Lady bug invasion!

Our street is crawling with Lady Bugs. I'm not sure what they're up to or how long they're planning on staying but I'm pretty sure I've never seen this many Lady Bugs in one place. There must be a hundred or more lady bugs on every tree in the street, it's like a Lady Bug convention or something! Seb and Isobel seems to love it and after spending the best part of an hour the other night staring at the tree outside our house I literally had to drag them away and pick the lady bugs off their clothes and out of their hair before they came back inside. 

I had perviously heard that the city of Victoria releases Lady Bugs in their thousands as a natural means of preventing aphid invasions or something and I'm wondering if the town of Beaumont has done the same thing. Does anyone know anything about swarms of Lady bugs??? I'd be very interested to find out. 

If you go down to the woods today......

Look out for a crazy English guy wielding one of these......

Neil's newest plaything.....a gigantic chainsaw. No sooner than he had this thing out of the shop and into the back of the car we were headed out into the middle of the woods on a pretty chilly day, up some logging road in search of suitable "decorative" stumps for use at Breakers.



We had been given some top secret information from an unnamed source as to a good spot for stumps and boy was that unnamed source right! Piles and piles of beautiful wood abandoned by loggers and left to rot.

Neil had the most fun he's had in ages while I watched out for cougars, wolves and bears. The kids? Oh yeah, they sat in the car watching a Charlie and Lola DVD.

No live trees were harmed in the making of our stumps.

I was starting to need the toilet and Neil became slightly delirious with testosterone and logging adrenaline and began beating his chest and making guttural noises. At that point I thought we ought to call it a day and haul our load home.

We got sprouts!

And we're eating them on EVERYTHING :)

"Talulah smells of fish Mummy"

As promised in my previous post, here's a little video snippet from our trip to Vic. Feeding the seals down at Fisherman's wharf was the best fun!!! Even though it was definitely a wee bit chilly, I could've stayed there all day! 

I love seals I do!

Untitled from neil ralston on Vimeo.

Oh and if you're wondering about the title...notice how Belly wipes her fishy hands on her dolly Talulah after feeding the seals? Well the resulting fishy whiff coming from Talulah sparked a bit of a furore once we were all back in the confines of the truck. Thank goodness for my homemade wet wipes!

 :)

Starlight, star bright.....

Sometimes.....living in the absolute middle of flippin' nowhere has it's benefits. The starry sky on a clear night in Tofino is like nothing I've ever seen before. I took this photo last night when I let the dog out in the back yard for his evening business and if I were to tell you that I've never even tried to photograph the stars before, literally didn't have a clue, and that my camera was on it's last seconds of battery, I was cold and in my p.j's and that because of all these factors my photo is not a patch on how impressive that sky was in real life......I'm sure you wouldn't believe me :)

Meet Ned.....

This is Ned. He is a spider that lives in our house. Well, technically he lives outside and thank goodness for that because if he lived inside I wouldn't like him so much. I've been admiring his web for the last couple of weeks as it just so happens to hang right over my favourite spot to sit and enjoy a cup of tea. Yesterday the light was just right and was making his web look extra spactacular so I took a few pics to share with you.