Frog in pitcher plant

I don't think that these baby black swans can fly very well
with those wings

I didn't expect to see a frog in a pitcher plant today, but we did.  At least Sha's dad and I did.  Sha and her mum went shopping.  I've just realised that I need to know Sha's dad's name.  Apparently it is YuKui Du.  Okay, I'd better remember that.  It doesn't mean anything.  The frog was sitting in the bottom of the pitcher plant and seemed happy enough.

We also saw some strange plants with long, fluffy, red, trailing bits.  We then walked across the botanical gardens to the opera house.  Then we met about 1 million people all walking in the opposite direction so we found Sha and her mum and went home.  I've just made some pizza bases and we've all populated them with our favourite ingredients. Sha and her dad had an argument about bacon.

Sha told me yesterday that her father was very confused about why I wanted him to swim across a river yesterday.   That was embarrassing.  I'd been trying to mime canoeing and obviously got it rather wrong.  Luckily he didn't jump in the river.

... but they can swim

There was a frog in here

time to eat the pizza 

Lunch in a cave

Yesterday I went crazy.  We were driving round and round in circles in a mega-shopping-centre.  We had entered assuming that we'd be able to find some lunch, but once in we couldn't find a parking spot, nor the exit.  It was horrible.  Anyway, it reminded me that I hadn't been on a long walk in the bush for ages.  So, today Sha and her mum had a relaxing day at home while Sha's dad and I went bush walking.  We simply walked out of our house, into the Lane Cove park and then kept walking for 3 hours.  It was beautiful.  We had lunch in a cave.  I made the lunch - no chicken feet in sight.  

Unfortunately I didn't charge my camera battery and so don't have any pictures, but I've found some photos on the web of the various birds and animals that we saw.

Eastern Water Dragon. From: http://danny.id.au/photography/galleries/20050115-water-dragon/p/51151231-water-dragon.jpg. We saw a huge number of these dragons.  They mainly sat on a tree trunk.  One jumped into the water as we came past and then swam away.

Common Fence Skink: From: http://australianmuseum.net.au/Uploads/Images/5947/Cryptoblepharus_S%20Swanson_b.jpg.

Red browed finch.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-browed_Finch.  These were everywhere!

Eastern spinebill: http://www.avianweb.com/images/birds/honeyeaters/easternspinebill2.jpg.  So beautiful!

Crimson Rosella:from wikipedia.  These birds always seem to come in twos.  One of these wanted our sandwiches.

We also saw lots of cockatoos, a kookaburra sitting on a BBQ and a Cuckoo.  Sha's dad got excited by all the big fish that we saw in the river.

Canoeing on the Lane Cove River

What a relaxing hour.  We drove down to the Lane Cove National Park and hired a canoe for Sha's dad and myself.  We left Sha and her mum on the bank!   As soon as we'd passed the first corner then we had the whole river to ourselves (apart from a large number of lizards, birds, and things that went splash).  The water was perfectly calm and we could glide up to ducks, herons, moorhens, cormorants, darters and water dragons.   Our conversation was limited to saying "big duck" and "fish, is it?" and so most of the time we just silently paddled up the river.



Then we came home and played Donkey Kong which is not very peaceful.

Sha and her parents ambled around taking a million photos
of this Kookaburra

Moorhen + baby, lizard + baby + duck

I'm back

I've finally worked out how to recover my gmail password and so can log back into blogger.  No idea what to write here, but my New Year resolution is to try and keep my blog more up-to-date.