It’s five years since I started Heraclitean Fire — or Stormy Petrel, as it was then called — using a Python-based Slashdot clone called ‘Squishdot’. Which was probably a silly idea even then, and was only because I had set up a wiki using a free hosting service that was based on Zope… but still, it’s amazing how much blogging software has moved on since then. That was my first attempt to get my head around CSS. Oh what larks.
Silly, I know.
If I’d been better blogger recently you might have got my thoughts about things like the weirdness of the US healthcare debate (you’d think that the aim of universal healthcare was laughably naive starry-eyed utopianism, rather than something that every other wealthy country has already achieved), Manchester United’s prospects for the season (I’m worried they’ll be short of goals if Rooney gets crocked), the Ashes (I’m thrilled we won, but it was a funny old topsy-turvy series), and the appearance of a variant, yellow-winged form of the Jersey Tiger moth in the garden.
So you haven’t missed much, really.
I don’t actually have anything in particular to say now, I just had a twinge of guilt about the lack of blogging. I’m currently drinking a cup of coffee and preparing to upgrade the OS on my computer — something I realised I was excited about not so much because of the software itself but because it’s named after the most beautiful and coolest of the big cats.
A second new cat, to keep Dolly company; introducing Oscar:
The company-keeping theory isn’t actually working very well at the moment — there’s a lot of hissing and growling going on — but hopefully they’ll get used to each other soon enough.
No, I haven’t sprogged. The gene pool is safe from my pedantic genes.
This is Dolly. There are more pictures and videos of her here.
I’ve had a couple of good days of birding. Yesterday we had a walk in some dry scrubby brush – cistus (ie rock rose), wild lavender, broom and flowers like wild gladiolus, orchids and so on. There were nightingales and woodlarks singing, and I also saw Dartford warbler, woodchat shrike, black kite and possibly most exciting, turtle dove, a bird I haven’t seen for a surprisingly long time.
Then today we went for a walk somewhere picked for no other reason than there was a big lake on the map, and again it was a lovely landscape with masses of flowers. Nightingales singing beautifully, and this time I managed to see subalpine warbler. And even better, red-backed shrike, which is a bird I’ve only seen once before, many years ago, and then I saw a juvenile or a female, so it was a boring mottled brown instead of the attractive male I saw today with a pink tummy, a rufous back, grey head and a rakish highwayman’s mask.
Then just to top it off, a family of crested tits turned up at the villa during lunch. So that was nice.