There’s an old brushtail possum near our place, which must be near the end of its life. There are plenty of these marsupials around where we live, but we don’t see them very much. They are nocturnal, and hide during the day. Occasionally we see one crawling along a fence or in the branches of a tree at night when walking home from dinner out or something. And you can hear them at night when they fight over territory or mates.
But there’s an old one that for the past week or so has been visible every day, in daylight, sitting on a fence. It’s pretty battle scarred around the face, and looks like it might have lost an eye. I assume it must be too old and injured to behave normally and seek out a hiding place in the daytime.
It’s just been sitting there lethargically for over a week, and I fear walking past one day soon and seeing it lying dead on the ground. Wild animals die all the time, of course, but it’s still a bit disturbing to see the process happening.
There’s another injured animal which has been a fixture for around here for well over a year now. A magpie with an obviously broken wing that has somehow managed to heal enough to let it fly a bit, though it stick out at a funny angle. This bird has been instantly recognisable every time I see it, and I’ve named it “Wings Malone”.
This morning I had to go up to the supermarket and buy some milk. The online pick-up order I made yesterday was missing the milk! Thankfully the supermarket has a quick resolution system for missing items in orders, so now I have a credit for the value of two cartons of milk. But it was still a pain to have to walk up there just to get replacements.
I took Scully for a long walk with my wife just after lunch. It was a beautiful winter day, 22°C and sunny after a morning which was thick with fog. When I walked to the supermarket at 9am the visibility was at most 200-300 metres. There were apartment towers just a block or two away from where I walked, and I couldn’t see them at all. We get fog a few times a year in winter, and it’s always interesting.
Today I mostly worked on writing Darths & Droids comics, trying to build up that buffer before I head to Japan in two weeks. Healthwise I think I feel a bit better today. I felt well enough to go on the first 2.5k run for two weeks. I decided to try a completely new route, and took it a bit easy. That and the hills on this new route meant my time was pretty slow, over 13 minutes, which it hasn’t been for a long time.
New content today: