes, although I suppose you could have something smaller and more decorative.

[clvrlad]

hmmm not necessarily.... using the change in weight to trigger a sensor to activate a pump would work for quite a distance

(sensor=power switch [a spring loaded push=on one would work well.....] )

suggest it to him