Alabama 2022 - 10 July: TV and Wildlife

It has been a quiet few days.  This is mainly due to the heat.  Inside, in the cooled house, life is easy.  There is little manual labour and the temperature is entirely comfortable.  Even the guest bedroom is comfortable, and that is the coldest room in the house.  We have been entertained by binging on TV series.

Lost in Space

An update on the 1960s TV series, which fails on so many levels.  It falls into the trap of being 'all action' at the expense of story and proper character development. Every character has their own agenda, none are focused on the mission. There are occasional loose ends left hanging, and impossible (in the story's universe) things seem to happen - or did I doze off and miss something critical?

Ted Lasso

I was expecting the sitcom to be utterly cringe worthy - an American baseball coach comes to London to manage a Premiership football team.  It isn't. The mixture of American enthusiasm and English cynicism works to provide a few laughs an episode with some reasonable stories, The central characters are developed, as far as they need to be, so far.

Wildlife

In the evening, as the temperature starts to drop a little, the noise is incredible.  I'm told this is caused by frogs.  There are certainly lots of little frogs around the property, the children have caught one almost every day.  Tonight, coming back from the store, we found something bigger on the patio.

Using google to look up the picture, I think this is a Fowlers Toad.  There were two of them, and I speculated that their skin patters may be like fingerprints and can be used to identify individuals. Each as abut 5 cm long.  The picture was taken using one phone's light to illuminate the toad and another phone to take the picture without flash.

In the trees at the bottom of the yard and just beyond the fence, there are a couple of Northern Mockingbirds.  They regularly harass the kite that sits at the top of the tallest tree.  Tonight, they also chose to harass Mauve after I threw her ball under the tree.  I'm assuming there is a nest in the tree.