A couple of days ago Dave called in the evening to tell me he'd be working later than expected, covering for a teammate who wasn't well. Given time to kill, I got to rummaging through the old hard drives, looking at pictures from years ago ... and stumbled over rafts of them, which I'd either lost or simply forgotten. Treasure trove! What are memories worth?!
I have literally thousands of photos from 2007 - 2012, the years when we were at Miller Street. Those were the years when we had the bird feeder, and the back garden was always brimming with parrots ... when Bagheera was in his prime, and ruled his domain. Memory is odd. One simply begins to forget, and it's a source of enormous pleasure to stumble over archives of photos!
The camera I'd have been using for these shots would have been either the Fuji Finepix 6500 or the HS10. The resolution is higher than the 5MP of the 5600, certainly, but I didn't get the HS50 till Christmas 2015 (that was the one which didn't last very long before it began to malfunction and physically fall apart). I'm agreeably surprised by the pictures -- the camera also recorded color brilliantly. Some of these photos have hardly been enhanced at all; they're just brilliant, straight out of the box! I also have lots of videos from these years, but those are not so good. Video was very low rez at the time, so we'll just bypass those ... except to remember the ducks in the swimming pool!
The bird feeder was so much fun ... I'd forgotten how much. Although we're currently living much further out of town than Miller Street, so you'd assume there's have to be more birds in the garden here, actually the reverse is true. Very few birds come down into the garden, and those that do don't stay for long (a few New Holland honeyeaters, the very occasion sparrow, a blackbird or two; the rest fly over). At Miller Street, the bird feeder attracted them by the flocks, and they became so accustomed to the place, they'd spend summer evenings in the trees, chattering and grooming. Lorikeets, cockatoos, galahs, crested pigeons, turtledoves, sparrows, wattlebirds, and once, a sparrowhawk, looking to try its luck. It didn't stay long; other birds mobbed it till it departed. And ducks in the pool!
The garden we have now didn't have much in the way of flowers before the self-seeding stock got in. It was almost all pavers and pebbles, hardly attractive to birds. We've let the flowers take over, so it's a great garden for bees, but I could wish there were more birds.
Each house is different, with its own character and personality. We were at Miller Street for five and a half years, and we've already been here for seven and a half! Time flies. In fact, after over 35 years of the gypsy life, moving from house to house on what is smilingly referred to as "the rental roundabout," a large part of my brain is wondering, "Where next?" We've been here so long, subconsciously, I'm always wondering about "the move" as if it's inevitable.
It just occurs to me, as I write that, how sad a statement this actually is. Dang.
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