The Dangers of Syllable Juggling

One of the long running jokes in our household is the something I have just decided to call "Syllable Juggling".  This essentially involves changing the syllables in a sentence round so they form some kind of amusing nonsense.  Unfortunately this happens in such a spontaneous and throwaway fashion that concrete examples are hard to remember, but typically something like "Let's load the dishwasher" becomes "Let's dish the loadwasher" or something similar.  Yes, the long winter nights just fly by.

However, Syllable Juggling while tired can have unintended consequences as my Darling Wife discovered when she had a go with "The Princess and the Pea" and came up with "The Peaness and the Prince*" - fortunately Phoebe is so used to this kind of thing that she didn't notice the unintended meaning, while I was able to quickly leave the room to avoid drawing attention to it by laughing.

* just say it out loud if that's not making sense.

UncleMungo - Nature Photographer IV

Finally some success or at least I got something much better than my first effort anyway.  I have to admit, this  was a massive fluke and unfortunately I missed what could have been the best shot while dragging my camera out of my bag and turning it on.  But never mind, I managed to snap this pretty cool shot of a Grass Snake apparently trying to make off with a duckling*.  For those of you with a nervous disposition, don't worry Mummy Duck was equal to the challenge of chasing the marauding snake away.  Click the picture for a better view...

* I have no idea if the snake was really after a duckling, it did seem to be chasing them though - swimming directly at the family of ducks several times before mummy finally saw it off.