Touchdown at the Newest Bluestocking Inn. Pudding, cups of tea, the vegetable garden coming into its own, and gerbils beautiful gerbils all furry.

[DeanElderberry]

All females welcome for intelligent discourse and non-harmful comestibles.

Sorry, I've got nothing. There are pipistrelles around here in the summer, but nothing larger.

...seconding the swallows. Or house martins?

Ok, I'll bite. Boning channels?
As in ... corset boning?

I've never seen a badger at all, so the idea of a patio full of them is amazing .

My delight at looking out the kitchen window and seeing a fox, or better still, a fox family with cubs, gives me an insight into how it feels to be so close to badgers.

I like that these animals no longer fear us, and are happy to visit our gardens.

I'd be wary of getting too near them because I believe they can - quite justifiably - bite. Though you're probably safe enough as your badgers prefer their food in dishes on the patio😄

Thanks for taking one for the team, Angle!
I read it first as boring😄

Myrtle, some of the meetings I used to have online, you could block camera, get up and go make a sandwich, eat it, go to the toilet, wash your hands, make a cup of coffee, sit down, rejoin the meeting and nobody would even have noticed you were gone! I did wonder a few times if my time would be better spent watching paint dry.

It started with cutted up apples when we'd heard something of a nighttime, then once we'd seen them it progressed to peanuts (shelled & not salted!), peanut butter sandwiches made with seeded bread, & pears as well as apples. They loved everything. Some coarser badger occasionally kept the others away from its food by making its head the centre of a circle, frantically wolfing down its sarnies, while its weighty rump was propelled by the back legs in describing the circumference, at speed. That was a sight to behold.

Do it, Deano, do it!

We also have foxes (including gorgeous cubs one year) & deer which are a bit flighty but seem to like snoozing in the garden (oddly, I've never seen deer in the nearby forest, so where do they come from or do they just hide behind a tree?). Also grass snakes, slow worms, frogs & toads.

They never showed any aggression except towards each other if there were rivals in the group. My elderly cat took against them & would slowly walk past them, hissing; they just looked up, saw it was her & went back to their food!

I asked him about the suggestion of swallows & he said no, definitely bats.

Yup.

I carefully calculated how much Rigilene I would need, which involved Measuring and Sums, then checked what I'd got in my stash. Not quite enough.

So I ordered some more, and as soon as it was too late to cancel the order, of course I found another coil of the stuff.

So, here's the thing,..

I understood "yup" and "ordered some more" and "cancel the order".

There's quite a bit of that, AngleofRepose, I sometimes just go te-dum te-dum until the techie needlework talk is over!
But I'm full of admiration for the results💙

I caught and corrected what would have been the World's Most Spectacularly Wrong Typo- I typed 'te-deum' instead of te-dum' -
you carry on talking about yarn and stitches, I'll just sing Te Deum laudamus in Gregorian Chant till you're finished

Poor knittedsloth is never going to catch up, at this rate!

Bar gerbils, it's five o'clock somewhere, can I have Talisker, double, neat please? I need to have a think. Will be in the Quilting Nook.

I don't think I have ever been more jealous of a post on here. The only thing to beat it is the Boris The Badger And Friends on Facebook, where he sits and the badgers climb over him - including one nicknamed the custard cream thief as it is always sniffing out and stealing his biscuits.

I do like a Gregorian Chant - I'll join you

Sorry, abandoned the boning for a minute to watch a Spitfire touring Wales on Flightradar.

Now there's a sentence you don't hear very often.

It's just buzzed Haverfordwest airfield at 800 feet. I imagine there were some photographers snapping away.

I’m so sorry, @AngleofRepose.

I fostered for 2 years & then Kitty arrived & announced that she was staying. So that was that.

Sadly I had the opposite reaction: Rigilene, OMG! I remember that, & not in a good way. I had my wedding dress made by a recommended dressmaker, &...

Let's just say Rigilene is the stuff of nightmares, to me.

I had a bit of an annoying experience today whilst working in my gardening business.

I do two houses next door but one from each other, I have done them for 10 years. The bloke in the middle of them asked me to take on his garden which i did last week and was thanked and paid.

Today when i knocked on the door i was confronted with angry faces. His wife said you overcharged us last week. I said well what you thought i charge is incorrect i have not, that is my price. The husband changed tack and started shouting at me and saying I hardly did anything!!!!

I just said well i will not be continuing with them and they will need to find someone else who will work well below minimum wage.

They then looked shocked and surprised i would not refund them, or continue to work for them.

I have never come across this before.

I saw my first swallow of the year a couple of days ago, perched on an electricity cable as I drove past (I see a lot of wildlife from the car...).

Last year Merlin once or twice picked up chaffinches in the garden, but I never saw any, nor heard the song enough to learn what it sounded like. This spring, though, a very bold pair seem to have taken up residence. I heard something going again this afternoon and thought, I think that's a chaffinch, whipped out good old Merlin - and it was.

The local jackdaws seem to have stopped collecting nesting material, and are instead marching around in search of food.

Cher, what are you making the requires boning?

Couldn't find him, but I did find lots of other FB badgers while looking for him. ❤

Didn't they check your price before asking you to do their garden?

No swallows yet but I do get bats and more than one type, pipistrelles and I believe the larger ones are brown long eared bats. Its quite rural and there are ancient hedgerows that support and attract many species of birds. The previous occupants left me a list of bird species they had seen in or from the garden and I have added to it. Recently got to the 60th species, a Raven. I sometimes see them in the woodland nearby but this is the first time in the garden.

Well yes i think the confusion caused was that my and DH (now retired) has joined me.

So we will spend 1 hour on a garden, but they get two hours worth of labour.

I explained that before engagement.

They seemed to have converted that in their heads in to two for the price of one.

But when i explained that they switched to you didn't really do much. Pretty insulting.

Given i have been doing both side neighbours for 10 years, i cannot understand why they would think i would rip them off.