Unemployment in all its slightly worrying glory!

I'm still looking for a job, and I am starting to get a tiny bit bored, and not a little bit worried about my mental health. Unemployment has offered opportunities to experiment with a variety of low levels of wigging out, usually by becoming a little bit obsessed with something. 

For a while this was restricted to finding new ways to categorise my books, but the main thing for the last few weeks has been my growing relationship with, and increasing levels of devotion to, a pair of rainbow lorikeets that have adopted our garden as their territory. Somewhere along the line someone started calling them Mr. and Mrs. Stumpy (as one of them has no tail feathers, though it seems to get about well enough) and the name has stuck.

A day wouldn't be complete without a bit of a chat with the Stumpies while I feed them a few grapes or a bit of slightly too squishy peach. Mr. Stumpy in particular is very affectionate and will happily waddle up my arm to sit on my shoulder. I worry about this slightly, because it doesn't seem right that wild animals should get too used to humans, but it's hard to resist. Looking back at what I've just written, I suppose I should  be slightly more worried about the fact that in my head this daily interaction as achieved the level of 'a chat'.

I have spent an inordinate amount of time googling rainbow lorikeets over the last week or so, and have become quite the amateur ornithologist, much to the dismay of my family. 

I have even gone so far as to join the Bird in Backyards website, and have signed up to do a regular survey of birds in my garden. It seems that somewhere along the line I went from being a twenty-something gadabout to a slightly cranky retiree. But at least it stops me from trying to alphabetise the contents of the fridge again.