This is one of those serendipitous challenges – I’d just dumped the ashcan onto our mini land fill around the new water tank when I noticed the drops of water suspended off the branches of this apple tree (at least I think it’s an apple tree – it didn’t give me any clues last summer)…
My camera is a small but handy Fuji which fits in a pocket but on examination (short of reading the instructions) I couldn’t see any way to manually adjust the f-stop and exposure settings beyond the preset options. I did want a shallow depth of focus and not deep shot where the background would distract from the rain drops…I got this using the macro setting and it look’s OK but not as good as a true manual…
It was the same here…this is the magnolia closest to the house, all set to bud for the spring (clearly it has read the script) in stark contract to the one below which is still trying to decide – after three snows – whether it is really Autumn/Winter yet or if Summer’s just kidding around with all this frost and rain…
Then I walked back inside – you were waiting for the serendipitous bit, yeah? – and there was this challenge for Focus – just too me a while to get it together, that’s all…
Hmmm….my own unique way of looking the world…presumably without scaring small children…contrary to my normal rule of only using my own photos in these challenges, this week I am using a photo that a friend (you know who you are and I’m happy to credit the pic if you want) posted on her Facebook page which enjoying a coffee in an Auckland cafe…
I guess that I didn’t look too closely at it when she posted it and I commented something along the lines of “interesting wall decor” which, of course, she found a little odd (I get a bit of that!) as she thought that she had photographed what was sitting on her table…
Maybe it was the shadows, or the angle, or the fact that I had too much/not enough coffee that morning, but my immediate perception of this image is (current tense!) that it is a wall display of an enlarged magazine, sugar cellar (salt cellar therefore sugar too?) and a cup of coffee (obviously not a real one or all the coffee would run out!), with the late morning sun creating the shadows…
So, yup, my perception of an unusual point of view that wasn’t…
I was brought up in Oamaru, on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island so I guess that the sea has always been a part of my life in one way or another…this is what Oamaru Harbour looked like around the end of the 80s. In the 60s and early 70s, it had been a busy little coastal port with (small) ships regularly coming in for loads of wool and other produce – my uncle was a truckie at the time and I remember how cool it was that he could park alongside the ship and dump his load of grain directly into its hold…
This is the feature known as Matanaka at the northern end of Waikouaiiti (keep up with the place name pronunciation, you foreigners!!) Beach – we had a bach about a mile inland on the main access road to this end of the beach and used to come here every summer in the 70s and would as often ride horses along it as play in the surf…
Cutting forward to the late 80s – I think that this is the beach at Kuantan on Malaysia’s east coast – we stopped over here for a night during the Great Thailand-Singapore Bike Ride…we arrived in Kuantan mid-afternoon and had a ball body surfing – right up to the point that we got back to out hotel and Dan Flan pointed out the big rip…uh-oh…
I spent some time in Vietnam in the late 90s – this is the famous China Beach. At the time it was still many miles of unspoiled white beach and I have been afraid to go back in case it has been spoiled by commercialisation or industry. I used to sit here all day and read my one English book (on its 6th or 7th go round by this stage) and watch the MiGs and Hips fly in and out from the airbase by Da Nang…every couple of hours, I count count on a couple of local kids dragging a bucket of ice and Coke along the sand to keep me refreshed…
Swimming with dolphins off Akaroa…sometimes it’s a bit or miss as to whether the dolphins will come out to play but that did this day – this is a must-do if you are in Akaroa…
Crossing from Stewart Island back to the South Island – don’t know why I even bothered to invest in breakfast…
Muri Beach in the Cook Islands, during our honeymoon…quite happy to spend the day just paddling around the lagoon…
Taken from the Manhattan Beach Pier in LA on one of my stopover days on a business trip to the US…I catch the tram-bus to Manhattan beach for a donut breakfast and then spend the rest of the day shopping at the malls around El Segundo, my mission being to only have enough US cash left for a chili dinner at LAX before my flight home…I love these piers that let you stand behind but above the surf line and watch the waves roll by…
This is one of those casual posts that just start when I get an angle on a particular image…it started with this:
Two six-year-olds watching cartoons
Kirk and Lily watching cartoons, very old cartoons that, according to the date in credits, were made in 1946…both the girls love them (we have three DVDs worth of them, including a very un-PC take on Superman) and Kirk is pretty keen too…I’m not sure what the attraction is – it’s not that the girls don’t like contemporary cartoons: we put this on at their request because the morning cartoons on TV had degenerated into the daily infomercials, but they’d been happily following those; it’s also not because this is all there is to choose from on the cartoon front in our house: we have a good selection of animated movies. There is just something timeless about Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and the rest of the crew that still appeals…it might not be modern art but it is definitely art…
Needless to say…this was very much edible art…now you see it…
We had quite an artie weekend that weekend – the girls had a choice of sponge or chocolate cake for the mandatory ‘helping in the kitchen’ session (like that’s actually a choice!!) and helped Nana create this chocoholic’s dream, although they insisted on the right to do their own decorating…this is Elisabeth applying her finishing touches…
…by Lily, aged 6…
Lily’s our creative girl and she left us this great little self-portrait with Elisabeth, Nana and Poppa…
Does anyone really wonder why we call her ‘Scerri’ sometimes…?
Meanwhile, their youngest aunty was busy dealing to the zombie apocalypse in Rotovegas…a messy job but someone’s gotta do it…and it looks like she’s getting some real job satisfaction from it…
My birthday was actually quite a while ago, but I have been meaning to write this since…partly by way of acknowledgement but also to show what cool people I have in my family…
Many ,many years ago (so long ago that we need to use two manys, and that’s not too many!), I saw an article in Look and Learn about a revolutionary jetplane-submarine that the Americans were developing. This Look and Learn issue was one of a batch that we had acquired at a St Lukes Church jumble sale and dated back into the mid-late 60s.
Just for situational awareness, this is what St Luke’s Church looks like…
It had a couple of drawings of what such a device might look like in action but I never saw anything like them again, until I opened this gift from Carmen…what a score!!!! Who gives a fat rat’s that she bought it in the Op Shop and it probably didn’t even cost a dollar? I like these old annuals anyway but to find one with the ‘sub-plane’ from so long ago…yeah baby!! Coincidentally, I had just finished reading Attack from the Sea, the story of the US Navy’s attempt in the 50s to develop a credible sea-based airborne attack force and so was quite on top of this subject…it’s quite sad that had the sub-plane been scratched on the back of a napkin just a few years earlier, it might have made it at least to the mock-up stage…but I digress…very cool pressie numero uno…
These two are pretty cool and are responsible for me writing this post …they were staying with us for the first week of the school holidays and hadn’t been here for more than half an hour before charging into my study to announce with some concern that ‘ice had turned to stone and I better come quick‘…OK, busted, yes, I had a teeny-weeny Glenfiddich while watching Shout At The Devil the night before and had left the glass on the coffee table…
These are the ‘stone ice’ in question…my parents gave them to me…I’m not sure if it was just a particularly insightful guess or whether I had mentioned at some point how much I hate the ice in my drink melting and diluting it, especially when it is almost finished but these things rock! They only take a few minutes to chill down in the freezer and hold their cold for quite a while, certainly longer than the life expectancy of the average drink…
This is the way cool birthday card made for me by my nephew, Toby in Dunedin…it is so cool that Aunty Carmen grabbed as soon as she saw it and framed it to share with everyone who visits us…
Toby and his younger brother, Arlo, also sent me these two pressies…the first, the Kermit green thingie is a USB port that plugs into the cigarette light of the truck and it is an absolute lifesaver. As many of you will know, I like to listen to Audible talking books when I am driving any sort of distance on my own, including doing laps on the lawnmower. Unfortunately my current MP3 player, a Creative Stone+, only lasts about 8 hours which isn’t enough for some one way trips and definitely not enough endurance for many of the round trips I make…
The sonic rocks are just cool…you can use them for lots of things ranging from the mundane like holding the grocery list on the fridge door to tossing them around and, yes, they do sizzle as well as snap, crackle and pop…I keep them hidden away most of the time because they are just the sort of uber-cool thing someone might think they have a greater need for than me…
And, finally, because I too am a cool member of my family, I gave myself this, a simple but effective paper model that will upsize quite nicely I think…one of the very first carrier-borne torpedo bombers, not so much cool as very very scary trying to get one of these off and back onto a carrier in the immediate Post-WW1 period…
So thanks to all the cool people who made this the coolest birthday….
Carefree school days…late 70s and early 80s…the Cold War chilled…tragedy was Erebus and the death of John Lennon…TV was McPhail and Gadsby, BJ and Bear, and Battlestar Galactica…who knew that the ‘boy gets girl’ ending of Star Wars was going to become a ‘sensitive’ subject for Luke and Leia…petrol was 60 cents a litre (we finally had our heads around this metric stuff) but this actually worked out to about $2/litre in today’s dollars…the nation had its last leader for twenty years…
I don’t really have a bucket list…I’ve been around a lot and done a lot of things and am pretty content with the things that I’ve done, places that I’ve been, etc so any such list I might have of things to do before I go is pretty simplistic…for this summer, my one ambitions is to landscape this area so that any rainfall runs parallel to and not towards the house. It will have to be dropped quite a bit on the bank side and the fence past the tank will have to be replaced as the ground level there will drop my about half a metre: probably a good time to convert it to post and rail….
2. What is the most useless item on your child’s back to school list?
Not something we have to worry about now and, as grandparents, we can encourage all sorts of inanity…
3. What is the one reality TV show that makes no sense to you?
There’s reality shows that make sense? The only ones that I watch, if they meet the definitions of ‘reality show’ are some of the more up market cooking shows like Masterchef…well, just Masterchef, really….
4. What is one movie you can watch over and over again? Why?
Oddly enough, the 2009 version of Star Trek….I hated when I first saw it but it’s really grown on me. This might be just because I know that it outrages all the pureborn Trekkies to the point of pain but more and more it is because I think it has a top cast, is an interesting take on an old but tired story, and pays more than lip service to character development…on nights when TV just sucks and I don’t want to think too hard about selecting a movie or I just want something familiar on as background while I work on something else. more and more, Star Trek 2009 is my pic…
Just for those too dumb to figure out what actually happens in the movie, this picture might help make it clear. Everything after The Original Series is gone now (and so, in logic, is First Contact). Is that a great loss? Mmmmm…possibly not…4000 seasons of Voyager, The New Generation and Deep Space Ninepretty much thrashed the franchise to death…MAKE IT STOP!!!! So JJ ABrams did….get over it…
One of the things we do together as mates is watched TV…Kirk really loves watching TV…he’s been a bit crook recently and so has been getting a bit more preferential treatment than usual. I’ve adjusted his diet and he seems to be a bit more perky in the last couple of days so hopefully, it’s just a passing bug and he will be up and about fully soon…
He is very attached to that bean bag which he actually stole off Deda. As soon as he is allowed inside he will race over to it and take possession of it…I may have to hide it as I am not sure that it is doing his back any favours. I’d much rather that he’d use the flat cushion you can see in some of the other shots…
This weekend we had a bit of a Professionalsmarathon but by the last DVD, Kirk was a bit over it…
…but he perked right up when 60 Minutes came on with an item about elephants poaching in Africa – Kirk loves nature programmes and anything else that has lots of real (as opposed to canned) animal sounds…
…after 60 Minutes, TV looked pretty sad so we put on a movie…it was my turn to pick so we watched Act of Valor – Kirk’s taste tends more towards Red Dog, Black Sheep, etc – Kirk was pretty into this…
…and got right into it when the dogs in the Mexican village – near the end of the movie – began to bark…
While we were watching The Professionals, we caught this bit of unintentional humour. The plot involved an article on the other page but we spotted this about Rolf Harris’ ambition “…to star in a sexy film…” Possibly a bit regrettable today in the light of the ongoing arrests of entertainment stars from that era for a range of offences with young girls…
It was the same here…this is the magnolia closest to the house, all set to bud for the spring (clearly it has read the script) in stark contract to the one below which is still trying to decide – after three snows – whether it is really Autumn/Winter yet or if Summer’s just kidding around with all this frost and rain…
The World According to Me... 