Family reunion?

Another day of clouds, sunshine and periodic showers. Last night I succeeded in getting to bed an hour earlier than usual and benefited from an hour's extra sleep. Must do that again! Clare's study group arrived after breakfast. I prepared another Morning Prayer for the week after next, then went for a walk in the rain in Thompson's Park. 

The mother moorhen and three growing chicks were joined by the (presumed) father, dabbling about in the waterlogged grass verge on the edge of the pond. Before I could get them all in the camera viewfinder together, they slipped away to a shaded corner of the pond where they were hardly visible, so I missed the rare family shot. It's the first time since early summer that the male has showed up with the rest of them, leaving the mother to raise the brood on her own. I heard the screech of a parakeet in the trees in two different places, and eventually saw one in flight, but out of snapshot range. I still don't know if there's more than one of them out there.

Clare's study group members were just leaving when I got back, and she was already forging ahead with cooking sea bass lunch. While she was having a siesta afterwards, and the house was quiet, I recorded the text prepared earlier, then quickly wrote an accompanying reflection, recorded that and edited it. It was five by the time I got out of the house, again in the rain, and walked for an hour and a half under a brolly, listening to the evening news on my phone. It's quite a good use of time actually, walking and listening with few interruptions. Fortunately the rain was mostly in light showers, so I didn't get soaked.

After supper I found a new Finnish crimmie about the dark side of life in a Finnish town bordering on Russia and started watching. It's about organised crime the sexploitation of young women and trafficking. I suspect the story reflects how things were before the outbreak of Putin's war against Ukraine, prompting Finland to join NATO. Since then the frontier zone has become a different place altogether I reckon.