Weekly Photo Challenge: Big

Posted on 20 October 2012 by SJPONeill

As soon as I saw the word ‘big‘ as last week’s WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge, this monster sprang to mind…it is an aircraft wheel on display at the Imperial War Museum at Duxford. At the time, I didn’t take that much notice of it hence the rather casual off-hand nature of the photos…but it is big…

Someone’s else pic of the accompanying placard in the museum (off the Net)

…and the mind boggles at how big the actual aircraft might have been if it was ever completed…

…when you extrapolate the size of the aircraft from the known size of the wheel…

…it says something for German engineering that it was trying to construct aircraft like this less than 20 years after Richard Pearse’s epic first flight…go the mighty Poll Giant Triplane…!!!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Mine

Posted on 8 October 2012 by SJPONeill

Mine…all mine…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Happy

Posted on 7 October 2012 by SJPONeill

Happy is the word…

Getting happy at Fag Ash Lil’s…our Brussels’ centre of operations…from here it was off in a series of ever-decreasing circles in search of the puppet \bar (Toone Bar but took it off the bucket list because the manager – but not the cute bar staff – was rude to us); we are still in search of the mythical ‘record’ bar which I think is the Delerium bar but not the same one in which we knocked back four Kwaks last night….our explorations continue…

Weekly Travel theme: Foliage

Posted on 5 October 2012 by SJPONeill

The WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge was late again this week so Angel Ailsa came to my creative rescue with an invitation to contribute to here Weekly Travel Theme, this week being ‘Foliage’…

I’m on the road at the moment and so don’t have access to the home image library – although, to be brutally honest about ti, my travelling net book has more than enough capacity to carry all those with me anywhere – so a photo challenge is somethinmes a little more challenging than usual…I’m in Brussels at the moment and it is trying really hard to be autmn or early winter but every is still really green and there are even still lots of flowers about…

But, then, last night, traipsing back through the puddles from the bus stop I spied this dry brown leaf on the footpath – by the time I got to my camera and came back it’d been stepped on a few times but I still think it’s an OK example of some more distinct foliage on the Brussels scene this week…

Five Question Friday! 9/21/12

Posted on 25 September 2012 by SJPONeill

I was a bit slow off the mark with this edition of Five Question Friday over the weekend…too busy baking for Carmen’s birthday dinner on Saturday and then we had the twins on Sunday, and Monday?…Well, I was just knackered and still had the annual accounts to do – yes! I do know that the financial year ended in March!!

1. What is one grammar issue you cannot let go without correction?

Absolutely and positively, apostrophe abuse…for example, the difference between it’s and its – why don’t people just get it!

2. What’s your favourite thing about fall?

Here, in civilisation we call it autumn (if it ain’t broke…)…best thing about it for me is looking forward to that first snow of winter…assuming of course, that winter actually arrives…it took its own sweet time this year and while this looks pretty chilly:

…this was as we had the next morning:

Pretty pathetic really and now that the days are getting longer and flowers are starting to pop out, it’s unlikely that we’ll get any more this year – unless of course, I shift all the delicate plants out from their winter shelters…

3. What’s your favourite dish to take to a potluck?

For Carmen, it would have to be one of her uber-pavlovas, either au naturel or deconstructed…for me, on the those occasions when I might be allowed to take my cooking out of the house, probably my South African curry (options of vegetarian or not).

4. When do you start Christmas (Holiday) shopping?

Despite great aspirations every year, normally the fortnight before, although the greater panic is not so much the shopping as getting everything all wrapped up and in the mail for those family not in the immediate geography…

5. Did you move homes a lot growing up?

Nope…not once…my parents are still in the same house that I grew up in and left home from…

…to Invercargill in 1983, then Burnham, Singapore and Linton up to the mid-90s, then Trentham and Khandallah, finally in 2004 to where we are now in Raurimu…

Of course, it has changed just a little since we arrived….

Weekly Photo Challenge: Solitary

Posted on 25 September 2012 by SJPONeill

A traditional rural long-drop ‘dunny’…a great place for solitary introspection…but kinda scary to navigate to by night with only a flickering torch or candle – rule of thumb: the darker and scarier the night the greater the rate of flicker – it’s a physics thing…

And this…

…a single solitary Bambi that used to visit over the summer of 2009/10…he was pretty bold and sometimes would come right up and look in through the front door…we’re sure that he is still around as we get occasional sightings on the front lawn…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Everyday Life

Posted on 16 September 2012 by SJPONeill

My take on everyday life…just random shots I dragged out of Picasa… …heading back into Washington after Josh and I did a day visit to Quantico…

…monsoon season in Kota Bahru…the great Thailand-Singapore Bike Ride…

…tight little English streets in Salisbury during the inaugural ABCA CLAW…

…and a summer’s day in Turangi…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Near and Far

Posted on 8 September 2012 by SJPONeill

WordPress’ take on ‘near and far’ is meant to be about mechanical perspective but perspective is relative…

In 1985, I was also a (very) junior member of the local Territorial Force (TF) company, Alpha Company of the 4th (Otago Southland) Battalion. The larger proportion of our soldiers were all freezing workers from one of the major freezing working around Invercargill and they all had difficulty getting to the TF annual training Camp in January (to align with scarfie school holidays) as that was the peak of the works season. On one of his vists to the deepest South, it was put to Chief of General Staff MAJGEN John Mace that shifting the annual camp to the works offpeak season would be a great enabler for local recruiting. He took up the challenge and stated that if A Coy could put a full company on the ground In October, he’d be good for a company deployment to Singapore…

So A Coy put a company ++ on the ground in Tekapo, meeting its side of the deal….lots and lots of adventures that fortnight, I can tell you…

I was also in the last year of my lineman apprenticeship with Telecom and in this phase of my training, I was spending some time with the rigging section that maintain the radio towers scattered around the Southland Plains. Fifty feet is quite near, until you are fifty feet up a tower on a breezy day…then it snowed which was the end of tower-climbing for the day…

This was the day before we staged through Dunedin and flew out to Singapore – 4000 hours (or so it seemed) on a Herc across the red dust of Australia for a one night stopover in Darwin to the sweltering humidity of South East Asia to our home for the next six weeks…Dieppe Barracks, Singapore…

Not that we spent much time there…shake out on the ground and almost immediately off across the Causeway to hit the jungle for Ex PEMBURA RUSA…helicopters…rain…snakes…rain…hornets…rain…more rain…and almost as much fun as there was rain…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Free Spirit

Posted on 5 September 2012 by SJPONeill

Tommy

The theme here was ‘free spirit‘.

This is Carmen’s big brother, Tommy, and no words describe him better than those for he truly was the free-est of spirits.

Tommy passed away the week before last.

Tommy loved colours. If you saw a canary yellow coffin whizzing around Auckland a couple of weekends ago on the back of a Nissan ute, that was Tommy’s.

Tommy was always aware of what was happening around him. His brother-in-law, Chris, tells how he tried to teach Tommy about traffic lights…red means stop, green means go, over and over as Tommy got the idea. Chris, then, went for the next stage “OK, Tommy, we’re coming up to an orange…what do you this we should do?” Without an instant’s hesitation, Tommy roared “PUT YOUR BLOODY FOOT DOWN!!” Yep. he knew what has going on…

Tommy loved jigsaws – I’d seen him tackle some pretty complex ones getting onto a thousand pieces – he never looked at the box-art though – just assembled the shapes in his mind and chipped away at it away til he finished.

Tommy loved the water. Regardless of circumstance or temperature, he would launch himself into it, always in the flattest of belly flops – and some of those impacts must have hurt – but he’d leap out of the water and launch himself again and again.

Tommy contracted meningitis as a baby and never recovered from the damage it wrought so got to spend his life as a four year old – there are far worse ways to go through life, I reckon…

RIP

Tommy Grey

Free Spirit

Weekly Photo Challenge: Urban

Posted on 5 September 2012 by SJPONeill

The lead for this theme was that the idea behind urban photography is to photograph your city and the streets where you grew up as they are but I’d sorta done that in Wrong the other week….I’ve loads of photos from cities all around the world but I struggled to find one that really said ‘urban‘ to me (What your photos DON’T talk to you? Crazy!!).

But just last night, through the miracle of the Picasa 3 screen saver app…this image flicked up onto my screen just as I logged off…fortunately I had just time to recognise it as from my visit to Duxford in 2009…it is in the American Hangar, a massive display of American aircraft all in one big hangar – getting them in and out must be a real act…

This one image is what urban is to me – well, what it was last night anyway…the old and the new, clutter, things standing still and things apparently moving fast, light but dark at the same time…all apparently moving in different directions…