Articles in “Random Photographs”

I came back from grocery shopping this afternoon, and noticed that the possum was sleeping under the floorboards again, but in a different position.

Now, I’m not one to waste the opportunity to demonstrate that the wildlife under my floorboards isn’t actually dead:

Then the chair I was standing on to take the photograph exploded.

This chair:

That wasn’t the most pleasant thing that’s happened to me all day, I must say. Nick took this picture, because the chair and I are no longer on speaking terms.

Then I noticed I could take an equally cute picture of the possum from another angle, an angle in which you can see that they’ve pulled some of the insulation up to use as a pillow:

Nobody can excuse me of being unable to see the silver lining.

It would have been the moon, but there hasn’t been a decent full moon recently.

I call this one “Terrified Lizard Who Can’t Show Himself In The Back Garden Without Being Chased By a Madwoman With A Camera.”

The article goes back to the editor tomorrow, and then normal blogging will resume, I promise. Well, plus abnormal blogging on Tuesday nights when Doctor Who is on.

Well, at least someone is enjoying this weather.

This is more than a half-hearted update, however: it’s also a note to say that I will be live-blogging Doctor Who this evening, and continuing throughout the ABC’s airing of season two. It will mean a hiatus to my real-time blogging of season one, which I’d barely started, but it’s always more fun when we’re actually watching the episodes on television.

Remember, if you’re not an NCIS fan: ABC1 at 8:30 p.m. (Brisbane time for the live-blogging, of course).

I think I’ve figured out where our possum sleeps during the day:

That’s right: today’s discerning possum chooses not a hollow tree, but the small space between a cupboard and the floorboards in a suburban garage.

I’ll say this for him: he’s a heavy sleeper. Nothing disturbs him: not the garage door opening and closing, not the car moving, and not unexpected flash photography. If only I could sleep that soundly.

We’ve been a little worried lately, because we haven’t seen him for a while, and the little lizard’s been running around as though he never used to get beaten up for trying to sit on the lawn in the sun.

We thought the big lizard might have moved on to pastures greener.

But here he is, albeit looking rather grubby, actually.

He didn’t fancy having his picture taken this morning, though he’s usually mad for the attention (or just enjoys posing), so it’s not the best shot.

But I’m pleased to see him out and about today.

UPDATE: And then he settled on the barbeque (and is still there) and I ignored his apparent desire for privacy and went to take his photograph again:

The photograph I really love, though, is this last one. I didn’t think his English-language comprehension skills were that good, but I told him that I’d only take one more picture and then leave him alone, and I got this shot:

Aw, bless his sad little face.

(Neither of those last two shots are cropped at all, by the way. I think he recovered his desire for attention.)

I have no real update this evening, since I am entertaining my father-in-law to dinner, but I feel the need to share, from Wondering Willow’s blog, this absolutely hilarious photograph of my younger nephew.

His mother claims that there’s no caffeine in what he’s drinking, but who would actually believe that, given this photograph?

(Secretly, I believe. But only a little and through force of habit.)

I’ve spent the day writing “cliche,” “fatuous,” “vague transition,” and the like on my own article (I’m much harder on myself than on my students, if anyone’s worrying about that. I’ve written “cliche” on students’ work before, but never “fatuous.”) and it has, oddly, put me out of the mood for updating the blog, especially since I’m only on page sixteen and it’s already after 6 p.m.

So, in the interim, here are some photographs of my dogs:

Well, technically, General Montgomery—the Elvis-fancying terrier of an earlier post—isn’t mine: my brother got him after our old dog, Scampy the Hell Hound, died, long after I moved out of home.

Petey the poodle is an old dog now, at least sixteen, and Monty only a youngster, but they’re both good boys, and Terry Pratchett tells us that that’s the highest praise we can give a dog.

It worries me slightly that I don’t know whether he was just highly amenable to having his picture taken or was, in fact, too terrified to move.

He turned up on our clothesline at eleven o’clock tonight:

It’s not the best photograph, of course—it was pitch black (hence the flash and the red-eye, which I thought of reducing in iPhoto, but it just made him look weird); I didn’t want to spook him by getting too close, and had to essentially guess where he was.

So, actually, not such a bad photo under the circumstances.

And isn’t he beautiful?

(Nick tells me that I should mention that this beautiful boy is a Tawny Frogmouth (and I’m so pleased to see that they’re at low risk of extinction, the lovely things). I just assumed everyone would know that, which just goes to show that I shouldn’t be writing on the Internet.

Actually, I don’t know for certain that these are the same ducks who came visiting in August, but I found them wandering their way around the garden this morning after a brief but intense sun-shower.

And then, bless them, they came even closer:

Who doesn’t love ducks?

This evening brought many more parrots than usual flocking to the palm tree:

I know: still nothing to do with books. But, while the book I’ve been re-reading my way through today—Andrew King’s The London Journal, 1845-83: Periodicals, Production and Gender—is a fascinating and extremely important book, especially for anyone with any interest in serial publication in the Victorian period, in penny weeklies (it is the only full-length academic account of these journals yet published), in reader-response theory, or in theories of textual consumption, especially among those groups of readers (such as the working class) whose experiences used to be considered unrecoverable, it’s not the sort of book I normally blog about, especially on a day that hasn’t been as productive as it should have been.

So, instead, let’s all marvel at how cute birds are when they’re eating upside down, and wonder how they’re able to eat upside down, when I tend to choke just trying to drink on a slight incline.

Seriously—I don’t intend the blog to become an image blog, but neither do I want to get into the habit of skipping too many days: a picture of birds eating is a nice step on my current path towards finding a compromise between my blogging and my (unpaid, because I’m currently unemployed, but vital, if I ever want to be employed) academic writing.

I’ll make it up to people who want something a little more word-intensive by starting my real-time blogging of season one of Doctor Who this weekend.

But with a day divided between excavating the skeleton of my argument from a journal article that has been provisionally accepted (but needs to have its theoretical and methodological framework refined before the 31st of January) and being really, really annoyed that Australia won the Sydney test (even though it was a dead game with the series already won) when Graham Smith had gone through the effort of batting when he has both a severely damaged elbow and a broken hand—well, I’m a little tired.

So I’m wimping out on the update and loading some more photographs of my parents’ beautiful garden, which is largely the handiwork of my brother the horticulturalist.

See? Nice and soothing. Now I can go back to what I’m calling theoretical archaeology (why, yes: I am rather pretentious) to the calm, illusionary sound of a water garden that’s actually one thousand kilometres away.

I took these photographs in Minnamurra Rainforest, at the base of the Illawarra escarpment. It is—according to my brother, who knows these things—the most southernly sub-tropical rainforest in Australia: after this, it’s temperate rainforest.

What I like about Minnamurra is the opportunity to take shots that play with light and shade, as well as all the water.

Come the return to Brisbane, however, I will actually be writing on this blog again, rather than simply uploading photographs.