Its funny isn’t it how for so long over the last few weeks I have had very little to blog about, and then all of a sudden there is so much to say that you need lots of posts to do it.  For this reason this post is a mix of this and that, that has been happening over the last couple of days.

About a week ago now Daphne (our female breeding budgie) hatched another two young.  They are both coming along nicely and seem to be developing well.  They have even coped with the moving of the aviary (see below).  Another couple of weeks and they should really start to look like littlle budgies.  At the same time however Goldie is not doing to well.  She had a lot of mess around her bottom this morning and when Helen cleaned her up it is clear that she is bunged up with something.  A trip to the vet means that she is on Antibiotics.  Hopefully she will pull through in a day or two.

Yesterday and today was the big aviary move ready for concreting underneath the aviary.  We first had to dismantle the shed and avairy then it could be moved onto the patio that was constructed a few months ago.  There is was part reassembled so that the birds could go back in there for the next week or so while the concreting and electrics are done.

We have been waiting all day today for the order to arrive from Berrys (the local builders merchant) and as I write this the materials are still not here!  Therefore today has been tidying up this and that.

Finally the rabbits.  They too have not escaped the moving of the aviary, as moving it meant their pen was now open.  Therefore they have been relaxing in the sun all afternoon in the old rabbit run.  I think they have quite enjoyed siting in the shade next to each other, eating grass and apples.  They certainly looked relaxed.

Now that the holidays are upon us this means that it is time to finish the garden once and for all.  The only thing left to do is to concrete under the aviary so that it has a solid base.

You remember a while back that I have written about the work in the garden on many ocassions.  Although it has been fun to redevelop a plain space with grass into something much nicer and to be able to sit out on the patio with a glass of wine or a beer it has been hard work, and I am glad when it will be over.

Over the next few days I will be posting pictures etc. of the transformation of the underneath of the aviary.  The first job tomorrow is moving the aviary and with baby budgies recently hatched it will be a delicate operation.

After months of trying and the prospect of having to go through IVF treatment in order to become parents, my wife and I have managed to become pregnant - yeh!  Below is the 12 week scan of baby Wilkinson.

He/She (my wife doesn’t want me to call it, it!) will be around 6cm long in this scan.  He/She was not very forth coming in terms of having his/her photo taken as he/she wouldn’t really get in a good position for it.  Anyway I am going to be a dad so good news there.

My parents have always had a small vegetable garden at their house, growing all types of vegetables from salad stuff to peas in a pod.  With me now having a larger garden with some more space I thought it was time to give it a go.  So here it is, my first vegetable garden.

Well it is only really a few lettuce at the moment, but who knows, in the months, years to come it could be a fully fledged vegetable haven with all manner of colours in there.  Lets just see I if can get these to grow first shall we?

I thought I would also update on the escapee rabbits.  On Friday evening I put the top off the old run onto the corner where they were escaping and it has seemed to work.  Therefore today I have constructed a more permenant (although we will do it for real in the summer) ledge in order to stop them climbing over.  You might notice that it is a piece of the left over trellis from the back wall behind the new patio!

Working away on Saturday on a clients website I decided to open the window in the office and take a look at the newly (almost) completed garden and admire the view for a little break.  To my amazement I found two rabbits running around eating all the foliage in the garden.

Now for anyone that has been round to our house over the last month or so will have un doubtably been sheperded into the garden by my better half in order to show you the livestock living accommodation.  The birds live in the aviary and next door to them are the rabbits in their newly built rabbit run.  We have built them a fenced off run as they like to run about a bit.  Previously (in the old house) they ran around the garden and where free to come and go as they pleased.  However this meant that no plants or flowers could be left at or near ground level as they ate them all.  So now we built then a run area so they can run around, with one prickly fern thing in the middle, and that way they cannot get into the main garden and eat all the plants.

We first of all what we all thought would be a plants that they would not really be interested in eating they love.  In fact the plant in their run now no longer resembles a plant at all, rather a carefully sculptured work of art, eating away to perfection to give it a bare bottom and thick top.  In fact George loved it so much that as I looked out the window the other day I found him actually sat in the plant munching his way through it.

Worse still is that they have obviously learnt how to escape from their run area, which has a fence around 600mm high, which I why I saw then running round the whole garden eating plants in sight.  Clever rabbits as they have probably been plotting this for weeks, and then made their move.  So when we finish off the garden in the summer holidays we are going to have to adapt the rabbit fencing somehow in order to prevent them escaping.  Just when I though the garden was coming to and end as well!

Today I attempted (successfully at the moment!) something that I have been looking to do for a long time now, an upgrade to my oldest Mac Mini.  I finally got round to installing the two memory chips that I have had for ages, to make the total RAM in my music centre to 1GB.

I have two Mac Mini computers and jolly good they are too.  The one I use all the time (I am typing this on it now) is a newer version of the affordable, compact Mac desktop.  It has an 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2gb RAM.  I also have a Mac Mini that is connected up to the TV downstairs which works as a media centre, streaming music around the house, and in particular into the rooms downstairs.  This Mac Mini is a little older, and in fact I got it a little cheaper as it was being super seeded by the new generation minis at the time.  Its is a 1.83GHz Core Duo processor and just 512mb of RAM which for just playing music in iTunes was fine.

Anyway I wanted to upgrade for the simple reason that I wanted to install Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on it and therefore I thought that it would be much better suited to having at least 1GB RAM.  I also had to spare 512mb chips handy because when I bought my newest mini that had been upgraded, it came with the original chips, which I thought that the time I could use to upgrade my media centre mini downstairs.

I have put it off so long because I have been aprehensive about doing the job.  Mac Minis are, well, mini and compact and therefore poking around inside them can’t be the easiest of jobs and if you don’t know what you are doing then something could easily go a miss.  I searched around the net for a few minutes and found endless guides on how to replace the memory in an Intel Mac Mini, many of them where video tutorials and they are all pretty easy to follow.

The hardest part of the upgrade was getting the case of the Mac.  You have to prize it off with a putty knife or a thin wall paper scraper would do the job.  Its hard because you really don’t want to put too much pressure on the case as I was affraid of breaking it.  However you do need a little brute force in order to free.  I did make some minor scratches on the case, but most of the internet guides said as much.  The good thing is, is that the marks are left on the bottom so that you don’t see them when the Mac is in use.

From there is was easy, however beware as at the front there is a small black wire that needs to be removed in order to lift off the CD Drive and hard disk, and you must remember to replace it.  I forgot to replace it and although the Mac worked the fan was going mad and therefore I assume it is something like a temperatire sensor.

On Saturday night I experienced my first comedy night.  We decided to take a trip to the Guild Hall Preston for an evening of comedy with the Red Dwarf computers.  Off course the Red Dwarf computers, for those who are not ‘Dwarfers’ are more (actually perhaps less) commonly known as Norman Lovett and Hattie Hayridge.

I have never really been to anything like this before and therefore didn’t know what to expect but I have to say that it was really good.  I have always been a fan of Red Dwarf and therefore new the two comedians.  They both did about a 40 minutes stand up and then did some Q and A from the audience.  Well worth going to see.