Sick as a parrot

No wonder I felt so vile on Friday. I was coming down with a cold/flu. I've spent a miz weekend and Monday and Tuesday coughing, spluttering and generally feeling sorry for myself. But today, finally, I'm starting to feel a bit better. I'm on conventional antibiotics (for the chest infection) and also cortisone. But my old remedy, and one which always works, is to have massive quantities of vitamin C. The nutrition tables suggest one only needs 100 grams a day of vitamin C. I think that's probably too low and is set in the context of the classic western diet where we eat FAR too little fruit and veg, the natural sources of vit C. Vitamin C isn't toxic, but if you take a lot, you can get diarrhoia. I take 1 gram (10 times the "recommended" intake) every hour when I have flu, and that seems to work very effectively to send it on its way. Thank you Linus Pauling (the man was obviously a genius, but note how he was vilified for opposing nuclear war, and called a 'communist') and Adelle Davis (also called a 'communist' because she rightly accused the US food industry of not caring about consumers' health) which is where I first found out about the huge benefits of vit C.

Right. So here I am again, full of beans. Well, of something (did I mention the diarrhoia?) With a pic or two of an exquisite Ozzie parrot, the rosella. Usually a brilliant scarlet and royal blue, they do in fact often have other colours in their feathers. They have a sweet chittering call, and are almost always seen in pairs or foursomes. Despite the fact that loyal Ozzie "patriots" insist that we plant native bushes and trees to draw the native birds, rosellas adore the seeds of the elm (Ulmus procera) a species exotic to Oz. The seeds are covered with fine little envelopes of transparent paper, to allow them to float as far as possible from the mother tree. In autumn, in an avenue of elms planted by the early settlers in our town, you can walk between the trees listening to the demented chitter of literally hundreds of rosellas as they eat the seeds, and see the empty shells of the envelope seed cases as they drift to the ground.

I bet you thought I was going to post something about romantic m2m love, didn't you? Sorry.