Monday 25 July 2011

Another Day By The River











River Traffic


A short video I made whilst spending a day fishing
 and watching the boats go by on the river Don


Wednesday 13 July 2011

Dolphin Pod

I found a pod of dolphins today on Google Earth at,,,,, 33 59 17.02 S 151 15 32.09 E


Tuesday 12 July 2011

Google Earth

What would you do with 70,000 empty Coca Cola bottles?
View Larger Map

Parking spaces are hard to find in Holland

Saturday 2 July 2011

Having a Domestic

My highlight of today was a couple having a domestic in Tescos. As I was walking down an aisle in my local supermarket a little struggle caught my attention. A couple were having a domestic in public. The man took a item out of their trolley, she grabbed it and slammed it back in, the man shouted "OH F**K OFF YOU STUPID BITCH, IM GOING" and stormed off past me, chuntering to himself. She shouts down the aisle after him "YOURE GONNA  PAY FOR THIS YOU BAS***D, JUST YOU FCUKIN WAIT,, OH YES, YOU ARE GOING TO REALLY FCUKING PAY FOR THIS" She smiled at me sweetly as I walked past..... Someone is sleeping on the settee tonight,,, Lol

Friday 1 July 2011

Dry Dock

Today's task for me was to bring back home daughter, with all her worldly possessions from Uni. She has just finished her first year at Leicester University and is now back home for the summer break. She will be in different accommodation next term, so her room had to be cleared out.

Now,,,, in the space of 12 months, her worldly  possessions, that took a hatch back car with back seats folded down to transport there, now need a hatch back car with seats folded down, a trailer and some skillful packing to bring back. I'm on the lookout for a Tardis for next year..

On a boaty note, which is another passion of mine, we had an hour or so to kill before daughters room was inspected and checked that everything was present and how it was before she moved in, by a Uni warden,. So off we went to "Dry Dock" a pub my daughter had found during her first year at Leicester. The photo isn't very good,, I didn't notice my camera was set to manual focus,,,,Doh,,,, It was a really nice place, we sat outside to have our drink, a nice feature in the inside was the boat part you can see, had a sliding roof that was open, and the sunlight poured in and lit up that area.  Ill take some better pics and update this post when I take daughter back after the summer break and have a bit more time.

Something unusual happened at waspville the other day

For me, it was just another morning, same routine, get up, cup of tea, a slice of toast, read emails, then check the garden. All was well, and how it was the day before. As I was just about to go back into my house, I glanced up at the bird box I have in the corner of my garden. The one with the wasps nest in it, Ive spoken about it in another post. Well,, today there was something definitely going on out of the ordinary. The entrance to the box was covered in wasps, and there was quite a frenzy going on. I am quite knowledgeable about wildlife, so my first thought was, the nest is being attacked by other wasps or hornets,,,,,,, I must get some photos of this.


I took a few photos, admittedly from a distance, but they didn't seem to be in war path mode, and didn't bother  me. so I moved closer to take some more, and upon closer inspection of the photos, and the area under the nest, there seemed to be no battle going on, no dead wasps or attackers had fallen under the nest. Ruling my first impression of what was going on out.





The interesting thing was when I had a close look at the photos was that there were several queen sized wasps around the entrance to the nest. This is June, from what Ive read, wasps are supposed to produce queen wasps in the Autumn (September, November) by feeding the developing grubs a different diet from worker grubs. Then the new queens fly off and mate with a male wasp from another nest, who dies shortly afterward, and the new queen wasp then hibernates over winter to start up another nest the following year.


My thoughts are, is this evolution in action????,  we had a very hard early start to winter here, it started in November with severe conditions that only the fittest for purpose would have survived. So those that did make it through that time would have to have been deep in hibernation before then, we then had quite a mild spring. So subsequently the ones that hibernated early on, would be active far earlier on than others of their kind when the winter had passed.