The End of Australian Spring

These are the last of the Australian spring flowers sent in by DavidinOz and that makes me a bit sad. It’s been a treat for me to have so many bright, happy flowers to work with during the short gloomy days of late Canadian autumn. In 2 days time it will officially be another winter to endure Up Here, but that also means that it’s another summer to enjoy Down Under and I’m hoping that David will have a chance to share some of the flora that grows in Australia during their hottest season. Hint, hint.

Thanks for spreading so much joy, David. [Read more…]

Winter Drama

We saw them in sunlight, but after some of you mentioned a love of fog, I give you these same rooftops on that same day – this is reasonably early in the morning (it did get lighter, as the last picture shows), but the drama is only deepened by the looming darkness.

The fog lasted all through the day.

The wide view
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Where’s that shiny cupola disappeared?
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I don’t know what feels creepiest, the paired streetlights or the general sense of loomingness…
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Midday was considerably brighter, but visibility was still what it was.
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And here’s a creepy winter song, too.

Jack’s Walk

Hurry up, mum. ©voyager, all rights reserved

Ha! I found the battery charger for my camera and as I predicted it was in the last place I looked. Actually, it was found by an out-of-town friend who reminded me that I had the charger with me when I visited her a few weeks ago. She was certain that I hadn’t left it behind so I took the short walk to the cupboard and finally found the damned thing in the pocket of my suitcase. I am relieved. And embarrassed. But mostly relieved. The photo today is my sweet Bubba enjoying life without a grapefruit sized lump in his armpit. If you look closely you can just see the shave growing in on his right arm. He was prancing around the woods today like a puppy with his tail set at sail and obviously happy. I think that some of the slow down that I’ve been attributing to age might have just been Larry The Lump™ giving Jack the pip.  He’s a bit frustrated in this photo because I am taking too many pictures!

 

Airports and Timeskips

In TNET, we had a small conversation about omens and quests, but I think the answer is much simpler than that.

See, I got some cookies in the mail (more about that sometime next week). Because I was expecting a long day of travel, I packed some as snacks for the trip. My original first connection was to a large hub airport that is reasonably close to the cookies’ region of origin. Obviously, this was not acceptable to the cookies (they are not meant to go home!), so they sent out waves of distress into the spacetime ether, and destiny listened – not only was that first flight delayed for more than 2 hrs (in the end!), but I couldn’t even be placed on the same route without missing one or some other of my later connections. However, instead of the double-plus-best-good option of visiting two completely new airports this trip, I got one very nice one at Zagreb. Add to that an earlier (than original) arrival at my final destination, and this is a win no matter how I look at it. It is now snowing outside my hotel window, and I have a happy ending, and one full productive work day behind me.

(And the cookies ended up saving both my life and the lives of my passengers between Vienna and Zagreb, but that is a much more mundane story and requires no fantastic elements. Thank you, cookies.)

Let us retrace my steps, then (though the Skopje photo is from last trip, as by the time I got in I couldn’t be bothered):

Riga
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Vienna (it’s a bad photo, so what, the cookies were calling my name)
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Zagreb (not a complicated airport, but so much I love about that construction and its geometry)
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Skopje
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This is Peteris Vasks writing about everything that is the opposite of anything related to heights, it is here for the the quietness and stillness. The moment the choir happens is the one where time stops for me.

Oh, speaking of stopped time, my favourite part through my terrible ordeal with delays and undelays was watching luggage trains make pretty tracks in the snow:

Hearts and ribbons? Particle collisions?
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Tree Tuesday

Our tree this week is a bit of a show-off, being laden with both flowers and fruit in December. The photos are from Nightjar and they were taken on December 2 of this year. I double checked that date because I could hardly believe it.

This is a strawberry tree (Arbutus unedo, no relationship to strawberries except for whatever was on the mind of the person who came up with the english common name), bearing flowers and fruits at the same time as is to be expected from a tree that blooms once a year and whose fruits take around 12 months to mature. Native to the Mediterranean region, the flowers feed the bees (the resulting honey has a unique taste) and the fruits feed the birds. I like to eat the fruits fresh, although only a handful at a time because they can become cloying fast. They also bruise very easily, so there is no point in picking more than what one can eat in that moment… unless the goal is to make the traditional fruit brandy or jam, but I like neither of those things. Anyway, I think the tree is very pretty and it seems to be relatively unknown outside of its native range, so I thought I would share it!

©Nightjar, all rights reserved

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Jack’s Walk

I was all excited earlier this morning because it began to snow. Hooray, I said to Jack, thinking we would get a nice fresh, white blanket to cover up the dull grays and browns of a soggy December. Then the snow stopped and what few flakes had fallen melted away leaving behind only gloomy skies and the same slippery, gray landscape. Sigh.

This pretty little fungus reminded me of a flower. ©voyager, all rights reserved

 

Macedonia 9 – Skopje At Night

This is the last piece in the series (previous one here), which is fitting, because things have come around and I am back in Macedonia for the week. I doubt I will be taking many pictures this time, because work and I’m taking the opportunity to not really think about anything else outside of that.

So here’s a few pictures of Skopje at night, enjoy the light.

Alexander at dusk.
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Bridges into darkness.
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[Read more…]

December Light

At this time of year the days are almost at their shortest and the world can seem gloomy and dull. Nightjar has found some light, though, and she’s used it to create magic.

Still playing around with light! For me December isn’t just Christmas lights, nature can put on quite a show too and there is nothing like getting up early on a dewy December morning to fully appreciate all the magic of December light. The last photo of the ruins and olive tree is just to illustrate how lush the fields look right now, it’s not a morning shot but I liked the light in that one as well. We don’t get snow here, so that is exactly what my concept of winter is like: green.

©Nightjar, all rights reserved

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Slavic Saturday

I used to collect books by Karl May. What, you might ask, has a German writer have to do with Slavic Saturday? Well, I used to only collect editions that were illustrated by Zdeněk Burian. I would collect them still, only I rarely have a chance to visit an antiquarian bookshop nowadays.

Cover of a set of photoreproductions. “Pravěk” means prehistory. Click for full size.

Outside of our little land, he is probably most known for his paleoart, which to my mind simply has no equal in past or present. It might not be the most accurate paleoart by today’s standards as science progresses, but those pictures are so alive that they still have value and still are inspiring. One of my most prized possessions is a set of loose sheets of photographic reproductions of his works – this was also one of the first of his works I have got my hands on. The mammoths on the cover are simply amazing – and that is an understatement. I would very much love to see the original paintings some day, everyone who had the honor tells me their impact is much greater than of the reproductions.

The back side of one of the sheets. Click for full size.

Each sheet in the book represents some specific geological era and it contains one A4 color reproduction of an oil painting on the front, and some black & white inks and some text on the back. Shame it was not published in other languages, and is not even published now in CZ, because I think many aspiring artists, paleontologists and paleoartists would benefit greatly from being exposed to this work more. I never cease to be impressed by what he was capable of achieving with just black ink and a pen.

His paleoart has been a great inspiration to me. I wanted to be a painter and to achieve such great things, but alas I lack the talent. Burian’s genius has in fact demonstrated itself early on, when at the age of mere 14 years he was accepted into study at Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, which he left just two years later. And he went straight into the most difficult branch of the painting and drawing business – illustrating books. I consider this to be the most difficult part, because not only is the artist forced to draw realistic humans, the scenes also have to be living and dynamic in order to truly add to the book. And here he got his first claim to fame, by illustrating adventure books both by renown authors (like Karl May and Jules Verne) and pure pulp fiction trash. He was extremely prolific, the amount of work he managed to do in his life is staggering.

An illustration of the book “The Son of Bear Hunter” by Karl May. The book is in very poor condition, almost falling apart. I paid for it anyway. Click for full size.

I have failed my dream of becoming as good an artist as he was, but this did not spoil my love for his art and my appreciation of his technique, and I still learned a lot from him and thanks to him. There are many books out there containing his illustrations that I did not get my hands on yet. I will never pass the chance should it occur.