@ Head

Yesterday I heard a thump as a bird flew into a window. She was okay, just a bit stunned it seemed.

She eventually flew off after a couple of bloopers where she flew into the wall, then flew into the veggie garden fence… must be that new extreme sports flying.

I had no idea what kind of bird she was, so I posted a link to the photo on a bird watchers forum and in no time some kind soul had helped me identify her as a female satin bower bird. Gotta love technology for making it so easy :)

How cute is this ?

Seems a bit earlier this year. Last year I took a photo of the then new “mower”  early September. Although in that picture that joey looks older than this one. 

Here’s another snap of this year’s. I think that roo on the left in the picture is the same one that I took a picture of in the pouch last year.

It's winter

but still a lot of activity in the garden. The orchard is quiet, a lot of pruning jobs awaiting. But my Meyer lemon is just about to produce it's 2nd crop of lemons... enough to keep scurvy away over winter ;)  The Meyer lemons are really sweet for a lemon:

I saw some camellia sinensis plants for sale the other day, so I just had to grab one. Hopefully in summers to come I'll have green tea from it along with my lemon grass and lemon verbena :)

I

n the vegie patch things are slowing up.  I pulled out the tomatoes plants last weekend, and have just about caught up on weeding. There's carrots and beetroot still, as well as silverbeet:

and celery:

and the wild broadbeans are in flower:

Some of the wild Pak Choi is flowering and adds some nice colour to the veggie patch (as well as seed for the next lot):

Elsewhere in the garden, some of the wattles are beginning to flower:

And the honey proteas are also in bloom:

The New Holland honey eaters love the proteas :

On a sadder note one of my big pine trees is sick:

I planted this tree from a seedling many years ago. That white strip on the trunk is a 1 foot ruler I balanced there to give some perspective to the size of the tree:

I've started watering the tree in case it's just because the winter has so far been very dry.  It looks like there is still some life there, but it is shedding a LOT more needles than any of the other pines :(

As I went to take some pictures of the pine, the local kangaroos of course just had to get in the photos.  This is the big buck that comes in every so often to serve the girls then goes away. He usually hangs around only for a couple of weeks at a time.  The girl roos are showing large bulges in their pouches at present. I think some of the joeys are hopping out at night, but so far have only spied a tail sticking out of a pouch. "They" say animals know the season ahead, but I'm not sure what this lot of breeding means ;)

The weather has been reasonably mild, a couple of cold nights, and a couple of good rains, but overall still much drier than usual.

Windows Defender told me it scanned 12,843,673 objects !!!

Admittedly that included another drive with Win 2008 on it, but that's still a lot of files.  I noticed that the objects includes the contents of help files including MSDN. Even still, I figure it would take me half  year to look at each of them for just one second !!

So this got me curious as to how many files there are on my Vista drive. It has Visual Studio, Office and some other stuff. 

At root level, there's over one hundred and forty thousand files (140,000) and nearly twenty thousand folders !!  Twenty thousand folders I thought, nah couldn't be... that's crazy.  So I looked around a little more..

The windows directory tree contains over 70,000 files and about 14,400 folders !   14,400 folders... you've got to be kidding me ....

The windows\winsxs directory tree has 41,400 files and 10,560 folders !  All this sxs compatibility sure does take up a lot of space and folders.  But there's still 3,800 or so folders elsewhere in the windows tree...

There's almost a thousand folders inside the Windows\System32 tree, but turns out the main source in there is almost 700 that are in the DriversStore, (again a compatibility thing).  Of the remaining 2,800 folders or so in the windows tree, Microsoft.Net was 100,  the Inf tree was 220 or so,the installer tree about 100 or so, etc. The remaining big one was the Assembly path (aka the GAC) which had almost 1,700 folders !!

Sure does seem a lot........

Nah, a blue tongue lizard. But when you first see them and only see their head or part of their body it's hard to tell.  I saw this guy while I was cleaning up in one of the windbreaks. Being the start of winter he was pretty slow, so I could grab my camera and take a few pictures. He hissed a couple of times, but wasn't into showing off so I couldn't get any photos of why they get their name ;)

The are well camouflaged in the leaf litter, just are many of our snakes. More often that not it's the tell tale rustle of the leaves that gives them away: