We’ve started feeding the ‘possums near our house. It began a couple of nights ago when M put out some old bread on our balcony, and hey presto - in the morning they were gone. We didn’t actually see what took them, so we assumed it was a ‘possum… for all we know a huge dinosaur came past, stuck its head over the balcony and yoinked the bread. But I think we’re fairly safe in our ‘possum assumption.

Last night he put out some old bread, and some tomato. He actually caught one of them in the act, but by the time I got there it was gone. I guess it didn’t like us turning on the outside light to have a look at it. During the night I heard what I assume were ‘possum noises, but I couldn’t see anything. It was sort of like a cat hissing, but not really a hissy sort of noise. Definitely not a koala, which sounds like a pig. They’re quite weird. So tonight I have to keep a vigil next to the window so I can catch them taking the bread. Ah bugger it, I’ll just go to sleep with a warm fuzzy glow that at least one ‘possum will have a full tummy.

In other news, my neighbourhood has a hard rubbish collection coming up. In case you don’t know what I mean, that’s when everyone dumps the rubbish that they can’t put in the ordinary rubbish collection, like furniture or scrap metal or computers etc. So all the houses have a collection of (what they consider to be) rubbish on their front lawn, waiting to be picked up by the Hard Rubbish Guy (or Girl). Unless, of course, it’s snapped up by some opportunistic neighbour first. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure and all that.

It’s quite funny to see what people have put out one day, only to see that certain items are missing the next. I think someone drove around the streets with a huge trailer, grabbing whatever took his fancy. And some of the stuff does actually look ok. M saw a widescreen tv at one house. I don’t think that lasted very long - no, he didn’t take it, because it didn’t look quite right (and who would throw out a working widescreen tv), but someone obviously thought they could do something with it.

So we were trying to find stuff that we could get rid of in the collection, and there wasn’t really much except some branches that we’d trimmed. Because we live on quite sloping land, there isn’t anywhere flat to put the rubbish out the front because it would just fall onto the road. So he put it across the road, with another guy’s collection. Note that we only had about three branches. So anyway, the guy who lives there comes out and throws a hissy fit because we put the branches with HIS stuff. M explained that there wasn’t anywhere on our side that we could put it because of the slope, and the guy said that the garbage guys might think he has ‘too much’ stuff and not pick it up or something. Like three branches would tip it over the edge. M was dumbfounded. The guy ended up saying not to worry about it - what an idiot. And what’s more stupid is that that’s the back of his house facing onto our street - the front of his house faces onto a different street altogether, so he has two places to put his junk. And he was complaining about three branches! So anyway, an old washing ‘mysteriously’ turned up on our side of the road, leaning at a rather precarious angle. Gee, I wonder who put that there? How infantile.