I was doing some debugging and was amused to get the following error message displayed to me:

Maybe I’m just a big kid, but I always find the unexpected use of the word pumping amusing - and the thought of a non pumping wait did make me laugh! Anyway, the problem actually had nothing to do with not pumping [snigger] Windows messages or some sort of race condition. I had paused at a break point and wandered off to get a cup of tea. Do you think I should report that to Microsoft?!

We got up on Friday morning to be greeted by 13 ducklings and one happy mother duck playing in our garden. They were cute running and tumbling over all our plants, squeaking to each other and staying close to their mother:

We didn’t want to go to work because we knew they wouldn’t be there when we got back. The mother was limbering up, clearly preparing to march her new recruits off to water and out of our lives. I came home hoping they were still there but sadly there was no sign of them - just an empty nest and some egg shells. It was a real treat having them and with a bit of luck they might be back next year - fingers crossed.

Ah well, back to the quiet life - although I reckon we’ve got Goldfinches building a nest in one of our trees so they might not be the only visitors this year…

Update: Okay, so nobody noticed my *cough* deliberate *cough* mistake. There are in fact 14 ducklings in the above photo! Well done to my girlfriend for spotting it!

I mentioned the other day that we had a mallard nesting in our garden and sure enough, around 28 days from her appearing, we now have a clutch of new ducklings exploring the world around them. Unsurprisingly I had my camera on hand to capture their frolicking:

We’ve counted 10 so far and they really are amazingly cute. Normally I only ever see ducklings in a canal or river but to have them in our garden right under one of our windows is really special. Their proud mother is constantly standing guard around them but she doesn’t seem to mind us (she knows we’ve looked after her)! They should head off for the big bad world in the next day or so and we’ll be sad to see them go, but it’s been lovely to see 10 little bundles of fluff come into the world and squeaking out of our lives!