clouds

it's sometimes difficult living here remembering how lucky we are - our days are repetative but each one unique - we sometimes need an outsider to come and ooh  aah to remind us of our special priviledge.

i'm home alone at the moment - if you call in close proximity to 1000 eland 800 gemsbok et al alone! - vicky took lara and brad to gabs - lara having her 18th birthday party even though she won't hit the legal drinking age until next february - her botswana friends are home for the holidays so good excuse for a party, and why not?

yesterday evening having no-one to share a cold castle with at sundowner time i packed a six pack in the eski and off with my two trusty hounds into the sunset. we had beautiful billowing cumulonimbus clouds must have been thousands of feet high like great big cauliflowers - i see them frequently but last night they were special, i really thought that we were in for lots of rain but no - i wonder who gets it - perhaps we need to start going to church. 

i must have been in a sensitive mood as everything seemed wonderful, or perhaps it was the charles glass influence. 

I wish you could see the burn in the north of the farm - just a few weeks ago this was a black burnt dust bowl - nothing left but a few charred stumps and ash - now it's a sea of bright green just like i remember england, the transformation is truly wonderous and difficult to describe.

last friday i had two of luke's friends here - james and tara - we drove kanana flat looking for game and saw virtually nothing, where does it go? last night round every corner there were animals, i came into a herd of around 300 eland with about 50 zebra -they were oblivious to my presence and i happily sucked on an ice cold castle and watched them meander across the road - brilliant.

my rhino sisters have gone walkabout and i saw their tracks at water hole no 4 this is around 20 kms from their normal stomping ground - this is great as ben, our resident bull is somewhere around there and sure will get a sniff and maybe do the business maybe we'll hear the patter of great big feet in 18 months time!

i'm off this afternoon to see my mate colin who is just finishing building a house on his farm around 40 kms from here - sure i'll be able to have a few more ice cold castles but this time not alone.

getting quite poetic - maybe time for a holiday in the big city and a dose of reality

if anyone reads this i would appreciate a comment or two - makes me think i'm not entirely mad

cheers for now

rain at last

the rain seems to have arrived - hope i'm not putting the jinx on it by posting this - we've woken up two mornings in a row to the patter of rain, bullfrogs appearing as if by magic in the puddles, trees are starting to come into leaf and green shoots appearing. the rain has been localised but we've had a little bit everywhere and a lot in some places. if we've had an average of 20mm all over then given that 1 cubic metre of water weighs 1 ton and 1 hectare is 10 thousand square meters then 10 mm of rain is 100 tons water / hectare thus 20 mm = 200 tons / ha x 30 000 hectares = 6 million tons of water which seems a lot more than 20 mm !!! sure is a lot of clouds full.

saw three knob billed geese at the hippo pool - never seen them here before.

christmas is coming and given the bird flu in the UK a turkey shortage is predicted, we may have to settle for knob billed goose, could be a new fad.

lara is on her way home - exams done and dusted, school now history - we're all excited and can't wait to see her again - arrives on the bus tomorrow.