It's our Anniversary!

Today is the first Anniversary of our arrival in Vienna.

Cate will argue about this but I have checked the airline itinerary. We left Sydney on 1 September and arrived here on 2 September.

There is no need to send presents – we have everything we need.

Annie and Michael arrived safely. Michael has stopped shaving and looks like a Yeti so I expect that the Polizei will stop him in the street and ask to look at his cellar.

This morning Michael was standing talking to Cate in the kitchen when he said ‘Is that your cat out there on the roof?’

It was indeed – Sissi is now big enough to burrow her way through the net – but panics when she cannot get back in and gets tangled up like a turtle caught in a fishing net.

So the net has been removed and Sissi is leaping and bounding all over the roof. We are not pleased about this but there is not much we can do apart from keeping the terrace doors closed. This is not a practical solution.

We hope that the attraction will wear off quickly and that she will show little further interest (Ha!)

In the meantime – it is nice to see Stephansdom without a net in front of it.

We now know where all the cows are in Austria – Steiermark. From not seeing any cows at all on previous trips we saw thousands in Styria - plus horses, sheep and goats.

You can drive from Wien to Salzburg and not see a single animal – why is this?

A big difference between here and Australia is that down under you cannot take a long bush walk without seeing wildlife – usually Wallabies, Echidnas and Wombats. Here there is apparently nothing to see – there may be Igels but they sure keep well hidden.

Was it always thus – or are the native woodland animals very rare (or extinct).

I suspect there were never that many – and the ones that remained and were large enough to see would have been shot by hunters.

Speaking of animals – the Gray Wolves in the Rocky Mountains were near extinction not so long ago so they banned hunting. They have recovered so – naturally – they are allowing them to be hunted again.

Sometimes the world – and America in particular – makes me want to sob.

Why do they have to shoot everything? You can’t eat a wolf can you?

On a happy note – our visitors brought us a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald. I read this online of course but it’s not the same as having a hard copy. I have been devouring every morsel of it and sniffing the paper.

This is one of the things I really miss about Australia. I don’t miss The Australian of course – if I want my daily dose of hysterical slobbering right wing blather from Murdoch I can just watch his FOX channel.

(My sincere apologies if I have caused offence to any hysterical slobbering right wing blatherers – but I suspect I do not number many of these among my readers).

I have caught up with the travails of John Della Bosca – LOL time. What a Goose! Silly John