Monday 10th October - Ikea heaven!

A supremely lazy day, caused in part, by a mounting sleep debt. We seem to wake up at silly hours and then can't go back to sleep. Take the night before last, for instance. Both Di and I were wide awake by 3.30 am and couldn't go back to sleep. So we read until dawn and then paid the price last night when we were exhausted by early evening. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that we didn't rise until late, Di not until gone 10.00 am. I read non stop most of today as I'd got to a pretty exciting part of my book: a historical novel by Conn Iggulden which tells the tale of the Mongol invasion of Europe. What amazing times and another example of how history education is woefully inadequate. Do you realise how close we came to being Chinese? In the mid thirteenth century Mongul armies swept through Europe destroying anyone who dared oppose them. There was nothing that could stop them. The great European war machine, honed by centuries of inter state fighting and holy wars, was as nothing to the Mongols. They annihilated tens of thousands of Europe's finest with no bother at all. They had just killed 40,000 Hungarian troops and were poised to take Austria and Italy when their National leader Ogedai, son of Genghis Khan, died of a heart attack leaving a power struggle that necessitated the Mongol armies leaving Europe and returning to their homeland. Had it not been for this man's timely death, the Europe we know today would not exist. Wow, food for thought!

Anyway, after lunch I was given the task of assembling some new furniture for the new baby, a shelf unit, a chest of drawers and a baby changing trolley. Spent a merry couple of hours following Ikea instructions, armed only with an Allen key, a screwdriver and a hammer. Things have progressed since the bad old days. An old GP friend of mine once told me that he was called to a patients' house by a concerned wife whose husband needed medical attention. Upon arrival he found said fellow in terrible distress with bloodied forehead which he'd self-inflicted having become insanely frustrated by incomprehensible flat-pack instructions. He'd actually beaten his own head against the proverbial brick wall, so anguished was he by his lack of DIY competence! Not so for Uminajay! I sailed through with ne'er a pause.

In the early evening we went round to the new house to put out the bins. The bin men are very particular hereabouts and you must put them on the kerbside, facing outwards, exactly one metre apart so that the machinery can pick them up easily.

I hadn't been here so late before and the bird life was different. There were loads of cockies in the vicinity. (sulphur crested cockatoos are huge white, raucous birds with erectile crests of brilliant yellow that they always raise and lower as they land). There were also four kookaburras sitting in the big gum tree in the back garden. A large flock of rainbow lorikeets were working the bottle brush tree in the front.

We arrived home synchronously with Will from work, and quickly cooked up a treat - a Jamaican style jerked chicken with rice, corn and peas. A great end to a lazy day.