(I wrote this while in Moneglia, in different stages, and I'm posting it now that I have a connection again)

[Sunday, 7pm]

Moneglia is still a very nice place.

There are lots of very chatty blackbirds, funny to hear them sing so much in the middle of the day (in Dublin they only seem to get enthusiastic around sunset). There are also many pretty wagtails, and they're called ballerine.

Swallows are another kind of bird I don't see in Dublin. There are lots here (and in Milan), and I'd forgotten how loud they can be.

There is an enormous quantity of tadpoles in the stream (no legs yet). I wonder if anyone has ever thought of making a fry out of them. I used to catch them as a kid, but it was for the purpose of growing them.

The wisteria is past flowering, which is a pity, but the bougainvillea is in flower now. Focaccia with cheese is extremely yummy. The temperature is probably what humans were evolved for. On the whole, life is good.

[Sunday, 11pm]

There are also frogs, and crickets. Both are noises I haven't heard in a while. In fact, I don't remember when I last heard a frog.

There are a few stars visible, but not many. I hope tomorrow the weather is good. I might even get to dip into the sea -- something else that I haven't done in a very long time.

[Monday, 8pm]

This morning I actually swam in the sea! I literally don't remember the last time I'd done so, but it's certainly been years. The sea was very calm and clear, the sun quite hot, and the water... well, I don't know, my parents thought it was too cold, I took a while to get in but once in the water it was nice enough. Maybe I've just become too Irish...

In fact, that looks likely. I seem to have acquired an Irish complexion, anyway. I managed to get sunburned (shoulders and ankles) by sitting in the sun for about 2 hours. This didn't used to happen when I lived here...

Moneglia appears to be full of turtledoves -- I don't remember so many of them when I came here regularly. I've also discovered that they don't only have the ceaseless, pitiful hooting call they're most famous for: when in flight, they actually sound like crows (jackdaws in fact).

I also saw a couple of lizards -- an animal that I've never seen in Ireland, not sure if it exists anywhere.

[Tuesday, 23:50]

No bathing today, but I went to the beach in the morning and in the afternoon. I kept my shoulders well covered (as well as slathered with sunscreen). I waded into the water a bit, but the heat from my ankles tended to evaporate it...

I watched Forrest Gump on TV in the evening. It is a completely inane movie. Harmless, probably, but I really don't understand what anybody could see in it.

[Thursday, 15:30]

Back in Milan, in time to see on TV the stage of the Giro d'Italia which is happening where we were this morning. Sestri Levante, where today's race starts, is the next town on the coast from Moneglia (LOL they're showing and talking about Moneglia this minute on TV!) We had to take a roundabout way to reach the autostrada because usually we go through Sestri and today it was closed to traffic.

My shoulders are almost healed, I did spend some time on the beach again yesterday and the day before, but I kept them covered. Also didn't get into the water past my knees again.

No, really. Baby tigers and young chimp. Don't say I didn't warn you. Baby white tigers, even.

Item 1: Sparrows and pigeons really like arborio rice. Even if it is not only raw, but in fact well past its sell-by date and in fact tasting a bit too stale for me to use to make risotto. Judging by the speed with which it disappears from my window-sill, they don't seem to mind.

Item 2: The secret to easily and firmly affix the shower-tray to my bathroom wall with suction cups (rather than having it crash into the tub after 5 minutes as usually happens) is methilated spirits. As in, cleaning the wall and the cups with it instead of with water or water and soap as I'd always done.

In other news: I just bought myself an external hard drive for backup purposes, and I'm now cheerfully geeking around to find out how to use it.

Baby elephant born this morning in Dublin zoo! The article has a link to a video!

A few days ago I wrote about the amazing variety of birds in Dublin, and how that still fills me with wonder.

Well, yesterday I saw a new bird, and a completely unexpected and surprising bird. A small hawk-type bird, in my garden, right in the centre of the city. I only noticed because as I crossed the communal garden of the apartment block to go out the back, there was a commotion in a shrubby evergreen tree right behind me. I looked and saw this large bird, which at first I took for a wood pigeon, upsetting some sparrows. All birds involved were hidden in the foliage, but the idea of a wood pigeon in the city was peculiar enough that I looked more closely. And the bird was indeed wood-pigeon-sized, and approximately the same kind of colour, but very definitely a bird of prey by the head and beak.

I didn't get a lot of time to look at it before it flew off, to a roof on the other side of the building. Watched it a bit longer, but from a longer distance, until eventually it flew away again and disappeared. It's definitely the first time I see a bird of prey in Dublin -- though there must be more in the outskirts, and admittedly if I hadn't looked closely I would have gone away thinking it was a wood pigeon, so maybe I've seen some without recognising them...

A bit of searching on Irish birding sites convinced me that it was almost certainly a sparrowhawk, which looks right and is reported as occasionally frequenting suburban gardens. Well, this one had probably still got lost, but a garden is a garden... Another possibility would be a kestrel, and while from the pictures I can't be sure it wasn't one, they don't seem to be as urbanised. (The third and last possibility is a merlin, but I don't think it was. They're even less urbanised than kestrels.)

(And I found that a sparrowhawk is called sparviero in Italian -- which is a nice word.)

As a side note, I will make no comment or moral judgment on the fact that the first hit when googling for "birds in Dublin" is
"DublinBirds.com, the definitive guide to Birds in Dublin. Escort services, domination services, lap dancing clubs, massage parlours, the street prostitution scene..."

Also, and completely unrelated: I can haz kimchi! Went to the Hop House (Korean pub) with L and came back with 1/2 kg of their homemade kimchi. They also sell kilo packs. I'm tempted to take one down to Cavan for the retreat, and see what happens... (The food on retreat is very good, but a bit on the Irish-conservative and mild-inoffensive side. Well, apart from the Glaswegian retreat leader's signature porridge in the morning, which is the real reason why people go to his retreats, of course. It involves ginger, and toasting the oats before cooking.)

This morning I got out before dawn (ok, it was 8 am, but it was before dawn...) to go and do some puja and chanting at the Dublin Buddhist Centre. It is a pleasant thing to do on a Sunday morning. As is crossing town on a Sunday morning: the place is completely empty, a very rare occurrence...

According to Google Earth, that was 2.3 km (or 1.4 miles), and it took me half an hour. So I have established that my cruising speed in town, without rushing but also without traffic (pedestrian or motor), is 4.6 km/h.

Since I didn't know how long it would take me, I left plenty time and so I got there very early. So I went to sit by the canal for a while. The place is full of birds. There were ducks (of the mallard type) and moorhens, small gulls, and a pair of swans. For a while I sat watching a heron from about a metre away. This was particularly interesting because on the way there I'd been working on some remaining kinks in the scene I'm rewriting, specifically to do with what Lanta says -- whose name means "grey heron" (as well as "ash"). Somewhat to my relief, the bird did not turn around and start talking to me. Instead, it would occasionally start stalking, then stop in mid-step for some time, then give up and go back to standing. No idea if it was actually stalking something or only practising... Eventually it flew off, possibly looking for some more interesting (or fruitful) stalking place. A hoodie landed on the other side of the canal -- a type of crow that I haven't often seen so close to the centre. (And on the way there, I'd also met herring seagulls and magpies, as well as the obvious pigeons). I'm not a bird expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm always delighted (and still somehow surprised, after all these years) at the number and variety of birds in Dublin city.

This crosses the line from cute to irredeemably twee. Yes, even for me.

You've probably all seen them by now, but in case you haven't, they're worth it:

Animated Bayeux tapestry (with subtitles and musical comment) (Worksafe unless you work for the Anglo-Saxons)

Duckling feeding the goldfish (worksafe unless your office has really stringent regulations about ducks...)

(With thanks to nwhyte and dduane)

Here they are. WARNING: have your insulin shot ready to hand.

[thanks to melancharisbron]

Yes yes yes! I am now working on scene 4.2, which needs some rewriting, and I have found the place to introduce the Tiane! This was one of the big glaring holes in the previous version, and I'm glad that I have found a smooth way to fill it.

However, since I had never got around to describing them previously, now I need to get a clear visual idea of the Tiane, of course. And so I went off, prompted only by the most genuine and selfless spirit of research, and collected a large quantity of pictures of sea otters. Because convergent evolution is particularly blatant in the case of marine mammals, and so, although the Tiane don't look exactly like otters, they look close enough that I can use them as a model for my not-precisely-visual imagination. (The two main differences are that the Tiane are larger, and that they are not quite as cute-looking).


But talking about cute, I could not restrain myself from sharing one of the pictures I have found during my totally disinterested research, and so... BAAAAABY OTTER!!! :-D

annafdd linked to this article in her own LJ, and now I'm linking to it too, because it's worth reading. It's an article about aggression in primates and what it means for human behaviour, written by a "field" ("savannah"?) primatologist.

What makes it really good, to me, is that he isn't talking about what we are programmed for by evolution, as too many people do when they talk about primate behaviour (including primatologists). The article is about how our evolutionary programming is not all that relevant really. I only quote the last sentence in the (long) article:

Anyone who says, "No, it is beyond our nature," knows too little about primates, including ourselves.

(And I'm recommending it despite the fact that I had to get to page 5 before it told me something I didn't know. It's got good stuff if you've never read an article about primate behaviour before, and also if you've read a lot :-))

Cat chases black bear up a tree. With picture.

An enterprising young killer whale at Marineland has figured out how to use fish as bait to catch seagulls — and shared his strategy with his fellow whales.
(Associated Press story here)

I didn't know they looked so immature at birth... (From Repubblica)

This is indeed too good not to spread.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) -- Police say three lions rescued a 12-year-old girl kidnapped by men who wanted to force her into marriage, chasing off her abductors and guarding her until police and relatives tracked her down in a remote corner of Ethiopia. (Whole article from CNN here)

(Thanks to batwrangler)