Glowing kitties and chickens

This is what happens to an orange kitty when the setting sun shines through smoke.

He is already an extraordinarily dark orange, but add the orange sky and he really did glow.

Yes, that's the fly screen gazebo back up for summer.  Thank goodness, since I have been dodging mosquitoes while trying to get outside time for quite a few weeks now!  It is so relaxing not to have to keep twitching and slapping, and it is already too warm to cover up head to toe as I do in winter.  These days the mozzies here seem to have neither a time nor a season where they go dormant.

Here are our three baby chookies; Spot, Fido and Rover.  They love this perching spot but mostly the big chooks chase them off unless they are out free ranging.

The pics aren't perfect, as the evening was well advanced, but at least they were keeping still. They often run wildly about at this time of night, chasing after flying bugs, and I've even seen one up in the spindly end branches of a low-hanging lucerne tree, picking leaves off! 

Spot is far right.  She is by far the wildest and even pecked me when I had to pick her up.   Sister Jen suggested maybe that was because, with more white on her, she threw back more to the white leghorn in her heritage, and they are a notoriously wild breed. That theory makes sense to me!

Red Rover is darkest, and she is in the middle.  She is also tamest. Fido isn't bad either. I'm not one for handling my chooks all the time. Our set-up makes it hard to catch them, and everyone gets stressed, so mostly I don't handle them at all, and they get used to being around me unmolested.  That way,  if I do have to pick one up to check for lice or for doctoring, they are right under my feet, totally unsuspecting, ready to be snatched up. It works for me.

Here's another ginger character who doesn't much like being picked up.  He loves it when I sit down to crochet, though.   

That's a mystery Christmas-prezzie Amigurumi.  I wasn't sure about the colour mix at first but now I have got going I quite like it.

We had a nice quiet Sunday afternoon, with crocheting and music and such, after doing a lot of work in the morning removing fallen tree branches up at the block. The firebreak needed to move due to an even bigger fallen tree branch that is precariously hanging in another tree (you can see it in the background there, squashing the poor old olive tree) so we got to work and cleared up the new area into a bonfire pile and a pile of firewood.

In the afternoon, Andrew did a soul retrieval for me, too.  I needed it done and it isn't the sort of thing you do for yourself.  Having done that and an energy separation ritual that I needed to do for myself, I am back to heading further along the path of my Shamanism studies.

The physical, creative, social and spiritual, these are the things that make up a balanced life and even a balanced day.

The social came into it when we had a good Saturday Morning Schedules at the station. Busy busy busy!

The local Maggies are busy too.  They have a nest in this old Jarrah tree, The Touchstone Tree, I call it, right by the cottage.  Already I can hear the tiny peepings of a newly-hatched baby or two.  Maggies can be vicious in guarding their nests, but our family trusts us and lives in peace with us, and that is a lovely feeling.

   
The sky yesterday was amazing too, as you can see!