Chasing each other round the dining table

No, it's not what you think. We spent a couple of hours last night folding the junk mail ready for today's delivery. Instead of sitting on the floor surrounded by different piles of catalogues, we put them on the dining table, stood either side and worked our way round them. Of course, every now and then one of us would catch up to the other, this encouraged us to work faster so we didn't get in each others way.

I timed myself in the afternoon, when it was just me folding and it took me thirty minutes to fill a bag. With two of us at it, it took ten minutes a bag, just because we were encouraging each other to go faster.

When we did the weekend delivery we had seven items in each bundle, today we had eleven. You might think it wouldn't make much difference, but because each bundle was so much thicker and heavier, we could only get thirty in our bags instead of the fifty we were carrying on the weekend. That meant we had to keep doubling back to the car to fill up again. It actually took us three hours today, instead of the two on Sunday.

To be honest, I thought the amount we delivered was ridiculous. The bundles were so thick, we had trouble getting them into some of the smaller letterboxes. We must have really pissed off the postie.

I weighed one of the bags last night and thirty bundles weighs ten kilograms. It reminded me of my younger days when I stupidly joined the army reserve. We spent one weekend up at Tin Can Bay lugging ten kilo backpacks and five kilo SLRs. Yes I know, the British soldiers carried something like fifty kilos on their backs in the Falklands war and they did it for days on end. Back in my army reserve days, fifty kilos was about what I weighed.

Needless to say, after and hour or so of tramping through the bush and getting completely knackered, I was told to sit down and wait for a medic. I ended up spending the rest of the weekend on sentry duty in the middle of nowhere, being woken up every hour for a radio check. Actually, the mosquitos and sandflies did a pretty good job of keeping me awake anyway. I was itchy for days after that.

Back to today's delivery though, I didn't struggle anywhere near as much as I did back then. Maybe all those years in the gym in my early thirties paid off, even if I'm not in shape now. I must admit, my legs are a bit sore and stiff now, but that's something I'll get used to.

I'll soon be ready for that seven hour walk in thirty-eight degree heat with Dogbait.

Getting paid to exercise

I don't know how much it costs to join a gym these days. It's been about ten years since I last worked out in one, and back then you pretty much had to sign up for a year to get the best value and that cost me about $600.

To get a bit of extra money, Donna and I have started doing letterbox drops. To put it another way, we're delivering junk mail. We did our first delivery this morning and it was easier than I expected.

The area we're working in has the word 'Hills' in its name, and for good reason. It's also the middle of summer, so the temp was around 28 degrees Celsius. It's definitely not as bad as Victoria was a couple of weeks ago, so I can't really say I can relate to what it was like for Dogbait, but we were glad of the water and Gatorade we had with us.

One thing that occurred to me while we were out was that I'd hate to be delivering mail on a motorbike. Some people either don't realise how hard it is to access their letterbox, or they just don't care. A perfect example of this is the house I came across with a beautiful, metre high conifer growing right slap bang in front of the letterbox. There is no way the postie would be able to reach that while sitting on his bike.

After the first couple of cobwebs I also learned not to walk between overgrown trees and bushes.

Some people must be very pessimistic about the amount of mail they get, going by the size of their letterboxes. You'd be flat out fitting a postcard into some of them.

Despite the heat, the hills and the drizzling rain though, I think I'd rather being delivering junk mail here in Australia than in the UK. I've delivered newspapers in Hertfordshire before and part of our round had blocks of flats, meaning lots of stairs. Add to that the fact that the letterboxes are in the front door, not at the front of the property, it means a lot more walking.

On the very last street of our round today I was powering (yes even after two hours) up a hill to where Donna had parked the car and passed a couple of girls in their exercise gear coming the other way. I thought to myself, I'm getting paid to do what you're doing. Okay, it's not a lot of money, but it beats paying for the gym.

What's in a name

We've been watching reruns of Hamish Macbeth on ABC2 recently.

The series finished last week, but I've been looking for the books the series was based on. Reading in Wikepedia about the author M. C. Beaton, I was surprised to learn that she's actually a woman. M. C. stands for Marion Chesney, her real name and the one she's used for the Agatha Raisin series of mystery novels.

This got me to thinking about other female novelists that have created popular male characters and I noticed a pattern emerging. J. K. Rowling created Harry Potter. Agatha Christie created Hercule Poirot.

Okay, maybe I'm reading more into this than there really is, but if I ever write a series of crime novels, they're going to have a female main character and her name will start with an H. How can I lose.

Can anyone else think of more examples? Come to think of it, have you ever been surprised to find a popular writer you admired turned out to be the opposite sex to what you'd assumed?

Special forces possum

We like to give the animals in our care a good chance of survival when they're released. This means giving them the opportunity too practise the skills they'll need in the wild.

This it trooper Terry during his covert ops training, abseiling down the front of his cage.



We also teach them hand to hand combat and assassination techniques.

Seriously though, we recently moved Terry into a bigger cage and he's gradually getting the hang of climbing on branches and stuff. It's a lot less stressful than having him climb on us, and a lot less painful than us as well.

Time to go

Donna was manning the BARN rescue phone on the weekend when she got a call from someone in our suburb. The caller had found a baby bird of unknown species sitting in the drive-thru of our local Red Rooster. She'd done the right thing and left it there for a while to see if it flew away or the parents came to feed it, but no such luck. So Donna asked if she could bring it round to us.

It turned out to be a Black Faced Cuckoo Shrike, a species we hadn't had in care before but had recently transported one for another carer. They're insectivores, but they'll also eat fruit which makes them pretty easy to look after as far as feeding is concerned.

This poor little fellar seemed to be pretty exhausted though, and with birds in that condition it's not a good idea to just feed them as normal. Your body has to use energy to break down food, so if you give a starving animal something that isn't easily digestible you may kill them. Fortunately, we have a product called First Aid which is made especially for this situation. I was able to get the bird to take some of it by putting some in a teaspoon and dragging its beak through it from side to side.

The next morning it was crying out for food and we discovered it was able to fly quite well, a fact it demonstrated by flying around our garage when we opened the basket it was in.

As I said, they're quite easy to look after, we got it to take a mix of pet mince (no, it's not minced up pets) and Wombaroo Insectivore, the same thing we feed to the tawnies, magpies, butcher birds and peewees. For the last few days all I've heard is the little bird calling out for food.

Our intention was to get it paired up with another cuckoo shrike of the same age that another carer had, the one we'd delivered a week earlier, but luckily we didn't get around to it. With all the calling it'd been doing it attracted the attention of an adult cuckoo shrike.

We usually put our birds outside during the day as they need the sunlight, even the nocturnal birds.



Yesterday the cuckoo shrike spent all day hanging from our clothes line and calling. We're lucky to have understanding neighbours, because it was a little annoying. Then later in the afternoon while we were busy feeding all the animals we noticed the adult was not only visiting, but it was visiting with food.



Eventually it landed on the cage and tried to feed the baby through the bars of the cage. This was the moment we'd been waiting for, as it meant the baby was either being adopted or the adult was actually one of its parents. As it was only found about five hundred metres from our house it's quite possible that it was a parent.

So I opened the cage, let the little guy perch on my finger and lifted it up onto the clothes line. From there it flew into one of our trees where it was met by one of the adults. It was a very rewarding sight to see the adult fly away, then come back with some food for the littlun. They then flew away in the direction of Red Rooster.

Hopefully we'll see them again, but not in care next time.

New computer

It's been nearly a month since my last post. You'll remember that back then I'd just destroyed my laptop. Well now I've got another one and I won't be destroying this one, it's too cute.

What I bought is an Asus EeePC 901. It's more of a kneetop than a laptop really, it weighs half what my old Acer weighed and is a lot smaller. The keyboard takes a bit of getting used to because of its size, but I'm still touch typing with it so it's not too bad.

As I said in my last post, I don't want another windows computer. This one is running a version of Linux called Xandros. When I originally decided on the EeePC my intention was to try it with Xandros, then install Ubuntu. I'd already played with Ubuntu a bit on our desktop computer and quite liked it.

Getting Ubuntu onto the EeePC, or more specifically a version of it called Ubuntu Eee (now Easy Peasy) that's just for the EeePC, isn't as easy as you might think. That's a bit ironic when you consider that the E in the name stands for easy. The reason it's not straight forward is the EeePC doesn't have a CD drive, so you need to make a USB thumbdrive bootable and somehow get the operating system onto it, then install from there.

It involved a lot of mucking around, but as always Google was my friend and I managed to find out how to do it and eventually turned the little EeePC into a dual boot system running both Xandros and Ubuntu. Then the frustration started.

No matter what I did I couldn't get Ubuntu to make a wireless connection. In fact I couldn't even get it to connect to the internet by plugging into the router. Luckily the frustration was tempered by the fact I could still connect by rebooting into Xandros. Then I discovered a few other things that didn't work in Ubuntu as they should and, believe it or not, there was no e-mail program installed. Not that that was much of a problem if I couldn't connect to the internet.

After a few days of mucking around with Ubuntu I noticed that Xandros wasn't working as well as it should, to the point it was becoming almost unuseable. When I tried running restore it wouldn't work at all, so I decided to reformat the whole thing and just have Ubuntu on the computer, thinking maybe I could get the wireless problem sorted. No such luck.

Now here's where I love the little EeePC, where it stands out from a lot of other computers. A lot of manufacturers these days don't supply disks with their products, it saves them a few cents on each machine and that all adds up. What they do is put the operating system in a partition on your hard drive and you restore from there. Of course it's absolutely useless if your hard drive gets corrupted like on my old Acer.

Asus supply you with not one, but two disks. One has the operating system on it and the other has some useful utilities, including one that allows you to make your little USB thumdrive bootable.

So now I have a nice clean installation of Xandros on the computer and it's running as it should. I must admit though, I was having a fiddle the other day and ended up breaking something. It's so nice to be able to get the whole thing back up and running again in under ten minutes.

Because the EeePC only has a 20GB hard drive you have to rely more on external storage, a good thing as far as I'm concerned. In fact Asus give you free online storage for your files if you have an EeePC. I also use Firefox Foxmarks to keep my bookmarks synchronised. If I have to reinstall Xandros again all I have to do is download all my bookmarks from the server. That's something I'm really glad I had on the old laptop.

So if you're in the market for a new laptop, consider the little EeePC. It's not for everyone and if you're not computer literate don't go for the Linux version as it's not as straight forward as windows when you want to install new programs. It comes with most of the things you might need, including Open Office, Firefox for web browsing, Thunderbird for e-mail and even a few half decent games. If you're looking for something small, light and cheap it's great. Ideal for a student.

Laptop vs sandal

I don't lose my temper very often and even when I do it usually blows over very quickly.

Even when I'm out driving and I get cut up by some idiot I'll mutter something under my breath, maybe even give them a dirty look if I manage to get eye contact, but I'm certainly not a road rager or anything like that.

I guess it comes with age, you just shrug your shoulders and get on with it. Water off a duck's back so to speak.

Sometimes though, you've just got to let of a bit of steam. The best way to do that is to take out your frustration on an inanimate object.

Back in September, while I was down in Armidale for a uni residential, I noticed my laptop was starting to get a bit slow. It gradually got more and more temperamental until, one day while running a Windows update it stopped.

Somehow the hard drive had become corrupted and Windows wouldn't run. I could access it by running a command window (remember DOS?) and I could see that all my documents and photos were still there, but it was going to be a slow process getting them all off. There were about 40GB of pictures on the drive and copying them to a thumb-drive one by one would have been really painful. I could of course take it to a repair shop, but that would have cost money.

Well I finally got the laptop running again on the weekend, but that involved reformatting the C: drive where all my documents were. There was nothing really important on there. I have hard copies of all my uni assignments, the only thing I didn't have a copy of was my amateur radio log.

Then yesterday the drive crashed again, this time it was the D: partition, the one with all my pictures on, including about 1400 European holiday pictures that I hadn't yet burned to DVD.

Still, I remained philosophical, there wasn't much I could do about it so I might as well make the most of it. I hate Windows, but a Mac is too expensive for what you get, so I decided that since I've lost everything on the hard drive, I might as well reformat the lot and install Ubuntu.

Half way through reformatting the laptop stopped on me again. The only thing I could do was unplug it, remove the battery and start again, which I did. I was starting to get a little annoyed by now, but only a little.

I started again and while it was going I went out to clean some of the animal's cages. When I checked ten minutes later, I sat down on Donna's brand new computer chair and looked at the laptop on another chair and it had stopped again.



The picture above was taken shortly after I said something along the lines of, "You f****** useless piece of s***!" and tried to put a size 8 sandal through the screen.

I now have an Asus Eee PC on order. The hard drive is solid state, so no moving parts there, it runs Linux, so no Windows, yet it'll still do all I want it to. Best of all, it's a lot cheaper than a regular laptop. It only has a small hard drive and no DVD drive, but external drives are coming down in price all the time.

I won't ever buy an Acer again, the computer I'm typing this on is an Acer as well and the DVD drive hasn't worked for ages. My previous laptop was an Acer and the battery was never any good on that.

I'll keep you posted on the little Eee PC.