Phee found me a lovely treat on Monday.  We were on our run and when we got to the new Acer at The Triangle on The Other Side (I need to send maps, don’t I?) he hunkered down, intrigued by something.  I called him off, thinking it was a lizard or frog or something, but it was the most beautiful little furry angel.  Huge eyes, big, boney paws, tiny ears and sort of wings.  I thought it was a baby possum.  I was going to walk back home over the ridge with him (Mum was nowhere to be seen or smelt) when he found his own safe harbor.  He crawled up the sleeve of my long-sleeved tee and made a nest in the crook of my arm.  And there he stayed for the duration of our run!

When we got home I showed him to George who was entranced, but no closer than me to identifying him.  I put him in a box with grass and water while I performed my ablutions and then popped him back up my shirt for the winding trip up to the office.  By this time he had a name – ‘Chi Chi’ and he did quite a lot of wriggling on the jpourney, trying to find the best spot.  At one point I thought I’d lost him forever and had to stop and hunt – he was resting in the padded hammock of bra between my breasts!!  When we got to work, Ged identified him as a SUGARGLIDER and we Googled the sugarglider diet so we could take care of him, and introduced him to members of the local Comboyne community when he came to the shop with me.  As sugargliders sleep during the day, he was exhausted and preferred sleeping skin to skin with me.  When we finally went home it was dark so Chi Chi was wide awake and slipped out of my shirt and into the car.  Phee didn’t seem to care.  And when we got home I went hunting through the Pajero til his rustling in the back gave him away.  Man, they are fast!  So I decided to leave him out  of his box and in the spare room during the night so he could run and climb and fly while we slept.  Big mistake.  When we woke in the morning he was gone, I know not where.  But I have my suspicions about Phee who wouldn’t meet my eye when I was grilling him.  I had blocked up the gap under the door but maybe not well enough, or perhaps Phee spent the night creating a gap.  I guess he found him . . . but we are very sad.  He was just GORGEOUS.  Bye Bye Chi Chi.

The horses are returning to normal but we have taken hair from both of mine and Gypsy for testing by my Horse Herbalist to try and get to the bottom of the antipathy between them and we have found egg fragments in the Plover nest but so far no sign of the babies.  Mum & Dad are pretty busy defending something, though!  Every time the horses are on the river flat (normally at night) the plovers are screeching their warnings and by day they dive bomb any of us brave enough to go looking for the young.

I have been amazed by the prehistoric cicada shells decorating the trees and fence posts (and pretty much anything else that stays stationary for more than five minutes).  The shells split down the back to release the fully grown cicada and the shell remains gripping the upright – bizarre.  And if you have never been deafened by cicadas before, you are missing one of life’s most extraordinary experiences.  The high pitched buzzing screaming of a million cicadas ‘singing’ their strange and primal songs drills into your brain and swells inside your skull until madness feels moments away.  The relief when you move out of earshot is exquisite!

I have been cutting and pasting photos and being a one man band production line to get all the invites out this week so I can cross that off my pre-wedding list and get on with the next thing.  We went and interviewed two celebrants and now I can’t decide between the two . . . too many decisions to make!

Mummy very kindly paid for a Fowl House for us for Christmas.  I had spent hours on the internet trying to track down a good wooden house for my new girls and thought I’d found one and paid $250 for a removalist to bring it down from Brisbane.  It turned out to be cheap, shoddy and made of softwood which would last approximately three and a half minutes with the white ants at Avalon.  So I am embroiled in a battle to get a full refund.  Poor fools, they don’t realise that I always win in the end!