Oh...er...Hello

Here I am, tippy-tapping away on the laptop within the cosy confines of my nice new man cave. Life is sweet. Aside from the weather I have little to moan about. Except the seawatching of course - that's always ripe for a good moan. Here's a photo I took earlier today...

At around 5pm I drove to the Hive Beach car park in Burton Bradstock, positioned the van at a jaunty angle and pointed my optics seawards for an hour. The coast here faces more or less SW, and with the wind in the east I was hoping for a bit of late afternoon/early evening movement from right to left. Needless to say I didn't get any. Never mind, I am used to rubbish seawatching from years of regularly dashed hopes at Seaton. A flock of 50 or 60 Common Scoters was loafing offshore, and as I zoomed up to try and string something better from among them a gang of half a dozen largish waders flew distantly past in the murk. I'm pretty sure they were Grey Plovers, but pretty sure isn't tickable sure so I had to let them go. Shame. Grey Plover is probably not an annual gimme in this bit of Dorset. But Burton Bradstock isn't part of your patch, you say? Well it is now, for seawatching at least. I can easily add it as a little extension of the Cogden patch without troubling the 3km² limit.

Incidentally, have you ever tried seawatching from a vehicle? I'm useless at it. It's okay with bins I suppose, but when most stuff flies past just off France a scope is handy. Trying to coax my two legs and the tripod's three into some kind of spatial coexistence is a challenge I have yet to master...

The other day a fellow blogger asked if I was phasing again. After all, my only public face is this blog and Twitter, so a period of quietness in both media might be bound to prompt such a query. I thought about it and decided that it was too early to say. These past two months have been pretty stuffed with other things, meaning that yes, the birding, cycling and internettery have been moved onto a back burner, but have they been dropped entirely? No. I've managed a few rides, I've added Wheatear, Sand Martin, Chiff and Willow Warbler to my patch list, and I've been following Twitter and reading blogs, if not actually writing anything myself. So, quiet yes, but phasing? I don't think so.

One recent distraction was an unanticipated journey into the world of juicing. Mrs NQS made me watch a documentary she'd discovered on Netflix called 'Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead'. It's by a bloke called Joe Cross, a very overweight Australian with assorted chronic illnesses who goes on a 60 day road trip in the States, consuming nothing but freshly extracted fruit and vegetable juice. The results are a real eye-opener. My quackery radar is hyper-sensitive, yet I could detect none. Intrigued, I did a bit of research and found more, like this video on YouTube: 'Super Juice Me!' by Jason Vale. I was hooked, and with a 'nothing ventured, nothing gained' kind of attitude embarked on a 28-day experiment, living on virtually nothing but freshly juiced fruit and veg. It was totally fascinating! I figured NQS readers most likely already suspect I'm slightly not right, so resisted the day-by-day chronicle that would have confirmed the worst.

Consider yourselves spared.