First Whisper

Hello Everyone,

I have joined the great unwashed and leapt headlong into the blogosphere. Somewhat surprisingly to this luddite, it is disturbingly easy to create your own blog. "The Chook Whisperer" epithet may initially seem strange but the reasoning will shortly become apparent. Suffice it to say that in the process of blog creation a name must be chosen and unlike babies, there is no material downside to naming your blog after the first thing that pops into your head.

I make no claims of this being interesting to anyone except my family and possibly a few friends who put up with my ramblings from time to time. Mainly this is about me connecting with family and reflecting on life's happenstance in the hope that they will take the time to drop me an email from time to time.

I have been reflecting lately on the fun of watching & feeding chooks in Nan & Pa's backyard over many years. Grandma Binny had chooks too and in 37 years (nearly) I don't ever remember being unhappy in the presence of a chook. Ok, so perhaps I haven't put quite as much thought into the whole philosophy of happiness idea as Aristotle or John Stuart Mill but the "chooks make you smile" theory is pretty sound I reckon. This thought stream was triggered a few weeks ago when I was buggering around in the backyard and for the first time took a decent look at the stuff stacked behind my garden shed. I'd seen it there before of course, but had never really looked at it before. It turns out that the stuff appears to be the makings of some sort of big-arse aviary. In the millisecond journey from my eyes into the processing centre of my brain this was translated into "chook house".

I've checked out the ACT rules for keeping chooks and I think I have it covered. Anyway, Raechelle (my sister) and Ash (her boyfriend) are coming to Canberra to visit for my birthday in a couple of weeks and I thought that would be a great time to drag all that 'stuff' out, transform it into a chook house and get some chooks so I can devote some time to watching chooks. Rae likes watching chooks too :-)

Last weekend, for no particular reason, I listened to a series of 24 lectures on the Confessions of St. Augustine and was so taken by the whole thing that I am on the lookout for a copy of the book now. Speaking of reading I've also recently finished some more Rafael Sabatini (The Tavern Knight & The Trampling of the Lillies) and have begun The Sea Hawk. I just love the opening line of the Tavern Knight:

He whom they called the Tavern Knight laughed an evil laugh - such a laugh as might fall from the lips of Satan in a sardonic moment.

Great stuff! If you've never read Sabatini I highly recommend it. It's all duels at dawn and the like.

The other news is that in the last day or so I was asked to help with a body of work that will involve me travelling all over the country monitoring various things, so I might get a fleeting glance at a few parts of Australia I haven't seen before.

I will now attempt to post this thing onto the web and email the link to a few test subjects. If it works ok I will start the work of tracking down the email addresses of family and friends so i can send it out regularly.

Dave

P.S. I think you can click where it says "comments" just below and leave a response. I hope you do, cause thats the whole point here!