Dealing with the Wildlife

When you live in the outer reaches of urban living, you need to learn how to deal with the wildlife.

In our region, crocodiles immediately come to mind - you cannot miss them - they appear on the front page of the local newspaper almost every day. Along with snakes, ants - large and small, especially green ants, bandicoots, cockroaches, cane toads and ...........lizards.

The last ones come in large through to small. Our immediate neighbourhood has a quite large monitor lizard - similar to a goanna, about a metre long, and an absolute plethora of much smaller lizards. Skinks of various types and lots of ta -ta lizards. Even the resident dog hardly ever bothers to chase these critters.........there are just too many in the yard, "her" yard!

But last night we had a new incursion, with a 300mm long ta-ta lizard sleeping - yes, sleeping, on the small clothes line on the outside covered terrace area. They cling on tightly to small tree and shrub branches to sleep overnight where they blend in with the colour of the branch very well. But I had not seen one using the clothes line, grasping the line tightly and using it for a bed!



And yes, it had moved on by this morning.

Sunday Night Food

The Sunday evening meal is always problematical. The end of the week, end of the weekend and with some very hot humid weather it has been a trying weekend.

Does one eat leftovers, or a quick takeaway chook plus home cooked veggies, or some other equally exotic fare. Would toasted sambos do the trick?

It is even more of a problem, well, issue maybe, when you have spent several weeks on holiday eating all types of delightful asian cuisine, even if at times in the hawker centres or food halls that have appeared in most shopping areas in both Malaysia and Singapore.

It gets worse........some weeks away lead to a dirty house and yard, so after spending time on those chores, a quick trip to the local food hall would have been great. Sadly it was not to be.

Options were limited. An ordinary, very ordinary Sunday night roast at a local club. Takeaways were less appealing even. But wait, there’s more.......[ after a very notable TV ad of yesteryear] .............what could be better than high quality liver pate with red onion and cucumber [ both finely sliced and fresh], on freshly cooked toast, washed down with a gold medal award riesling?

Great fresh quality food and a quality wine...........beats crappy food anytime.

Eat your heart out!

The Weather is STRANGE

Darwin is wet........that's normal in February and March, although much of February was dry with a big wet flurry at the end.

But Singapore is VERY dry, recording one of the driest February's on record with only about 8mm for the month and the dry weather has also substantially reduced much of the rice crop in Thailand [ a large exporter of rice] and parts of adjoining countries.

That may cause some problems in rice supply in Asia shortly.

For now, the food is good, spicy and just great.