February 9. Day 40. Witching hour

The dictionary would have us believe the witching hour is the time of day when creatures such as  witches, demons and ghosts are thought to appear and to be at their most powerful and black magic to be most effective. Normally, this is thought to be midnight.
Parents of young kids know this to be crap. Witching hour is that hideous time (if you are lucky it's only an hour) in the late afternoon or early evening when kids go feral. Everyone is tired, hungry and tempers are frayed.
Of course it's a long time since I've had a toddler in the house but surprisingly it's not only human children to which this rule applies. Canines also suffer from witching hour syndrome as Rumple and our visitor The Fed clearly demonstrate. Late this afternoon, the dogs were going batshit crazy (this is a technical term) so rather than let them continue to destroy each other and the house I took them out for a walk. And guess what? We didn't have to go far before we came across the lorikeets also putting on quite a turn in an avian display of an afternoon feeding frenzy. There were plenty of seeds and flowers to go round but you'd never have guessed it the way they were carrying on. I suppose climbing the flower stalk is better than climbing the walls. It's prettier at least.