A day in the life, plus flowers.

Today was quite busy so I thought I'd do a traditional, diary type blog.  To make life a little more interesting for readers and viewers I have included some images of garden flowers after that.

After the usual checking of emails we headed off for our dog/exercise walk.  The highlight of this was finding the male of our frogmouth family in one of the favourite roosts.  From looking at past years they usually vanish for a couple of weeks around New Year, and on return the youngsters are not with them.  I wonder if the female will be found later or if he will have to recruit a new friend?

After this warm up I went for a short run as part of my effort to get fit.  This included a couple of 'digs' over 600m to try to get some speed into my legs.  I did mange to do one of them in less than 3 minutes, so I am getting somewhere.

It was then time to head for Queanbeyan and Fyshwick for various activities mainly, in my case, related to the process of acquiring the technology needed to control the local rabbit population.  (More detail will come on the conclusion of that process, expected some time in April: as a hint, the word "bang!" is helpful.).  

On the  way out we noticed a small dragon lurking in the creek.

• The first was to visit the Motor Vehicle Registry in Queanbeyan to correct a name error on my driving license.  This was done without my blood pressure getting much over 300, so I must be getting both fitter and tolerant!
• My next stop was to visit Tony de Queanbeyan for a haircut.  It was suggested I should have done that before I had my photograph taken for my license!
• Then to Bunnings, the Australian equivalent to Home Depot, in Fyshwick to acquire some hardware needed for the later stages of the technology process.   This was followed by a visit to a gun shop to sign up for a course, and to check that gun storage rules hadn't changed.  They had - or at least the implementation of them has so much rethinking of plans needed.  No biggie, just very very annoying.
• After visits to the Fyshwick Markets for some fruit and the ex-government furniture place (mainly to see what they around) it was back home.

My main business at home was taking some of the following photographs.  The first is of an Oriental Lily which is trying to achieve an award in a Triffid competition.  Rather than the smell of rotting stuff that accompanies triffids (in our case occasionally generated from the fly trap or possibly the old bones the small dog has buried under the deck)  this lily has a very pleasant perfume pervading the Northern side of the house.

After a couple of years we finally have some hollyhock flowers.  This red one is spectacular.

The remaining pictures are of various forms of gladioli, of which we acquired 250 mixed bulbs earlier in the year.  They are in three clumps around the garden and doing very nicely.

They also do well indoors, when the spikes break off in the garden!