Chainsaws and rain; Alice in Wonderland

Now I have a heap of logs from dead branches of the biggest of my three almond trees. Don't use your chainsaw in the rain - but there was a break in the weather, so I got some outdoors jobs done.

Sun's out, but the temperatures are heading for our southern hemisphere winter. OK, so Antarctica is southern hemisphere, but I'm talking about our balmy South Australia where it very seldom gets to freezing. I mean - once in every ten years around here, anyway. Is that balmy enough for you.

Yeah, I saw Johnny Depp's cool Mad Hatter in the recent Alice in Wonderland movie when it hit the big screen. Now you can get it on DVD, so I've added a link to our friends at Amazon. I buy DVDs and books online now as much as in an "offline" store; you know - the kind you can walk around in. The nearest real bookshop is a three-hour drive from my place.

Here's a personal bit of nostalgia. Once upon a time I owned a copy of The Nursery Alice which the author - the Reverend Mister Charles "Lewis Carroll" Dodgson himself - had inscribed as a gift to a friend for his kids: and he'd inked a small drawing of a cat, BUT sadly Lewis Carroll didn't SIGN IT. Darn. Would have been worth a lot. I sold the volume years ago to a dealer for a few hundred dollars, or double what I paid. But, ah well, we always wish we'd hung on to such gems.