Archives for posts with tag: reflections
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Cash Cow’s wisdom

December 11, 2012 //
7

cash cows question

You might have expected to see Mouse today, but the order of the candidates is pulled out of  a hat, so the next one up was Cash Cow.

Don’t be fooled by her droopy eyes and her circumstances that find her living in a garage. Cash Cow had a rather well received performance last week and if you care to listen, you will realise she still has a lot to offer, even though her udder ran dry.

Devil got up from his seat when Cash Cow appeared and greeted her with a kiss on her cheek. He then waited until she had settled on her seat before he sat down himself and read out the questions she has to answer:

1. If you could be something else, what would you rather be?

2. What is your biggest regret in life?

3. If you had 3 wishes, what would you wish for?

Cash Cow sat quietly for a while. You could see her mulling the questions over in her mind and then finally she moved her rather large pink flower into position and started to speak:

“What would I like to be if I could be something else?” She asked into space “…I would like to be a fountain… To be precise, a fountain of knowledge. It is not so different from being a Cash Cow really, except I would attract a totally different audience, wouldn’t I? Puppets would come to me for my wisdom, not for the money they’d expect. As you know, I am dry… Yes, you can suck a Cash Cow dry – and once this fact was out in the open, my stream of visitors ebbed away as well. I don’t think this could happen to a fountain of knowledge.

“I have to disappoint you with the second question though, my dear. Regret is such a big word. Don’t get bogged down by it. I always live to have no regrets. So if you don’t mind, I will have to pass on this one.”

“With the last question, I have to disappoint you again… I don’t want to be greedy… I am happy with one wish and one wish only!” She paused and Devil looked at her expectantly.

“I would wish for all my future wishes to come true. If this one is granted the other two become obsolete and I could give them away, to someone who really needs them and uses them wisely”, she said with a sparkle in her eye. And it looked as if she was thinking of Pig who certainly would wish for a fridge full of beer. “Not everyone wishes sensibly!” she added after a short giggle.

How do you rate Cash Cow’s answers?

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Categories Art, Fun, Hand Puppets, Life

Silly Season

December 9, 2012 //
6

deutsch fraulein fridge

Philosopher raised his concerns yesterday that Deutsch Fraulein is missing the German pre-Christmas period. If you have ever visited Germany in  Advent, you will know what he is talking about. Christmas is the winter feast of warmth and comfort in the midst of cold and darkness. If you look past the commercial side of it, it is really something: The snow, the glittering lights in the dark, the spice filled air. The Germans are one lucky folk in that they don’t have Sunday trading yet (or at least they didn’t have it last time I was there). Sundays are still days of contemplation, particularly in winter when the body wants to go into hibernation.

Here Downunder we call the pre-Christmas time the ‘silly season’. I always thought it is because you have to go to an endless line-up of barbeques and office parties, which of course goes hand in hand with drinking copious amounts of alcohol and being silly.  I only recently found out ‘silly season’ is an historic newspaper term from the Northern Hemisphere and it describes the time of year when parliament is  in recess and the newspapers have to come up with other (less important) stories to fill their pages. Of course Christmas and the long summer holidays coincide here. And come to think of it in terms of newspapers, silly season is all year round here.

For me personally, Christmas in the sun has lost its meaning. It is totally debased and what is left is one gigantic commercial feast. Needless to say it passes me by. I am out in the sun enjoying life. Come next winter and the coldness, I am back contemplating.

But I do understand Deutsch Fraulein (German Girl). She reads all these German blogs and gets terrible cravings for a good solid Christmas. So I thought as consolation I will buy here a ‘Stollen’, which is a special German Christmas cake with marzipan in it. To keep it fresh I put it in the fridge. Somebody must have told her. Next time I looked in the fridge, there she was, attacking the Stollen with a fork. She was so keen she hadn’t even taken the plastic off. She obviously found the perfect dark and cold place and is now devouring the comfort food. I hope she doesn’t forget to contemplate and that she leaves a piece for me.

 

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Categories Art, Fun, Hand Puppets, Life

On an island…

November 24, 2012 //
0

Nobody came forward with any ideas about how to stop Smug Little Devil undermining my decision making. …Truth be told, I can’t really act on it yet, as I have only heard the accusations through the grapevine. So I will have to leave it for now. It’s hard though, not to do anything. I have to confess his behaviour irks me greatly. I am confident the Dedes’ allegiance is still with me for now, but for how much longer? I will prick my ears up… and if he should be so silly to give me half a reason I will pounce on him and take him to task. That is the plan! But I know he is a cunning little weasel. He doesn’t trip up easily. I have to be very, very patient.

In my defense, (and this is now an explanation for all the Dedes, who feel they should have been selected for the gallery trip), the idea was to send five puppets who have absolutely nothing in common. They were supposed to be online friends, not real ones. When we tested it for a few weeks in the living room it worked very well. They communicated very nicely via their modems and didn’t look at each other. Instead they looked out into the big wide space before them, but had no idea who they were connected to. Unfortunately in the gallery they managed to turn their heads round and they saw who was on the other end of each modem. I believe that was when the real trouble started. When Ms SM suddenly realised she had opened her heart to a pimply teenage Boy and Smug Little Devil was not chasing that young hot fox, but middle aged Liar. Alien just thought it was a big, big joke and wanted to party!

I apologise, I didn’t think it through… I just acted on my great artistic ideas and ignored the personal pain I might have caused the participants. But then…. get real! When you find yourself on a deserted island, you have to learn to overcome your differences and cherish what you have in common. After all, you are all Dedes, aren’t you!

Phew, now I really worked myself up :), but I feel much better!

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Categories Art, Fun, Hand Puppets, Life

A puppet called Dipstick

November 21, 2012 //
6

May I introduce: Dipstick! The new puppet, that’s me – I admit it!… For all my second language readers: no need to look the word up in the dictionary,  once you have read the post you will know what it means.

It was one of those days yesterday – you know what I am talking about – absolutely nothing goes right. Okay, this is not entirely true as “those days” don’t really exist. There are just days, when the negative is unfairly pronounced while the positive fades into the background. I call “those days” puppet days now. The first client set me off…. Never a good start to the day. And it continued until seven at night, when it was time to go home. As it was such a frustrating day, I decided to take some work home… Doh…, How is that for punishment? No really, I wanted to take home one of the projects  where I have free reign creatively. For me that is the best way to relax.

And here the story starts: To take work home I needed to transfer a few files onto – I am a bit of a fossil – a memory stick. The only one I could find had a fault. It still could be read and as the info on it was unimportant I thought I would quickly format it… That will do the trick.

Format… Done!

Oh, You haven’t….!

Yes, I have…

I have formatted my 300 odd Gigabyte external hard drive on which I keep all my personal art projects. It is  a virtual studio and as big a creative mess as the physical one, oh dear! You might not believe me but that is a real account of what happened. I was so exhausted from the day that I didn’t even have the energy to explode – what use would this be anyway?

So, phone call to good mate: “How do I get my files back on a formatted hard drive?”

“You can’t”

“Yes I can, it only renders the FAT unreadable” Thanks to my elephant memory (usually more of a curse than a blessing ), this info was stored away somewhere in the grey matter…

Phone call to hubby: “Dinner will be late!”

So I go on the Internet and luckily find a program on the first try.

Ha, ha – Note! Luck on a puppet day! I have to point this out so not to despair.

So I download and start the program. It takes over 3 hours to collate the information. I let it run, go home, cook dinner, watch a bit of brainless TV, go back to work. Program is just finishing collecting the info. Six more minutes, I can wait for that…

Then it needs to build the file tree and tells me it can take hours. Luckily it is finished in under ten minutes….  All I need to do now is click the “Restore” button. But what does the program tell me after I have done that? “Yes there are files, but the free version of the software can only recover 100 MB.” That’s laughable…100 MB is not even one of my high res layered photoshop files.

So basically it works. I see the file names on screen, but I have to download the full version. 100 NZ$ is a small price to pay for being a Dipstick. So I obtain a code to continue. Shouldn’t take long… Wait for the email…. Code arrives….Copy into box on screen.

Code doesn’t work. The instructions say it can take a few minutes before it is active. So wait….

I try again… It still doesn’t work… Wait…. Try again… Still doesn’t work… Wait…. Try again…. You get the picture. I feel like Homer S – Doooh!

I find a few spelling mistakes in the program while I wait. This doesn’t bode well. Spelling mistakes, in my opinion, are a sign of sloppiness. I hope they took more care of the coding, but now I have paid my $100 can’t do much about it! In the end I download the program again via a link from the code email. Copy the code in here – it works – but it has to re-read the entire hard drive. It tells me this will take over 3 hours. Sounds familiar… I am at Square 1.

I haven’t been in to work yet. I write my posts before breakfast. If you hear a scream in an hour or so, that would be me!

Should any of my students read this post: Yes, guys it happens to me too :)

Needless to say the puppets kept a low profile. They are masters in reading my moods!

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Categories Art, Fun, Life

Monkey as police?

November 10, 2012 //
0

I went to the pub with Philosopher last night. After all it was Friday. I was so annoyed with Bobby that I couldn’t stop talking about him. I went on and on with blah, blah, blah and blah, blah, blah. You know the story. Philosopher is not the right person to have a rant to. He just sits there, lets you get it all out, but doesn’t respond. And I have to admit that gets boring very quickly. If you have a rant, you want to have someone who tells you that you are right and who understands your problem, not someone who just sits there with his eyes closed, smiling mildly. So in the end I started to get annoyed with Philosopher. This doesn’t happen very often.

What he finally said – though infuriating last night – makes sense the light of morning. He said: “So far, Bobby has done a fine job in my opinion. If you want someone to bend the rules for you, you should have employed Monkey as a policeman, not Bobby. But then, Monkey would bend the rules for anybody who gives him a banana, not just you. So what use would that be?”

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Categories Art, Fun, Hand Puppets, Life

Prejudiced

October 21, 2012 //
0

I have to recap what was on my mind all last week. One of my puppets (I don’t want to name him) has accused me of being prejudiced towards devils and he made noises about suing me for an obscene amount of money, which of course I don’t have. But that is besides the point. I have been thinking about it a lot this week: Am I really prejudiced? Who knows, but certainly not against devils. Honestly, I have spent hours and hours listening to him when he was depressed, because  nobody seems to like him. He is not the easiest puppet to deal with. And yes, I had promised him an outing to the boat ramp and had to cancel, but for a very good reason: It was raining cats and dogs and he wouldn’t have lasted 5 minutes in this weather.

It annoys me tremendously that he now turns around and just gives me the blanket label of being “prejudiced”, only because he couldn’t get his way. How can one debunk this label? It is such a trap… And I stepped right into it. It is one of those labels that is thrown into the ring when puppets run out of arguments. Nobody wants to be prejudiced, but how can you prove you aren’t?

My accuser has made himself scarce, but I know he is around. I can smell sulphide. The curtains in the living room smell particularly bad, they will have to go in the wash soon. Anyway, I wonder if he is man enough to show his face at the party tonight and I am curious how it goes.

For now I am pleased to have it off my chest…  What do you think?

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Categories Art, Hand Puppets, Life, Relationships

Stand out

October 11, 2012 //
0

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

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Categories Art, Life, Photography

Ninepin Rock

October 10, 2012 //
0

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.

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Categories Art, Life, Photography

I don’t get it!

October 9, 2012 //
4

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?

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Categories Art, Life, Photography

What is old age?

October 8, 2012 //
4

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!

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Categories Art, Life, Photography, Relationships
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