How do you grow a bulldozer?

Only two photographs today, I am afraid, but this paucity is simply because they are two of the most incredible photos of hitherto unseen transformations in nature.

A bulldozer growing!

OK - how do you grow a bulldozer? Well - two farming friends of ours have achieved the almost impossible - growing a bulldozer from seed.

Bulldozer seeds are hard to come by. They fit in your hand, come in boxes marked 'Dinky', are made of metal and generally are bright yellow. You have to find a suitable piece of land, plant them about 6 feet below the surface of the field, and then build a centre-pivot irrigation system which will irrigate the entire surrounding area. Bulldozers need an awful lot of water to grow.

If you are lucky, they sprout, and in the right conditions can grow quite large. Here then is a D4 bulldozer that the 'Farmer Palmers' managed to germinate and grow....

Incredibly they kept watering it and in no time at all (I think Sarah said 5 days) it had grown from a D4 into a D6.

Magnificent, isn't it?

Apparently the Palmers had been intending to let it grow right up to a D9 - but unfortunately the electricity failed, and did not come back for 2 days; the water pump failed, the centre pivot stopped going around, and the 'dozer stopped growing.

Once they stop - that is it.

For those of you who doubt the veracity of this story (and I suspect there may be one or two) - please go out to Ferndale farm and see for yourself the homegrown bulldozer.

Have a great day one and all!

Just birds, nothing else.

Time today for another look at our South African trip - this time the birds of Montecasino.

On one of the days that we had spare, we visited the Bird Gardens at a shopping complex called Montecasino - in one of the suburbs of Johannesburg. We had been there twice before - and had seen the 'flying display' which they put on, but on this occasion we arrived too late. Still, the colours of the birds are amazing - and the facility gave us the chance to see them close up.

If you are not interested in feathered birds, then today is not for you! And not much for me to say today except............'birds'!

and more birds

and more birds...

and more bird

This last is of a fairly drab little fellow who met us on our walk. He was on the pathway, and my daughter stopped to greet him - whereupon he started eating her false fingernails!

Soooooo - if you happen to visit the Bird Gardens at Montecasino and find a dead bird on the pathway - now you know what happened!

Have a great day!

The sword of Damoclese

So - the camera was found! I had apparently put it into the pink striped bag that my wife uses to carry stuff to her Bible study group!

Hmmmmmmmmmm

OK - so here we go again. This goes back to just before the children went back to school. For those of you who don't know - my kids attend Peterhouse Girls - a boarding school about two hours drive from La Rochelle. There they spend about three months at a time.

The Saturday before they went back to school, we hosted a dinner at the hotel where various children were given swimming awards. These are my three ready to party....

So on Monday we took the girls back to school - here they are about to enter the hallowed portals....

However - the smiles belied a dreadful truth.

I had spent a week making sure that each of the girls had everything they needed to survive the rigours of a month at school before we next saw them. Clothes, stationery, blankets, sports equipment, school shoes, toiletries and the like were all sourced and packed. It was only when we reached school that we realised....... Courtney (my youngest) had left her history and IT books at home on the dining room table where she had been studying!

With the 'sword of Damoclese' hanging over her head in the form of detention, there was only one solution for it - to send Thomas off to Peterhouse with the forgotten papers! He woke up at 01.30am on Tuesday morning, walked to the Harare road which took him well over an hour, and then he caught a bus to Marondera. At the school gates he 'dropped' (Zim-speak for 'alighted') from the bus, and walked down the school road, arriving at the school reception at exactly 07.30am as instructed. Courtney collected the envelope precisely 12 minutes before her class.

Plenty of time.

Thomas then caught a bus home - not this one, but one like it....

And here - returned from his travels, is Thomas - looking much relaxed after his journeys! He made it back by 13.30pm - just in time for the two o'clock shift!

Slightly bedraggled after his journeys, but quite ready to spend an afternoon at work watching the roses grow.

Nice to be back - have a great day!

So, now, here's the thang....

Regular readers of this blog will have wondered why the sudden silence..........and so here's the thang:

I've 'lost' my camera.

Quite how this has happened I have no idea, and I am still clinging to the diminishing hope that it will return - but the outlook is not good, as I have scoured all the likely spots and come up blank.

I last took it to Peterhouse to drop the girls off (and had a wonderful blog planned involving my youngest daughter Courtney, her history homework which was left on the dining room table, and Thomas the waiter who woke up at 01.30am to walk 9km to the Harare road to catch a bus - managing to get it to her just in time to avoid the dreaded 'detention') and I know it came home with us. But from there - nada.

Quite aside from the fun it has provided, it also has some serious sentimental value, and so I continue to hope it returns.

Failing that - I am not in any position to buy another one at this time, and so I guess I will temporarily have to suspend service. Because the blog without pics will just not be the same.

But - I'll be back.

I just don't know when!

Caveat Emptor

Let the buyer beware.

Today's story takes us back to our trip to South Africa - and the Shopping Malls of Pretoria.

I am not in any position to judge, but I am sure that the shopping malls of Pretoria in South Africa are on a par with the same facilities around the world. But..........what happens when a bunch of country hicks like us "hit the Mall"? Well, obviously, chaos!

First off - everything is very clean and slick - palm trees abound and fountains splash water while music softly lulls the senses....

To my untutored eye the range, scope and extent of the goods for sale in some of the shops was simply staggering. You 'first-worlders' out there may find the following picture of just the cold meat section of a Supermarket (with bakery in the background) perfectly normal - but remember I come from a place which once had nothing but condoms for sale in the entire supermarket. Mind-blowing.

Despite all this organised vending - there are several folk with 'tables' set up in the walkways - and at one were some pretty persuasive Italians selling beauty products - at an exorbitant price. They got their hooks into my wife Della, but the smarmy Italian salesman blew his chances by telling her she 'was-a as-a beeyoootiful as-a my Momma'. She flounced off in a huff.

However - my two daughters - Cara and Dayna, and their friend Aimee, were not so lucky - and in 5 minutes he had charmed the three of them, kissed their cheeks, told them they 'were-a multo bellissima', winked at them outrageously, and made them all blush at least twice.

They all left clutching packets of creams which they neither needed nor wanted. And all their pocket money........gone.

Here - taken furtively the next day, is one of the Italians relieving some other poor doe-eyed shopper of her hard-earned cash...

This is a picture taken at breakfast the next day, featuring the three girls who splashed out all their worldly loot on some 'Dead Sea exfoliating cream' - just because a dreamy Italian gave them a kiss on the cheek and his phone number. In the background - the R1,200 purchase being waved as evidence!

Suffice to say, when I found the three of them waiting, as arranged, at a Coffee Shoppe looking ashen-faced and sweating as they considered spending the rest of their holiday without a penny between them, I marched off and returned the cosmetics to the Italians, and received a refund. Unfortunately the girls had opened one of the packets - (in the vain hope that a genie would materialise and right all the wrongs of the world for them I suspect) so I could only return two out of the three packets. Things did get a little heated, but I succeeded.

However - I leave the final say in the matter to my daughter Dayna, who stated with conviction....

"But, guys, you gotta admit.......... it was WORTH at least R1,200 to be chatted up by those guys - even if we did get ripped off!"

Ah yes - "Live and don't learn"! That's my family.

Fred plays out of his skin.

Fred our pet chameleon will be well known to regular readers of the blog, and previous posts have shown him a mottled green-grey colour. However during the past week, he has been decidedly green.

See if you can spot him - again the wire helps him hide, but I can assure you he is easy enough to see...

As a reptile, part of growing up is the need to shed as he gets bigger. All scaly-skinned reptiles do this. Here is the skin of a Mozambique spitting cobra that we found at the hotel - the scales at the very tip of the tail break, and they just wriggle out.

 

So when we found Fred looking rather tatty - it was obvious to us that he was in the middle of changing his clothes, so to speak. The brown in the picture is the old skin sloughing off.

Here, then, is Fred's contribution to the 'Dead Skin Society'! This is part of his hind leg - and with all this readily-available material floating around I think there may well be scope for a recipe book of some kind!

What do you think?

Yeuch! Right?

For those of you who failed to spot Fred in the first pic, he is hanging onto the wire on the left-hand wall of his cage as you look at it - completely out in the open.

Have a nice day!

Can you identify this snake?

So today - another little visitor to the hotel Reception. And this time - simply too small to identify. At first, I thought he might be a baby brown house snake - because of colour, but the head was enormous, and whereas a brown house snake has a triangular-shaped head, this fellow was more 'coffin' in shape. As I said, his head was huge in comparison with the rest of his body.

He also raised his head instinctively - and though he didn't 'spread', my feeling is that he may well be a baby Mozambique spitting cobra. The other thing which made me err on the side of caution was the fact that, as tiny as he was, he turned to face every movement of my hand - obviously ready to do his best to inflict harm.

I trapped him in a plastic ice-cream container and placed a pen next to him so that his true size can be seen. Whatever the case - he was tiny, and had probably hatched that day - certainly not more than three days ago.....

Because I wasn't entirely sure what he was, the only thing to do was to release him. With many of our poisonous snakes here, the newly-hatched ones are just as lethal as the adults in terms of the potency of their venom. So this little chap was sent on his way, and very soon was lost in the undergrowth.

This is my youngest daughter Courtney, playing with what is definitely a brown house snake. As you can see - the head is somewhat triangular, though the colour of this and the baby are almost identical.

And my middle daughter Dayna with the same snake..... She apparently finds snakes more ticklish than scary!

Zim kids are a little strange that way!

If anyone out there can identify the baby from the somewhat grainy picture above - I would love to know that you think?

Have a great day!