Harry has settled in well, has made plenty of new friends. He loves baking, and so we had Kia and Kailand Ford round the other day for a baking session. Kailand has cerebral palsy, but copes really well. He manages to rampage all over with his splints. They are really fancy carbon fibre things that look more like plaster casts, rather than the metal frames that people used to associate with cerebral palsy.
The lightweight finally arrived in late September, which is great. We unloaded it, and Harry found his scooter, so now he charges all over the garden and up and down the street on it. This might be worrying in the UK, but here, the road we live on is so quiet, and there are lots of families, so everyone drives with care anyway!
With the lightweight we have finally got some freedom, and are now able to choose where and when we can go, rather than relying on others to give us lifts. Having said that, every time we go for a drive, someone photographs the lightweight! Needless to say, all the kids at school think it is cool.
We went down to Surf Bay. The pictures do not do it justice. The sand really is as white as it looks in the photographs.
While we here we managed to see some dolphins swimming in and out of the surf. This will make Jo, the art teacher really mad, because in just over a year she’s never managed to photograph them down here! They were Peale’s dolphins, and were only about 10 metres from us.
Surf Bay has also recently been cleared of mines. What were pretty sand dunes is now a bleak and barren patch of land. Grass has been planted to try and restore the fragile dunes. Part of me though does wonder. Everyone here knows where the mines are, and stays away from them –they are clearly marked and fenced off, and it is an offence to enter a minefield. A few people who I have spoken to here think that money should be spent removing them from places like Africa where no one knows where the mines are, and people are injured and killed daily by them.
Not only were we treated to the dolphins, but we also managed to get a flypast from the VC10 tanker based at Mount Pleasant. It really is as low as the pictures seem to show! We were on the beach and hardly had to look up at it!
While we here I thought I’d try some shots of the lightweight trying to blend into the background!
From Surf Bay we went to Gypsy Cove. There is a colony of Magellanic Penguins that live here. They are known locally as Jackass Penguins, because they make a very strange honking/braying noise that sounds like a donkey. They smell really bad; think of a rats nest is probably the easiest way to describe the smell.
Magellanics are inquisitive creatures, and seem to be incredibly tame. This series of pictures was taken from a distance of about 2 feet! It stood there for a while looking at us before retreating into its burrow, as these ones burrow underground. Harry now sees big lumps of grass and announces “that’s a penguin’s house”
On the way back I took a series of photos of Stanley with the intention of stitching them together as a panorama. The software for the camera to stitch a panorama together is really simple to use.
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