Daily Prompt: Life Line | The Daily Post

Posted on 19 November 2013 by SJPONeill

You’re on a long flight, and a palm reader sitting next to you insists she reads your palm. You hesitate, but agree. What does she tell you?

Photographers, artists, poets: show us HANDS.

I went to see a palm reader once – cost me about $30 and at the time I thought she was pretty on to it but as I learned more about such things, I came to the conclusion that she was just a good artist and the truths she came up with were not much more than a game of probabilities and reading ‘tells’ – she was probably a pretty damn good poker player too…

To follow the cue I took from Caron’s post I, Robot or, “Danger, Will Robinson! “Exterminate! EXTERMINATE!) in my post “…the scariest things ever…”, I needed some hand pictures…

I also found….

…no hands…

…helping hands…and that…

…many hands make light work…

via Daily Prompt: Life Line | The Daily Post.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Habit | The Daily Post

Posted on 16 November 2013 by SJPONeill

This week, show us something that’s a HABIT. We look forward to the glimpses into your everyday.

That don’t call these challenges challenges for nothing and I had to think into this one for a week or so about my habits (as opposed to quirks and eccentricities which are, of course, totally different!)

I did identify that, although it is well into summery weather here, I am still in the habit of putting the ‘lectric blanket on an hour or so before bedtime – not because it is particularly cold here at night but because I just love the feel of a the hot mattress on my back as I slip between the sheets…

We had a drought earlier this year – three months with no rain – and we only got by at home because we put an extra water tank in a couple of years ago. Even so, we were glad when we finally got some decently rain in April and heard the steady gurgle of tanks refilling. Once it became clear that this drought thing might last for a while, we started to be a lot more aware of our water consumption and I reverted back into old jungle habits of re-using water as much as possible, especially that water normally wasted running a tap waiting for hot water to come through, and when rinsing pots and other containers after use.

Rather than buy ready-to-eat yoghurt, we make our own from packets that have a much better shelf life and which also provide more yoghurt per $. Even the hot water used to activate the process doesn’t go to waste…it’s about a litre…

…than can be poured onto one of the developing plants (L-R: chestnuts, raspberry, kaffir lime and pohutakawa)on the deck outside the front door…

DSCF7348

…or, with a slightly longer trek, irrigate the box garden opposite the garage which seems to be self-planting as seeds left from last summer start to germinate around the broad beans and others planted this year… DSCF7349

The twenty metre journey each way to the box garden all adds up over a day, a week, a month, into regular exercise, even with only a couple of litres per trip…so in addition to the water conservation, this is probably a good habit to stick with…?

via Weekly Photo Challenge: Habit | The Daily Post.

Daily Prompt: Come Fly with Me | The Daily Post

Posted on 15 November 2013 by SJPONeill

Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home.Photographers, artists, poets: show us TRAVELS.

Well, as you may have picked up from my recent ‘movie’ posts, I have been doing a spot of travelling and spent a very nice week in Germany at the end of last month…

I didn’t take any pictures at all of the trip north; I didn’t even stop to take any of the storm damage that was obvious all along the road north from Raurimu to Auckland – this would have been interesting to contrast with the similar storm that swept western Europe the week we were there (and, nope, didn’t take any photos of that either!!) – so my first photo is the mandatory one I always (usually – none from Dubai because my view was only of a rather bland concrete wall) take of the view from my hotel room…this being in Kleve…

Kleve Oct-Nov 13-006

…and another from the hotel stairway looking back the other way…the Rilano-Kleve is very close (five minute walk) to the old centre of town (a five minute drive to the new centre) which has some great places to eat… Kleve Oct-Nov 13-003

The Wednesday night one of our team who used to live in Germany arranged for us to come here in Uedem for dinner with some of his friends…very nice to meet Jurgen and Petra and thanks for a great night out…

…polishing off the night with a bottle of Killepitsch herb liqueur…I had intended to bring a bottle home but out-clevered myself by checking my bag all the way through to Auckland so that I was unable to stash any post-checkin duty-free in it during our brief stopover in Dubai…Prior to heading home we had a chance for a very quick look around the area…this is the bridge at Nijmegen, just across the border in The Netherlands (lesson learned to include the ‘The’ to find The Netherlands in the GPS!). This is the bridge seen in the famous scene from A Bridge Too Far where a horrified Hardy Kruger watches Allied tanks advance across the bridge as he tries to destroy it. It is also where Robert Redford leads a daylight crossing of the river in collapsible boats…

I didn’t do any research before we visited Nijmegen. If I had, I would have known that the actual bunker from which the Germans tried to destroy the bridge was only just along the road from where we stopped (the T intersection above the ‘tec’ in battledetective.com below)…

From Nijmegen, it was only a short drive – an amazingly short drive when you consider the difficulty that the Allies experienced trying to advance along this highway to relieve the airborne forces there – to Arnhem and the ‘bridge too far’, now named the John Frost Bridge after the CO of the parachute battalion that held one end of the bridge for a week against much more powerful German forces…

There is a small museum by the bridge which was closed and a small memorial park with some display plaques and displays…

…one of which was this twisted propeller blade. There was no marking or label with it but we assumed that it is from one of the many Allied aircraft shot down over Arnhem as the Allies tried to sustain the airborne forces by air…

An hour or so later we arrived in Amsterdam and experienced a modern car park building where there are no ramps, just an elevator that services all levels. Probably a good thing that we had such a small car as the elevator is quite tight…

I can’t say that I liked Amsterdam that much…I’d probably revisit it out of novelty value but for the most part it was quite dirty and crowded…

The obligatory stroll along the Red Light District…pretty boring really…

…some interesting old architecture…

…and a novel take on providing extra cycle parking in the centre of the city…

Yes…you can do this legally on some roads…more impressively, you can do it in a Volvo diesel shoe box on wheels…

Crossing the Rhine into Dusseldorf…

No surprises that I got into trouble in this shop…and could have got into a lot more if I had a bigger suitcase…

I quite liked Dusseldorf in the short time we had to have a look around before heading over the the airport…it reminded me very much of pre-quake Christchurch with many old buildings (most reconstructed after the war) and walks along the waterways…if I come back this way, I’d like to spend a bit more time here to have a decent look around…

I felt that I had to take at least one photo in Dubai…this is from our hotel car park back towards the airport…

Flying south from Dubai over the desert – modeller’s note: the sand colour applied by the RAF to its Gulf War aircraft would have blended well into this endless monotone…

Tankers parked up in the Gulf…

…home again…the arrivals hall at Auckland Airport…just a four hour drive from here to home sweet home…

via Daily Prompt: Come Fly with Me | The Daily Post.

Daily Prompt: Standout | The Daily Post

Posted on 14 November 2013 by SJPONeill

When was the last time you really stood out in a crowd? Are you comfortable in that position, or do you wish you could fade into the woodwork?

Photographers, artists, poets: show us STANDOUT.

These guys have some pretty impressive camouflage for moths but it only works when they stay on their patch and don’t come swarming around the house at night where a. the camo doesn’t work anymore and b. there is a great big Lulu dog who just loves to snap things out of the air…the month or so when these things are prevalent is Lulu heaven…

Lulu (Left) and Kirk (not interested in hunting things) getting cuddles

via Daily Prompt: Standout | The Daily Post.

Movies – Dubai to Auckland

Posted on 12 November 2013 by SJPONeill

Despite only having a few hours sleep in Dubai on the flight home – landing at 1159PM and didn’t get out of the terminal til after 1AM for a 9AM check-in that morning, I was quite refreshed for the final leg and managed to clock up seven movies and still be quite chipper on landing in New Zealand…

Another in the Disney/Pixar/Cars mold but good clean entertainment anyway…a sidenote is that there should be a nice line of plastic and paper models come out of this movies as they did for Cars

Giant robots meet giant monsters intermixed with raw Ozzie accents…pretty tired and lacking the kitschy appeal of the Godzilla genre from which is is drawn…

Cop buddies do Hellboy meets Ghostbusters meets Heaven Can Wait…entertaining but definitely on the lite side..

Wolverine has been in five of the six X-men movies and this is the second that has featured the character in the title role…it’s getting a bit tired now and the franchise either needs to be introduce some new X’s or be put out to pasture…

Fun with guns and old people…charming fun and violence…

This should be a noble story of dignity and pride and its pretention is that it assumes this to be so…instead of letting the story tell itself, it relies on cumbersome and unnecessary flashbacks and voiceovers to overcome the weakness of its script. Even Tommy Lee Jones as Douglas MacArthur comes across as stilted and somewhat common, not as the shrewd aristocrat that the man really was. Full of cliches and stereotypes with a distracting and irrelevant search for a missing prewar girlfriend. Stick with the Gregory Peck MacArthur and read Manchester’s American Caesar for the real story…

Boring with no real story…a mercy when it finally ended…mindlessly meandering plot lines and even the action is mediocre…give it a miss in favour of Gigli or Johnny Depp’s disastrous take on The Lone Ranger…

Daily Prompt: Mid-Season Replacement | The Daily Post

Posted on 15 October 2013 by SJPONeill

For many of us the seasons are changing, bouncing unpredictably between cold and warm. Are you glad to be moving into a new season, or wishing for one more week of the old?

Photographers, artists, poets: show us SEASONS.

via Daily Prompt: Mid-Season Replacement | The Daily Post.

Although autumn (fall to those than shunned the Empire) usually hits quite late in the year, we always has three or four months of winter where the garden is a bit of a wasteland…in nine years we still haven’t figured out what the trigger is, or even if there is one, but some time in October or November, there is an explosion of color across the ‘wasteland’, heralding the change of seasons…

The one sure sign that winter is over is when the ponga shoots start to extend into the light…usually we wouldn’t expect to see this until late November or even early December but this week they all lit off together.

This is our citrus triumph – a little kaffir lime that not only has survived nine winters on the Mountain but which also produces some fruit each year. It probably wouldn’t be bigger but it has had a few knock-backs over the years…unseasonal snow or frost, sometimes just not being good enough with the frost cloth.

The scorched earth area in the background is an area still under development that we’re still deciding what to do with. It will probably be a pathway up to the boundary fence through a developing ponga grove…

Mr Maple’s a bit slow off the mark this year but in a few weeks should be a blaze of crimson. You can see why the terra planter (it’s mate has gone the same way too) was such a good deal a few years back…the walls are simply too thin to take the internal weight of soil and tree. A summer project will be to build some more robust wooden planters to replace these ones….might have to get these guys in to give me a hand…

So that’s ‘seasons’…

Timing is everything

Video

Perhaps I should have waited a few days before rising to the ‘Saturation’ photo challenge..?

Now that all stock has been checked and is OK, and drains all checked and cleared where necessary, we’ll be sitting back for an inside day…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Saturated

Posted on 12 October 2013 by SJPONeill

My first thought for saturated was colors but while we have green all around us here, it does not feel like we are saturated in green; my next thought was food-related but saturation and food often lead to fun-killing conversations…I was going to give ‘saturated’ a miss until I went for a drive yesterday.

Normally when it is stormy and wet, I drive south down SH1 as SH4 through the Paraparas is prone to closure in bad weather. Yesterday morning I was too engrossed in my Audible book (it wasn’t even that good!) and missed the ‘Kune turn-off (no eclairs for smoko). Fortunately by midmorning, the crews were already well into slicing and dicing the trees that had fallen across the road, and clearing away some minor slips.

What got me thinking along saturation lines were a number of uncharacteristic waterfalls torrenting onto the roadside – not something that you would normally see and a sign of how saturated the ground further up must be.

This was the only one that was anywhere that I could safely pull over and take pictures – much of the road is quite narrow with high cliffs on one side and steep drops on the other. Descending into Wanganui and droving along the river, it was easy to tell just how much water must have been dumped into the catchment over the last day or so…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Good Morning!

Posted on 5 October 2013 by SJPONeill

THIS WEEK, SHOW US A PHOTO THAT SAYS “GOOD MORNING!”

It could be a shot taken during your morning walk, the morning vista out your kitchen window, your cat doing a pre-breakfast stretch, or a textured close-up of your oatmeal bubbling away at the stove.

Most mornings, I wake just before sun-up and get to see the sky slowly lightening over the dark skyline. This silhouette heralds my new day. Already this morning the native birds are singing and, in the other room, Elisabeth and Lily’s sleeping murmurs will soon be the excited babble of a new day at Poppa’s: that’ll be my cue to start on breakfast. Outside, in their house underneath the stairs, Kirk and Lulu, scramble to investigate noises in the bush…a deer perhaps. It’s a clear sky, a good laundry day is on its way for me and for the girls, looking good for more games of Skunk in the Road, and lots of giggling as they play in the ‘jungle’ around the Monkey House.