The owl told me to get back to it

Last night I was slogging away at the word-mines, when my attention was caught by a fluttering and a rather disturbed dog in the 'walk-out' closet (aka short piece of passage to outside, done up as a walk-in (and out) closet) attached to my study. It has one of those soft fly-screens with magnetic tapes on it and stays open year round so the dogs can come and go from my study while they assist me in my word-mining. The fluttering was from one of those little boobook (or mopoke) owls, who had got in... and was now stuck. I pulled the screen aside, and attempted to shoo it out.

Only that didn't work quite as I expected. The owl took flight from the pile of jeans on the shelf... and landed on my chest (no I don't think it was trying to rip my chest open and eat my still beating heart. It was just scared and confused.) Luckily I had a very thick wooly jumper on - with the door open it can get quite chilly in my study, and claws only went into that.

I walked slowly and calmly out of the screen and it flew off into the night. It was quite something looking down at it, and it looking up at me, faces maybe 5 inches apart. It didn't occur to me that it could have made quite a mess of me until it flown off into the darkness.

I commented about it on facebook - but it occurred to me that would disappear fast enough. So I'd better do it here. I'm through the December mobs and the internet is working better... uh.Well the December part anyway.

We're in the 'construction' as we've got the wonderful gift of an old container - which will be a workshop for me and temporary store for our stuff and possibly even somewhere to stay if things fall apart. Yeah, I know. I am a pessimist, by preparation. So as I need to do some work putting a second roof on it (it leaks a little) I jumped up there. Well stood on a very short ladder and grabbed the top edge and pulled up. One of the things I got out of years of rock-climbing. One of the things I didn't get out of that, was that you shouldn't do it on the way back from the feeding the chooks and collecting the eggs, at least not if you still have the eggs in your jacket pocket. You want to know what the hobbit had in its pocketses...? Eueegh.

Other than that it's been a mildly frustrating day, with having undertaken a fair number of 'between writing' little jobs (when I get stuck I allow myself 15 minutes to attack the next of the list) all of which turned into being like those very computer games. You need x before can do Y. And you need W and and V to do W. And so on... And to do any of it you need to move A and B and C...(which part of what the workshop is all about.) So I think I managed... um. Nothing. Yeah. Nothing. But I got a lot of it done. I did order some more screws and 5mm hex bits - both of which I discovered were on the need that to do this list.