I heard this orb weaver spider catch the fly when I was watering the cactuses in my greenhouse. Before I managed to fetch my camera and macro lens, it tucked itself away with the fly in a crevice and began to snack on it. I almost did not find it.
Pictures below the fold. [Read more…]
These are my recollections of a life behind the iron curtain. I do not aim to give a perfect and objective evaluation of anything but to share my personal experiences and memories. It will explain why I just cannot get misty-eyed over some ideas on the political left and why I loathe many ideas on the right.
This one will be very short because the regime ended shortly before the Vietnam war was covered in the school curriculum, so we were not told a lot. History lessons in that last year were a bit scattershot, as is expected during a year in which revolution happens. And what little we were told I mostly forgot, except very few things.
Those few things could be summarized thus: The USA tactics and behavior in Vietnam were shown as essentially the same as German tactics and behavior in eastern Europe (edit: in WW2). Scorched earth, civilians massacred, war crimes committed left and right. We were shown short films about how the US forces were the baddies and how their defeat was a victory of good over evil.
It got embedded in my subconscious, but I was also aware that the USA has helped to defeat the Nazis in Europe, including in my hometown. I was unable to shake off this comparison with Nazis and I felt like it should not hold water on closer scrutiny. But it did not get better when I sought information about the conflict on my own, which was still difficult in the following decade with nonexistent internet and the history books being only slowly updated.
It would be a shock if it came quickly, but it was not because the realization came slowly over the years – whether you call it education or indoctrination, what communists said was accurate. The tactics the USA used in Vietnam were those of Nazis, no matter how you try to slice it. The USA probably could not present itself in worse light if they tried and they gave communists an excellent propaganda tool – the best propaganda might not always be one that is solidly backed by facts, it must address emotions first, but it does help if the facts are on your side too.
When I was visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. in 2000, it felt quite strange. There were people there, looking up their long-dead relatives and acquaintances. As with all war memorials, It felt quite somber and I have remained quiet and respectful as one should. But I could not shake the feeling that this is a memorial to victims of an unjust war and whilst most of the fallen soldiers being remembered were innocent draftees, there were very likely quite a few nasty war criminals with the blood of innocents on their hands among them too. To this day I did not quite figure out what to think about it.
I did have some warning that this might happen, but one cannot prepare for these things I guess, not really.
My mother had nearly zero reaction to both the first and second shots of the Pfizer vaccine. Some shoulder muscle aches after the first one, some a bit longer muscle aches after the second one but nothing more. My father had almost no side effects after the first one (he has not got the second one yet) and I got only shoulder ache after the first shot, albeit big enough to not being able to sleep for one night and work for one day properly. But it subsided after 24 hours and I was completely OK the day after.
Not after the second shot though. I got it on Wednesday afternoon and at first, it progressed the same as the first shot – my shoulder began to ache, I could not lift my arm and I could not sleep properly because I am used to falling asleep on my left side. However, this time it did not stop there. at 4 a.m. I got serious shivers so I have measured my temperature and I was 1°C above my personal normal. That not only did not go away until noon, it also got in fact worse – at noon I had 1,5°C above my personal normal. I no longer had shivers, I was drenched in sweat instead. And not only my right shoulder muscle was aching, but multiple joints also did, continuously. Especially my fingers and spine. I had to take Paracetamol to fight the temperature. Whether it helped or not I cannot tell. It stopped rising, but it also did not go down and I had to take another at 20:00 after dinner. And I still had to change my beadsheets and pajamas during the night because I was sweating profusely.
Today morning I no longer had a fever and the aches have mostly receded, but I was still weak, I mostly slept until noon and I remained in bed until now, which is about 16:00. I am now mostly pain-free, but I still feel tired like after a day of work and not a day of layaboutism.
The last time I felt this crappy was the previous year when the flu knocked me out. Only that time it took two weeks, not two days. If a vaccine does this to me, I do not ever want to know what the actual coronavirus would have done, I might not live to tell the tale. Yay for vaccines, even when they give you the taste of the real deal.
When I have started building my workshop in 2009, I did not seek a building permit and I had no project. I was just winging it.
For a building of this size (25 square meters, single story), that was perfectly OK and legal, especially since it was build in place of the previous much bigger wooden barn that I have torn down because it was becoming unsafe. The new workshop is not a workshop per see, it has two rooms, one half is made from bricks and is the workshop and one half is just a storage of gardening tools and materials. It is a combination of a small workshop, garden shed, and whatever.
I was quite happy with it for a few years, but when I decided last year to start a business and went to the business registration bureau, a problem arose. I was told that since I intend to do at least some work in my new workshop, I have to register the building in the land register/cadaster. For which I needed a project and some other paperwork.
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So I had to pay a surveyor and a project architect to get the building surveyed, measured and a proper drawing made. Which I did. And then pandemics started. That has delayed the rest of the paperwork quite significantly. The whole summer and fall of 2020 I got an answer every month that “maybe next month it will be done”.
And then the bad news came. To register the building in the category “production and storage” It would need to have running water. No matter that the house with running water is literally two meters away. The office worker who issued the decision knew the law is stupid, he even said so. But his hands were tied, the law is written for corporate buildings and does not differentiate between a one-man small workshop and an airplane-building workshop. And the law says that every workshop in a production and storage building must have running water (period).
After some back-and-forth I have decided (on advice) to let the building register as a hobby workshop and garden shed within the category “building with other purposes” with the reasoning that the purpose of the building before during and after I run a knife making and leatherwork as a business will remain the same, it will always be a part small workshop, part garden shed and part whatever. Now the only requirements were that I have to have a fire extinguisher and certified revision of electric installation, which I both had because unlike running water these both make sense and I was expecting them.
That went through at the cadaster this spring, but at the same time the pandemic was roaring in CZ, the offices had limited hours and the country was in lockdown again. It was only last week after my mother had both doses of the vaccine and both my father and I were two weeks after the first shot that I felt safe enough to visit the business registration bureau in person again and apply for the license.
And it went well. The type of building the workshop is registered as was not seen as a problem for intended purposes and today I got my official papers. So as of this month, I am officially allowed to charge people for my work – and I have to pay taxes accordingly of course. I have to contact a tax consultant and research some things that I have neglected to do while the whole thing was in limbo, but that is not a legal problem anymore, that is just learning the ropes of a new business.
In other good news, today was also the day that I got my second shot of the Pfizer vaccine. My shoulder hurts like hell, I cannot use my left arm, but I feel quite happy nevertheless.
I have applied for concessions/licenses for several categories of non-protected trades. There are about 80 of those in CZ, knifemaking is only a part of one of them and the fee is the same whether one applies for one or for all of them. There are some really, really peculiar things in this system – knife-making is in the same category as welding and making of steel constructions, and knife-sharpening is in a different category that includes repairs of non-electrical house appliances. So in the course of applying for some of the crafts that I actually intend to do I also automatically will (hopefully) get a license to do a lot of other completely unrelated stuff that I do not intend to do. Shoemaking & repair is one of those things.
But even so, I was pretty fed-up with buying a pair of slippers every year (at most) because they start to fall apart and become actually dangerous to wear at home since I live on the first floor and have to walk the steps several times a day. Last week the approaching-end-of-usability slippers combined with other factors and I fell rather badly. So I have decided to at least once do some literal cobbling and make myself a pair of leather slippers.
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It was a learnign experience and there is a lot that could be done better and/or faster. The stitching on the belts is needlesly fine for example and thus it took me forevah to make.
Unlike the cheap ones that I was wearing until now, these should hopefully last for many years and if the sole gets worn through, I will be able to re-sole them in a day or two at most. Based on my experience with leather goods, I think I shall die before that will be needed since they only will be worn indoors. And they are made from natural leather and wool-felt, so if they become unwearable and un repairable, they can be thrown on the compost heap. They feel comfy and pleasant even against naked skin and the natural leather sole does not slide on the floor more than rubber one, so I am very pleased with the result so far.
I had huge fun with this break from knifemaking so I shall make at least two more pairs for my parents. I expect those to take significantly less time than these did, although still not time that would make it potentialy profitable business – these took me a whole week, so if I were intending to sell them they would be ridiculously expensive, at least 30-40 times of what slippers typically cost. But my plan for next few years is not to make things in order to sell them – it is to sell things so I can continue making them so maybe I should consider them as an option for my repertoire if I could optimize the time to one-two days per pair, perhaps three with some fancy leather carving for decoration.
I first came across her channel last year when she made a canoe. It was interesting to watch but her channel was still fairly new so I decided to not feature her here yet and wait how it turns out. But she has made some more crafting and sciencey videos since then, and those that I saw were fairly good so here is her latest, in collaboration with Derek Muller from the Veritasium channel.
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Last week this magnificent bird sat on a dead branch of a nearby ash tree. It is their favorite spot and I have gotten some pictures of kites sitting there already, but this time It was later in the day, so the sun was at a much better angle. And the bird obliged staying in one place long enough for me to actually run with the camera outside.
It is a bit of pity that there seems to be some dirt stuck to the corner of its beak. Really, no sense of style whatsoever. One would expect a model to show to a photoshoot well groomed and clean and not with bits of food stuck to the corner of their mouths.
Still, what a magnificent bird. I shall definitively make a kite-themed knife. Soon.
My persimmon tree got me worried this spring again. It looked perfectly healthy when I was repotting it, but I had to trim a lot of roots in order to promote good growth – the main root was a bit too much as a carrot. But it had plenty of lateral roots too, so I did not think cutting it will be a problem. I have also trimmed most of the last years’ growth in order to promote the tree to branch out a bit.
The roots did not support splitting the plant into two, but that is not a problem, I will be happy to have bonsai with two trunks. But the tree, again, did stubbornly did not grow. Outdoors was everything green already and growing like mad, and this one did nothing. It was indoors the whole time, so I do not understand how it could be so heavily influenced by weather (this spring was delayed by more than a month), but possibly it was.
I was fretting and checking the tree regularly. Both twigs were still springy and the bark was fresh-looking, there were no obvious signs of the tree dying. Just no growth.
Last week I have put the tree in the greenhouse, in the hope that the warmth and high humidity will wake it up already. And it might have worked.
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Well, the tree is growing, but it seems unwilling to branch out. Maybe persimmons are plants with strong apical dominance. We shall see whether I will persuade it to branch out or not.
On the right, you see a new addition to my plants collection, a mango grown from seed. My aunt gave me mango fruit in the fall, which I, unfortunately, could not eat because I was seriously revolted by the smell. It was not spoiled, it just smelled unpleasant to me, like raw peaches (to which I am allergic). At least my parents found the smell pleasant and the taste too. And the stone went straight into substrate afterward. It looks promising and might make a passable bonsai too. And it seems to grow much faster than the persimmon since it is a tropical plant and does not have a real need for wintering.
Smaller whirlwinds do happen quite often even in Central Europe, although usually we just have ordinary high winds. Occasionally some roofs get torn off, but rarely anything more severe than that.
Yesterday was different. A once-in-1000-years tornado ripped through the south of Czechia and flattened seven towns and villages.
If you can spare some money for disaster relief, you can donate here. This is run by a non-religious charity foundation.
There might be some glitches, their servers have difficulty coping at the moment.
There is a pair of kites flying around every day and I hear their typical cries from morning until evening, so they are probably nesting somewhere close-ish. I hope they do and I also hope they will help with local water vole population, i.e. massacre it.
Unfortunately, I did not manage to get both into good focus, so a blurry picture must do.
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I did manage to get a few decent pictures of one of them though, from different angles.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
The pictures are of suboptimal quality because they fly very, very high. Even finding them through the camera lens is a challenge, and to take focus and press the trigger button on a moving target that high is a bugger, that much I can tell ya.
But no matter how high a kite flies, there was something even higher that day around her. I could not find it in my bird atlas so the species is not determined. If you know it, let me know in the comments.
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When waiting for my father to come back from a doctor’s appointment, I wandered around a bit and went into an underground garage. I was around and about there several times, but I do not ever remember wandering inside. But the weather was extremely hot and I needed some shade and cold. So I went down the stairs…
…and there I saw beautiful graffiti that immediately caught my eye.
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I had to take two photographs and make a composite, this thing is huge, ca 4 m tall and 10 m in length. Graffiti is usually just pieces of vandalism around here, just initials or a highly stylized signature lazily sprayed over some newly painted facade. Those deserve a ding around the ear and a duty to pay for the cleaning/repainting. But this is a work of art and it was probably done with the approval of the garage owner. This must have taken several days of work at least. And that was just the start.
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There were some small insect pictures on some of the support columns, and that still was not all. The whole huge second wall was covered with art too. Possibly done by several different artists because it had several distinct styles.
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The last two panels of the walls did contain beautiful pictures too, but also bear witness that the graffiti vandals seem incapable of not being vandals for a bit, even when the thing they are vandalizing is someone else’s graffiti.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
This is a kickstarter funded short film made by a group of New Zealand actors.
It is not the mostest originalest story ever written and it does contain a lot of fanservice to fans of their Epic NPC man series that probably does not resonate with audience outside that particular circle.
But I liked it and maybe some of you will too.
Open thread, talk whatever you like, just do not be an asshole.
Unfortunately, I was taking these pictures against the sun and I did not have too much time to get the exposition settings right. The little bugger hovered in one place exactly as long as it took me to take a focus and press the trigger button. So this is the “whoosh” sequence.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.