They're not snakes, they're hydras!

This morning we quickly made the 120 km round trip to the nearest rural centre to pick up our two pre-ordered 'point-of-lay'chickens. These were to help Uschi the young Lowan chick to get some playmates of the same age, so that she would stop sitting all day under a bush with the older hens, including her stepmother, Phebe.

At 9.30 a.m. the truck arrived. Bianca later commented that it appeared like a transfer of illegal migrants: the hens were rudely grabbed from deep within the truck and, upon receipt of the agreed sum ($A9.50 ea.) handed to the prospective new owners, respectively stuffed into their cages.

Bianca stopped at our produce store to pick up almost $A100 worth of wheat, maize, oats, shell grit and sorghum for the chooks and geese, then dashed across the road to check out the pet store where we had bought our ill-fated Lowans.

Needless to say, we departed with a third bird in a separate carton. Bianca called her Lola, and prompted me to name the two 'illegals'. Moving slowly across the bridge between our twin towns, I sponatenously said 'Biscuit' and 'Cracker'...

We dashed back to our nearest shopping mall for Bianca to grab some essentials, while I waited in the van, with all doors open to give Lola, Biscuit and Cracker some breeze and bread crumbs.

I looked across the carpark and my roving eye alighted on a classy-looking young woman, perhaps a mother, alighting from a small sedan, some 50 m away. 'Tiens', I said to myself, ever the gallant pretend Frenchman, I must have a closer look at her. As I approached, the young woman, wearing a white hat very alluringly, indeed pulled a pram from the boot, and a young man appeared from the passenger seat.

"Hi, Isaac!", I said to my son-in-law - as Giulia put the youngest grandson Benjamin in the pram while Daddy held on to Raphael...

It turned out that they had just been to our place, thinking that because my telephone line was busy I must be on the Internet and therefore at home. I explained that I had put my 64-bit beastie on a drip, as it were, to suck in all the XP updates and Northon SystemWorks protection updates, while we went chook-hunting.

Did someone mention hydras?

We raced home in the heat to put the three young hens in the shade in an enclosed run. Giulia and Co. were supposed to follow for lunch. (But they begged off later because Isaac was tempted by a job interview in a nearby seaside town. He had just more or less 'burned his bridges' in Sydney to move up the coast for the sake of his family.)

With the new hens 'parked' and fed, we introduced Uschi to the new playmates. She was not impressed, and tried to get away quickly. Bianca put her into the run at intervals, to get acquainted, and by late afternoon she seemed to tolerate the newcomers.

This is when Bianca saw the new python in my carport! I had to drop my playthings ( a new modem and software) to add a few more rows of plasterboard screws to the bottom of the chicken coop, just to make sure.

During m,y absence that morning, my 64-bit beastie (LHote, still on the Diderot cast), had installed heaps of downloaded Microsoft updates and Norton Live Updates, so all seemed hunky dory. No error messages, everything worked - up to a point: the uGuru 'clock that came with the Abit motherboard still showed 12 degrees centigrade as the CPU temperature.

Buoyed by various good things, including the realisation that I had three beautiful daughters that looked much younger than they are, I dared to install a new BIOS on LHote.

Flashing the BIOS was a breeze, and the machine rebooted without hitch, this time showing a more reasonable 40 C for the CPU.

I opened a bottle of Yarra Valley Coldstream Hills 2003 Chardonnay that was almost on a par with Lindeman's Padthaway.

Bianca spoilt my god mood by squeezing some freshly plucked lime into her glass.

And when I went to check my gmail e-mail, Google refused to let me sign in and instead offered my a new Google account - without letting me proceed past the sign-up page...

I suppose you can't have everything!

PS: Walking barefoot in the long grass made cool by the afternoon shade was exquisite recompense...

Cheers!

PPS: Nor can I get into blogger now... talk about a hydra! So I'm sending this bit from the old LeMarquis machine, without any hassles!