scribbling damselfly

It's time for that always fun not-quite-a-meme, analysing the search terms that brought people to the site.

STOP 0×0000007e (or some variant thereof)

Ah, the dreaded blue screen of death. Sorry, people, I can't help you on this one, other than to say I share your pain. This is the BSoD error I'm getting lately, but I haven't figured out the source yet. Initially I suspected iTunes, since it started happening shortly after the installation of iTunes 8, but a rollback to iTunes 7 hasn't fixed the problem. The Microsoft website tells me it has something to do with an unhandled thread, and the second parameter should tell me everything. (It doesn't. YMMV.)

i scoff at myself

Welcome to my world. I do this regularly. I do not actually advise this practice too often, however; it can quickly spiral out of all control. Apparently I'm not as funny as I think.

chippolatas

How this got you to my website, I truly don't know. I don't even know what chippolatas are. Who talked about chippolatas on my blog?

parts of a damselfly

You won't find many scientific descriptions of damselfly anatomy round these parts, I'm sorry. I'd suggest a more specific search term, actually: <em>damselfly anatomy</em> might get you what you want.

marxist superhero

Oh yes, that's me. Truly. (Okay, tongue firmly in cheek, yes. Still.)

what is spider season in australia?

Ha! The answer to this, my friends, is ALL YEAR LONG. Doesn't matter what time of year, there's a spider in Australia that's active, and dangerous. That's the way we roll round these parts.

The slightly more complicated answer is that in mating season, some spiders become a little more nomadic, and thus a lot more common — funnel webs in particular, which I'm guessing is what led you here. White tails aren't common where I am, but they're another one to keep an eye on, although there are rumours that it's not actually the white tail causing all those necrotic wounds, it just happens to be blamed for them. Don't know. The trick is not to get bitten at all.

The even more complicated answer is that that enormous spider in your house which looks like it could chew your leg off while you're asleep is only a huntsman and really isn't interested in you so much as a nice, dry place out of the rain. It's the teeny ones you need to worry about. And the funnel webs.

how to add up hours

No idea how this got you here, but it's something the girls at work have an awful lot of trouble with. I'm guessing it's something to do with the mental jag between operating in base-six instead of base-ten.

novels set in bhutan

There's not so many of these, at least not that I know of. There's "A Stray Dog", a story about a stray dog in Bhutan from the dog's point of view, and there's "A Baby In A Backpack To Bhutan".

There's also a movie, called "Travellers & Magicians", which is not only set in Bhutan but is made by the Bhutanese — I can highly recommend that.

The Pope, the evening news tells me, loved the koala. This is not particularly surprising — everybody loves the koalas.

I have finished the small stuff on the copyedits, and have only the big-fix pass to go. This, of course, is the slower and more frustrating pass, as it forces me to dig ever deeper in an attempt to fix something that was already, last time I saw it, the best I thought I could do. Once more into the breach!

(Also, the fact that I have used the word "fix" twice in the past paragraph is itching at me. Clearly, my copyeditor is having an influence on me.)

In utterly trivial news, my aunt has a cat who routinely stares at the wall. She parks herself facing the wall and ignoring all others in the room. Apparently she can do this for hours. It's her way of coping, now that she's not on the kitty equivalent of valium. It's a concept guaranteed to make me giggle, quite frankly.

The deathmarch continues unabated. I have now abandoned all pretence of understanding the rules of grammar or syntax, the meaning of any given word in the english language, and indeed appropriate times to laugh or talk. Apparently you shouldn't indulge either impulse while you're alone. Who knew? Pshaw, I say. Friends and family are beginning to suspect I've written a terribly funny novel. Little do they know it's the laugh of a desperate and mad woman, bemused by the weight of her own words.

To add spice to the mixture, I've been trying to book my flights for the trip away. I've stopped telling people I'm going to Bhutan, and started telling them I'm going to the Himalayas, since even travel agents are looking at me blankly and saying "Where? Where's that?"

Visited the GP to check out what vaccinations I'll need. Health and travel websites list a whole range of fun preventable diseases, such as polio and rabies and malaria and japanese encephalitis. The GP spent most of the consultation telling me I didn't really need to bother with the vaccinations.

Malaria? Oh, there's not really any need for malaria meds. They're such a hassle, you see, and the Himalayas are quite high up. If you head down into any of the valleys … well, maybe just stay up high, won't you?

Polio? Oh, you've probably already had a polio vaccination. No need to bother with another of those.

Rabies? H'm. I understand there is a bit of a street dog problem in Bhutan, and of course it's not just dogs you need to worry about, it's any mammal. So probably no need to worry about a rabies vaccination before you go. Just… if you do get bitten, by anything, do make sure you get the post-exposure rabies vaccination as soon as you get home, won't you? Because it's quite fatal, after all.

Me, boggling: You mean, as opposed to moderately fatal?

Oh, yes, he says, and if you develop a strange fever about six months after returning home, and you can't figure out what it is, do try and remember it might be malaria, and get treatment — because that's moderately fatal.

Rufus:

Unless you have already fallen under the power of Rufus, you will not understand THE AWESOME of this concert. I will content myself with the comment that watching grown men in dinner suits leaping and prancing and tumbling about the stage like sprained acrobats, or truckies given their first taste of choreography, while Rufus sings Judy Garland in cabaret drag? Is All The Good Evah.

I will also add that "Between My Legs" is a damn catchy tune — and not particularly socially acceptable to sing random snatches of in public. Although it's not the absolute worst song you could sing in public — that honour would have to belong to DAAS, closely followed by Radiohead.

Melbourne Zoo:

Two words: Present Backside!

That's right. EVERY SINGLE ANIMAL at the zoo saw us coming and turned away from the camera. At the start, we managed to catch some face as well as some backside, but by the end of the day, word had clearly spread, and the blasted creatures had their backs to us almost before we even reached their enclosure. We'd almost entirely given up on the cameras by this point, but apparently even that wasn't sufficient. Even the giant tortoise managed to turn his back, which is seriously hard-core.

Photographic evidence:

Tess tells me that I should stop claiming particular animals are my favourite, because apparently you can only have one favourite. It's in the dictionary or something, she says. I maintain I'm allowed a favourite from every genus at minimum, but she says that's quibbling.

All of which is to say, I will not list all my favourites here, and will content myself (due to the majority of my photographs being of this critter) in saying that meerkats clearly rock. (There were a whole lot of photos of the bear as well, but that was because I was passing the time while Tess sorted out a camera malfunction, as much as anything.) So, meerkats. Do they have the largest hearts in the entire animal kingdom?

You cannot see his tail in this photo, but it is stumpy because his mother chewed it off. I forget why. Melinda tells me the perpetrator has been disciplined accordingly, and this practice is neither condoned nor permitted at the zoo any longer, so there are also meerkats with intact tails. They didn't look any less pensive though.

Finally, the Australiana section of Melbourne Zoo has some serious Bermuda Triangle qualities. It is easy to enter, but not so easy to escape. It is worth daring, however, because it contains the Great Flight Aviary, where we saw a brolga killing (by means of spine-breaking shaking and drowning, for good measure) a mouse. We were also chased through said Aviary by the largest pigeon I've ever seen. It had red eyes, and cooed like it wanted to eat our souls. Zombie Pigeon!

The Australiana section also boasts an amusing and bemusing literary bent: almost everywhere you turn you will find artfully rusting structures painted or engraved with … surrealist poetry. I kid you not.

No, I have no idea either.

Came home from work yesterday¹ to find the invisible tree² outside the eastern windows full of rainbow lorikeets. More precisely, one adult lorikeet, and a swarm of babies, all drunk on the goodness that is the invisible tree's seed pods.

Wildlife that not only doesn't kill, maim, or harm you but is actually pretty and cheer-making? It's a world gone topsy-turvy!

1. I'm told it was a public holiday, but from my side of the dayjob desk, it didn't look like one. My paypacket may convince me otherwise, however
2. the invisible tree is so named because, incredible as it might seem, I could never see this tree out the eastern windows. What tree? I would say, turning, and at last (again) descrying the great branches scraping against the window. Oh. That tree. How long has that been there?

They're everywhere. I can't walk two paces outside without stumbling into a web and devolving into panicked swipings at my head and back in a vain attempt to rid myself of the silk and (more to the point) any possible spider.

This year it's little black and orange beggars everywhere.

I can't remember if I've seen them before. (He looks quite large in the photo, but that's just me, playing with the macro function on the camera, which I shoved up close until it was about two centimetres from him.) He's barely the size of a fifty cent coin, but he has grand ambitions of catching a human, because he is determined to spin his web across every doorway possible. Sometimes he's so quick that the web I walked into (and spluttered out) on my way out the door, catches me again on my way back in.

I'm told he's a mosquito-eater, and harmless. This does not particularly comfort me, as harmless in Australia does not always mean harmless. "Relatively harmless", for example, means it won't hurt you so long as you don't get close enough to annoy it. Harmless mostly means it won't hurt you badly. The fact that he's small is also no consolation: redbacks and irukandji are both small.

This morning I met another harmless spider, this one in the house: a huntsman. I couldn't get a great shot of him, so he looks smaller in the photo, because see the way he's sitting on the wall? That's an unhappy huntsman. Looks a bit like God's first experiment with macramé, doesn't he?

He's harmless, though, because he's not generally aggressive¹, and a bite will "merely" hurt, swell, and itch like buggery. You know, nothing major. Your limb won't drop off or anything.

At least they don't spin webs. Although they do have that nasty habit of hiding under the sun visor of your car. That's never fun.

1. except the females are a bit short-tempered, when defending their young

Found a funnel web in the pool yesterday, but we left "little" atrax robustus alone a whole extra day before fishing him out — these spiders are notoriously slow to drown and have been known to recover even after two days' submersion.

Won't catch me thrusting my hand into the pool filter for a couple of days, I can tell you that for free. If there's any part of the Australian wildlife that scares me, it's spiders that belong higher on the food chain than me, and know it.

Came home today to find the biggest stick insect in the world¹ hanging out by the rabbit's cage.

At first I told myself, no, it's a stick. Really, it's just a stick.

A stick with six perfectly aligned legs, complete with teeny feet clinging to the balustrade. A stick with antennae.

You know what's ridiculous? I couldn't actually get up the gumption to stick my hand too close to this fellow, when two weeks ago I had my face only inches away from one of the deadliest land snakes… Granted, the snake was a baby, and allegedly dead at the time, but still… No one ever died from a stick insect. I'm just saying.

1. Those who live in equatorial regions will probably consider this fellow tiny, or at most average. But any insect longer than my forearm officially qualifies as "biggest in the world", just so you know.

Today the girl-cat brought home a gift:

I'm not sure precisely what kind of snake it is, although it is teeny tiny, so I suspect it's a baby something. Which is kind of worrying, because that means there's a mother, presumably a rather larger mother, somewhere nearby. The colour makes me suspect it's a baby brown, but the faint white ridge across the back of its neck seems out of place for it to be a brown. Provided the ridge is natural colouring, and not some scar or wound inflicted by the cat, of course. I don't think it is.

See how tiny it is? And of course it's dead, so nothing to worry about…

…Except when I went out to check the mail, a couple of hours later, baby snake was missing. I did not clean up baby snake's corpse. No one else in the house cleaned up baby snake's corpse.

Baby snake was only playing dead, and has escaped to grow, and grow, and grow…

Which means my cousin, who took the photo below, is feeling rather grateful that Baby Snake did not launch at her face during the photo shoot.

ETA: I just looked up the common brown snake on Wikipedia¹, and found:

Juveniles have a black head, with a lighter band behind

Yup. Baby Snake just may be a baby brown. Which means there's a community of 1.5m snakes around here somewhere — and, given they birth a clutch of 10 - 40 eggs, there's at least 9 other baby browns out there somewhere. Good stuff. We're definitely into the "shoes must be worn while outside" season.

1. that font of all accurate knowledge, doncha know