More on Maggies

We have three groups (tidings) of Magpies and not quite a 'Murder of Crows' visit daily for scraps. I like Magpies but they like using our outdoor furniture as their toilets. I have been cleaning the chairs daily with what looked like two different forms of bird poo. One lot is the white greasy stuff that embeds itself into the mesh of the chairs and the other is a dry looking smooth dollup about the size and shape of a small olive. Just today I was shown the difference between these cast-offs when one of the Magpies disgorged an olive shaped lump on the glass table. It would seem that when maggies dig for worms etc they ingest a lot of other material which is separated and chucked up. I feel a little like Charles Darwin when I hypothesize on my backyard observations.
Hope you aren't eating at the moment?

Joan has had over a week of bad flu symptoms with coughing and aching body bits. She slept in another bedroom for that period and tonight feels well enough to move back in with me. I was getting quite used to spreading myself over the Queen sized bed.

Our friend Haddon has had some good news with the latest result of his PSA test. It has dropped from 67 down to 36. Last year when he had both a flu and pneumonia injection at the same time he had a similar result so he tried it again this year and voila! His oncologist doesn't seem to think there is any correlation??

Today I visited John in his nursing home. He greeted me at the door saying that he hadn't seen me in months. I gave him a haircut, and shave and had a bit of a chat with him. He also had a chat with me but unfortunately we were talking about different things. John was an academic at a university before he retired and he has a good scientific vocabulary and to the casual observer he would seem to be speaking quite sensible sentences, however in the space of one sentence the topic can change three or four times. Very sad, especially when he does have brief moments of lucidity.