Welcome to the wonderful world of virtual reality! Mia has just been introduced to the virtual world of Club Penguin (no, not Second Life – that’s where her mother goes). But sometimes it is really difficult to find your way round these virtual worlds so you just have to phone your friend and spend 15 minutes going through the ‘Higher! Higher! No lower’ Golden Shot routine before you can find each other. Club Penguin is apparantly 100% safe for children.
Meanwhile somewhere west of Vladivostok:
‘I am just in town for a day to go to the 5th birthday party of a boy whose Mum is American and whose Dad is Russian – they have German shepherd dogs that hunt after tiger poo! I know it sounds daft, but these dogs are clever enough to be able to recognise single tigers by the smell of their poo. This enables Linda and Misha to know how many tigers there are in the forest! Isn’t that amazing! David, the son, speaks very good English considering he never hears it. Anyway we are off to his party!
Can’t stop, but just to say I am alive and well (not yet eaten by a tiger), that although it is very cold at night when we work I have got a sun tan because of sunny days. Now it is snowing very heavily and we have given up trying to catch mergansers for the weekend while the weather is so bad.’
Quote from Toy’s latest email.
Thought I’d take a picture of a willow by our pond before the vegetation overwhelms everything. Water levels still high.
So here it is! Photographic evidence just to reassure visitors that we now only have one old banger. A couple of weeks ago we purchased an old new car or a new old car. It is a classic one lady driver with very low mileage (you can’t say kilometrage can you?). We even have all the service documentation to prove it. Even though it dates from 2003 it is very hi-tech for us. The salesman, who is also our regular car mechanic, was very keen to point out the bottom warmers and keeps switching them on at every opportunity. I’m not used to being beeped at so much and there are warning signals which I don’t even recognise.
The picture shows Tony examining mammouth bones in St Petersburg. He left for Russia early this morning and is staying with his Russian colleague whose husband is a world expert on these creatures. Tomorrow they will be flying to eastern Russia where the Chinese are taking over and where Tony and his group will be studying and catching 
Try finding 
The price of being snow free is having high water levels as the rain continues to pour down relentlessly. The picture shows our pond with water levels at previously unseen heights. Of course the cellar is flooded. We water-proofed it but only up to a certain height and that height has now been breached. Our water, never healthy at the best of times, is now coming out brown as the water table has overwhelmed the intake point. Tony’s next worry is that the pump itself will be waterlogged.
You haven’t heard from us in a while and as you can see from the picture it is because we are both working very hard. Tony had to go to Copenhagen today in order to get his visa for his trip in a week’s time.