Monsoon weather

I was longing to try see the Perseid showers, but, though the sky was fairly clear on the 11th evening, it was cloudy all of 12th and 13th early morning.
Friday(the 13th), on my evening walk with Elsa, the sky was so beautifully clear, pale blue, with a few, high, stripes of cirrus and a sliver of moon and I thought the monsoon is really almost over.  14th evening it rained.  !5th morning was a lovely morning--breezy, pleasant and sunny.  Went to church and before service was over, it was pouring, said rain not stopping till sometime this afternoon!
The vagaries of end of monsoon weather!

I love how the birds come out within minutes of a lull in the monsoon rains!  It's as though they wait a minute for their feathers to dry just a bit and out they are singing away.  And on a rainy day, they seem to go berserk during the short gaps between the rains, more than on a day it's not raining continuously.

A video

Ok, I managed to convert the bird calls I'd recorded on my phone into mp3 and used Picasa to make a video. The various bird shots are taken either with my small Sony DSC-W110 or my old Motorola phone..

I have some recordings of evening sounds and bird calls that I would love to share, but don't know how where to upload audio to, so that I could share it with you.

Monsoon skies

Noon and a lull in the rains. A sky the colour of washed out light blue denim. High up are scattered thin lines of cirrus clouds, like a child's finger paint smudges; below them are big, white, puffy cumulus clouds, racing across, going eastwards driven by grey, billowing cumulo-nimbus, pushing along, gusting, changing shape constantly.
Will it, won't it, will it, won't it, will it won't it rain?

Should I, shouldn't I, should I, shouldn't I take the clothes in?

Last Sunday

A lazy Sunday afternoon; a lull in the monsoons.  I take a walk outside with the Lab girl without her leash, because nobody is out at 3 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon!  So she runs through tall grass (part jungle now it's the rainy season) and enjoys herself and I, I enjoy the South-westerly winds and listen and watch the bird life.

There are 2 couples having a heated dispute--a racket-tailed drongo couple and a regular drongo pair.  There are a pair of crow pheasants going 'Oop, oop, oop' to each other and when I join in, I can see the initiating pheasant is totally confused and so that shushes me.  There are sundry mynahs flying hither and thither.  I see a woodpecker flying into a tree high over my head--too high to see the colours clearly.  There is a flash of blue when Lab & I move to another area--a kingfisher flying off at the disturbance.  

I feel so grateful at being able to enjoy all this.

Random pictures

Three pictures to be precise :-)

 A bowl of bird;s eye chillies, from a plant growing wild among the trees

  An orange fungus/fungi growing on a cut mahogany log;

A tug toy I made for my 6 month old pup--of half a coconut shell and coconut fibre rope.