Jesus and Mo – 22 January 2008

Dark House Quarter

Dark House Quarter

Be sure to check out the genius steam-punk art of Stephen Rothwell; bloody awesome stuff.

Packing Day

Today a month’s symphony of chaos culminated in the first of our packing days. Five packers and a supervisor arrived from Magna International and began the chore of putting all our household effects into teeny little cardboard boxes.

The speed at which professional packers work is phenomenal; within a few hours there were weird shaped boxes which looked remarkably like the items whose place they’d taken. There were funny lamp shaped boxes, chair shaped boxes and even an incredible feat of engineering, the rowing-machine shaped box.

The cats are totally freaked; their furniture is now covered with cardboard … so not right!

T Minus 4 days ….

Right we officially have 4 days left until the movers arrive! The house has exploded in a veritable nova of supercharged chaos. There are boxes everywhere and half packed trunks and a million and one administration chores fighting against a myopia of more urgent items which always manage to jump the queue. Tempers are a little frazzled and I am really looking forward to my 10 hours on an aeroplane to just unwind and have nothing to do but read and watch the latest movies from the box office.

Anyway enough procrastinating, sitting playing on Ipernity, Flickr and your blog seems so important and so much fun when there are boxes to pack

Happy New Year 2008

Photos by mugley.

happy new year 2008

How my soon-to-be-new-home saw in the New Year.

More Creepy Crawlies

It is 11pm and I was just about to turn off my computer when one of the cats got my attention with all the noise he was making. Turns out he’s playing with this big, really creepy looking bug. Now one of the joys of living in South Africa is the cornucopia of wildlife which this country enjoys and this holds true for bug-dom as well. I love macro work and I love getting the camera up close and personal with these chitinous segmented denizens of the microscopic however there are times when too close is well … just too damn close.

I still shudder to recall waking one night with two “Parktown Prawns” (as they are known locally; Libanasidus vittatus) crawling on me. As if that weren’t bad enough, perhaps I should mention the one was crawling on my face. I went from horizontal and blissfully asleep to vertical with enough adrenaline to kill a small elephant in about 1 nanosecond.

Now this “cute” little fella comes scooting along under my chair to escape the cat. Guess who will be checking under his pillow tonight?

Any entomology genii out there? Identification would be most helpful.

Stitching Photos Together in Photoshop

I’ve had a great time today stitching panoramas together in Photoshop. The functionality can be found under file > Automate > Photomerge and you load a whole bunch of separate images together and out pops the composite or panorama. It works flawlessly (so far) and seems much better than ptGui; software I tried out for doing similar composites.

Here is the result of 3 photos which have lurked in my photo-library since 2006 as 3 separate images, now brought to life as I had originally intended. This tree is a good couple of centuries old due to the thickness of the trunk. Standing next to it was a truly awe-inspiring moment.

And my bonsai are no more

I must say I feel rather gutted today; Mike came and took all my trees away with him. Mike is a really nice guy (good) who loves plants (better) and is a specialist in orchids and bonsai (best) but my trees were like pets are to other people – I loved them and tended them, looked after them, fed them and kept them warm in winter and medicated them when they got sick but they can’t come with me. It wasn’t for lack of trying, I contacted the Australian quarantine facilities and other bonsai specialists but the Aussies are paranoid about anything living (bar you) entering the country and the plants would have had to spend months in hydroponics quarantine for astronomical amounts of money and time. So I have packed up all my tools and know I can start all over again but 10 years of growing and tending my own trees is hard to replace.

So I waved good-bye to Mike after wishing him farewell and good luck and watched him drive away with his car bristling with green and the promise of a photo or two in years to come; bravely fighting back a lump in my throat and a strange moisture which had settled over my vision.