Archives for posts with tag: photos

Thank God I had been warned. My reader Rae had asked in a comment who had his hand on Pig’s ear in the photo posted in Good Times.  My sincere apologies, as a publisher of photos I honestly don’t want to put anybody in the poo. I am not a papparazzi. It was an honest oversight on my part. When I selected that photo I looked at the expressions on their faces and didn’t pay much attention to their hands. Big mistake! But in my defense…when you are out on the turps you just have to behave yourself so much more nowadays if you don’t want to see any compromising images of yourself on the internet. But in this case it is slightly different, as Professor has now got his knickers in a twist, because he saw something he shouldn’t have seen.

Sure enough, last night when I came home from work Professor was waiting on my doorstep. As I had an inkling about what he wanted, I just jumped in and said: “Great to see you, can you tell me again about this email?…” He looked at me and shook his head. “It is not all about you missy, you always do this to us!!! We visit you and the first thing you do, is telling us what’s on your mind! We might be little, but we have problems too!” He really worked himself up into a rage here. I immediately backed down, apologised and asked why he had come.

He wanted to see all the photos I had taken at the party. He is suspicious there is something going on between Pig and Sunny. His biggest fear is being cuckold. Pig and Professor have been together for as long as I can remember and what a fine couple they make. After all, they are the poster boys on my blog. So I listened to his lament and thought to myself: jealously is a more likely feeling. Knowing Sunny, tickling Pig certainly  means nothing to him. Sunny is just an air-head, always silly. I would say, if he had five fingers on his hand, he would have given Pig the ever so popular rabbit ears on this photo. (I only found out recently the annoying V sign people make on photos are supposed to be rabbit ears, not the peace sign.)

I went around to Witch‘s place last night. She is a brilliant mediator and I needed to confide in someone. Sometimes it is just good to talk to someone and the problems diminish. First of all she put me right. She said it is not always about me! Devil’s Advocate and Fairy Godmother are having an affair and of course Devil’s Advocate doesn’t want anybody to know because he is still married. So, their strange behaviour yesterday had absolutely nothing to do with me and they certainly were not talking about my case with Devil.

I discussed whether a puppet meeting at this stage would be a good idea, as Arindam suggested yesterday after I had posted the latest incident. Witch loves meetings and she says they are always good, but she had an even better idea. She said I should just invite everybody to a party at my house on Saturday. This could defuse the situation, no doubt. And it wouldn’t have an official feel to it.

Then she offered to look in her crystal ball for me to see how it all pans out in the end (of course for a  fee – she is not cheap, good old Witch). I shouldn’t have gone for it. Her best crystal ball is in the repair shop at the moment so she had to use her old one. That ball is so unreliable. She couldn’t see anything about me or Devil. All she could see was that Santa Clause will have an accident this year. This wasn’t helpful at all. Unfortunately I had already paid her, she collects her fees in advance and never refunds! It’s common practice, she says.

If I let the kids know that there won’t be any presents this year I will be in even more trouble. Sometimes it is better to keep your knowledge to yourself.

Devil has left his spot on the sofa and is nowhere to be found. He is not one for being known as a gossip, but I have the feeling that all the Dedes know of our little disagreement that just got out of hand. Whenever I see two characters sticking their heads together I can’t help but think they are talking about me and how mean I am to poor Devil. Whatever I do, they all watch me out of the corner of their eyes and shut up, or worse, lower their voices to a whisper as soon as I approach. The situation is becoming increasingly awkward.

I wanted to ask Fairy Godmother for advice, but when I arrived at her place Devil’s Advocate was already there and they looked as if I had interrupted something important, their eyes unmistakenly told me: “Bugger off”.  I might try to win Witch as a confidant in this case.

Focus on the difference! This is another contender for Silent Week.

The image shows Ninepin Rock at the entrance of the Manukau Harbour and at the south end of the Waitakere Ranges. We used to take the students there on a three day excursion at the end of the summer semester. They had a landscape assignment during their stay, while I had nothing to do and  just tagged along to wind down. I always had a great time running up and down the mountains right next to the beach. It only takes around 35 minutes from our Tech to the haunted 1870s Lodge where we stayed. It is an entirely different world.  First of all no cell phone reception! Except when you hike up the nearest mountain for half an hour (or take your car back to Auckland, but that would be cheating!).

It is a rough and spectacular place and every year the landscape looked somewhat different. It was always interesting to see what had changed from the previous year. There was a beautiful lagoon one year, the next year it was entirely gone. The storm just shifts vast amounts of black sand and reshapes the profile of the land. Just like God is playing in an over sized sand pit. Six square kilometers of land, or should I say sand, have been added at this corner of the country since the 1940s.

The shifting sand make the entrance to the harbour extremely treacherous. And it was here where New Zealand’s worst maritime disaster occurred. In 1863 a British Royal Naval corvette, the HMS Orpheus came to grief: 189 men out of 270 people on board remained unaccounted for. The ship was involved in the British preparations for the Maori Land war. Two years later another war ship the HMS Eclipse with nearly 300 men on board was temporarily grounded on a sand bank in the harbour entrance.

Mmhm, I wonder who God supported in that war.

Yesterday I read a blog on how to increase traffic on your site. I came across it accidentally, I was not looking for it.  Can somebody explain to me, what is achieved, when I increase traffic on my blog? It sounds to me like how to improve the bottom line of your business. Is creating a blog a business or a matter of self-expression? Am I a better person when I have five-thousand visitors a day?

Of course I am excited when people like my images or my puppets or what I have to say, but when I read an About page where 1350 entries start with: “Thank you for visiting my blog”, doesn’t that mean that the blog owner is just good at pushing the Like button on other people’s blogs? For me personally it is a real deterrent!

Don’t get me wrong, it is a truly innocent question and I don’t want to offend anyone.  I have seen blogs with thousands of followers and they deserve every single one of them for their quirky and/or informative content – I myself follow a few of those – but then I also have seen a blog with a total of seven posts of average everyday babble and more than 2000 followers. So, what is the motivation?

I read a disturbing article. It wasn’t really an article, but a profiling piece by a German foundation that helps older women to find jobs.  It said that women over 50 have a hard time finding  jobs when they become unemployed (I think for men it is not that easy either). I have heard this before from other sources but thought it was scare-mongering. I find it hard to believe that a society can discard such a large group and valuable resource by making 50 the cut-off point for participation in working life. When I was still living there, Germany didn’t have a huge culture of volunteer work either. So what are you doing when you are over 50 there? Is it really old age? Do you really have to start preparing for retirement? S-c-a-r-y!

It slowly dawns on me there is no way I could go back to Germany, even if I wanted to. This door is firmly closed. There is, however, this other interesting research I read a while ago, and it has stuck to my mind: In old age, you revert back to your first language, as you will loose the ability to speak your second language. I think old age might become very frustrating for me. Ah well, I always can talk to my puppets!

It is my two hundredth post today. Time to reflect on what I am doing here :).

In my self-experiment, I have come to the conclusion that, yes, the blog sphere is a parallel world. It magnifies what happens in the real world. One can potentially connect with everybody, but connections are still based on chance encounters. Not unlike going to a bar and starting a conversation with the person standing right next to you. You can have a brief chat, a lovely all-evening conversation and that is it – or if you like the person very much you can even meet again and become friends. But like in real life a solid connection takes time and effort.

I am a bit of a fossil. I love to have long and meaningful conversations and I treasure the luxury of time to process the given information. In the parallel world I am struggling with this valuable commodity of time. I  read heaps of  interesting snippets, but often I have the feeling I can’t process them correctly.

It is a cycle of  taking in, taking in, taking in…. alert, alert, information overload… Crash! Reboot… Maybe I need a new operating system!

Silent week is over. I thoroughly enjoyed choosing  the black and white images for my blog and I might continue with it for a while.  The image today was taken on Coromandel peninsula. You might have noticed that many of my images show deserted places and low clouds. It is not a feature I am searching for, it is just sooo New Zealand. In Maori the land is called Aotearoa, which means “land of the long white cloud”.  When there is a thick layer of fluffy sheep clouds I often have the feeling of being under a lid in a huge toy world.

In real life, the production of puppets has slowed right down as life has taken over, but I am slowly getting back into the right mind-set. My next two projects are a puppeteering workshop with the Older Women Network in Auckland early next month, and I am also working on an exhibition of puppets. The exhibition is firmed up in my head and I now have to find a venue.