We’ve been having a helluva a time with our internet services lately… hence offline-ness… the reasons why require a bit of backgrounding regarding changes here at Matiatia, which I will save for another post but for now suffice to say no interruption of services is a lie… and I now know about telstra processes 75, 77, 90 and the holy grail, 95…

On with the show…

Over the last couple of days and nights we’ve had sky phenomena which has been quite glorious. A couple of nights ago we had a phenomenal sunset, which transfixed everyone we spoke to the next day. Out of nowhere, out of this uniformly grey sky, as sky that went on for days and weeks and months, exploded, at the crepuscular hour, a golden light so fierce that it hurt… it lit up the hills all around in a fire of psychedelic green gold yellow. We all ran around trying to capture it with various cameras, but it was too ephemeral, too much for any lens we had…

nothing could capture the colors but you can see the double rainbow on the hills 

Then appeared the beginning of a rainbow, quite fluorescent, just the beginning, creeping across the sky until a full rainbow spanned the horizon, with another faint arc beginning to appear just above it. This beautiful double rainbow remained until dark. It felt like a promise of all the skies to come, lit as it was by an unclouded sun.

Yesterday there was another rainbow, and actual sun for most of the day. It was hot. I felt alive. I ran, and mowed. I weeded the vegie patch to reveal long lost spinach and tomato plants. I sweated. I began the task of wrestling the gardens back from the thigh high grasses. We saw 2 snakes today, always a sign of hot dry weather. And a good reason to get onto the mowing. With so many vulnerable animals and humans, and a good number of brown snakes, it’s wise to be able to see what’s in the grass…

A couple of days ago Charlene commented that one of the baby chicks was missing. I thought perhaps another victim of the rains, but really they’re babies no more, gangly teens really, and puddles of water shouldn’t be deathtraps.

Today I found the baby chick, in a most unfortunate circumstance. As I was mowing, a most tedious process using a push mower in thigh high grasses, the mower stalled, as it had been doing occasionally on the thick growth. In front of the mower was the baby chick – in the belly of a carpet snake! Which I must have walked over a couple of times in previous rounds of the lawn. Unfortunately this time I had inflicted grievous bodily harm upon the snake, a most beautiful carpet snake, huge and fat, which had been sleepily digesting the chick in the long grasses until fatally woken by the mower. I felt awful. The snake had to be swiftly killed as it was injured so terribly. I had seen this snake a couple of months ago around the pond, where I guess it was eating small frogs and rats, and I was very pleased to have a carpet snake living on the property, since rats outnumber people here by about 10 to 1… If I had had the opportunity I would have relocated the snake to inside the house, inside the walls or the ceiling to deal with the rat population, but unfortunately snake as gone back to the earth and will eat chicks, rats and other small rodents no longer. Not an auspicious event…

the snake’s stomach, with baby chicken inside 

An update on Tippi, since I know erstwhile farmgrrl 3, Deb, has started the Bring Tippi Home campaign… So, after our unsuccessful visit to the farmer who owns the herd Tippi is running with, and no word from him at all, I finally tracked down phone numbers for him and, feeling not so confident, since I have heard stuff about said farmer, rang and spoke to him. One needs to be bolshy in these kinds of exchanges so I was just as hardcore matey farmer as I could be, with the outcome that he will help us to get her back on Monday. His property had been sold, all cows dehorned, ready for market I guess, so lucky we got him when we did. I’ll report back on Monday as to the outcome. I’ll be happy to have Tippi home, and so will Hinimoa.

Laters, websters Vxx