I'm Awake

After being awake for nearly 50 hours (except for a few hours dozing on the plane between Auckland and LA) I fell into bed  before 10pm last night and slept soundly until......   0430 this morning when a lone Blackbird outside my open bedroom window started the dawn chorus.  Wow.  I had forgotten just how noisy the dawn chorus could be.  In fact, though it was the single Blackbird's very shrill, loud song that woke me, the comfort of the dawn chorus soon lulled me back to sleep and I woke at 0600 to make myself a cup of green tea.  The household is awake and the morning here in Glasgow promises to be absolutely stunning with the sun shining out of a cloudless sky.

Hearing the Blackbird and the dawn chorus was quite an experience.  At The Cottage the song of the birds including the beautiful but noisy Bellbird and Tui is ever-present as are the cicadas when the weather is warm enough but, because I sleep with the windows closed (if I don't I've discovered that the mozzies and so on come in and use my dormant body as a feeding place) and The Cottage is double-glazed the bird-song is not loud enough to wake me.  In Eagleton we don't have a dawn chorus and, in any case,  I tend to sleep with closed windows because of the wind!

So I woke to the following Facebook message: Fiona Richardson You missed the Waipuk earthquake last night, and they are evacuating the Hastings waterfront because of torrential rain and storms.... pretty good timing to escape! Sounds as if I've been lucky.  Fortunately, despite the bad weather and storms in Taupo where The Family are on holiday the weather has improved and they are enjoying some sun.  The landslips on the Napier to Taupo road should have been cleared by the time they are ready to return to Napier.

A day doing odds and ends today and then I return tomorrow to Eagleton.