NetDynam 2.0

after all this time, i’ve just signed up to flickr. so far i am having a lot of fun. hmmm. it is simple and easy to use, and has a lot of features i want to use for organising photos.

this shot was taken as we were speeding back to catch the ferry to return to the mainland on our last day on kangaroo island. i had to hop out of the car and quickly take the shot, so i used the IXUS. it performs OK in most circumstances i think.

it’s one of my favourite shots – mainly because the composition works, and the grass looks good. also, i did not notice those two stones when i took the shot originally, but now i think they make the picture.

i used picasa to gather a few related shots into an ‘album’, and exported the album contents to the desktop so i could easily upload them. the export facility, by default, makes the images smaller, so a lot of the information is lost, but i’ll try out a non-reduced image shortly just to see whether any difference in quality is noticeable.

the boundary between inside and outside is sometimes hard to determine. where is inside the house and where outside? i say the boundary lies at the flyscreen. insects not welcome past here. but insects and arachnids and other creatures do not abide by my rules occasionally. most people merely get out the killing apparatus of one form or another, when creatures cannot undertsand or will not acknowledge boundary-setting, but one of the abiding philosophies of eldon could be summed up in the prosaic aphorism, live and let live.

this rule is not adhered to in several specific instances. in the case of biting or sucking creatures on my person, or one potentially biting/sucking creature anywhere near me or my animal charges. i refer to mosquitos in my immediate hearing, ants biting my person, leeches anywhere on my person or any animal charge, and fleas in our immediate habitat. you will note the absence of spiders, snakes, and flies. actually i will swat a fly in the house if it keeps drawing attention to itself. a bee can sting me if i am careless enough to catch it on my arm or hand – but generally they do not bother me, even if i am cutting stalks in their vicinity.

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here we are back in adelaide for the xmas-new year period. as usual i get sucked in to local things, and so i just registered to adopt the street tree out the front of our place. it has not looked well for a few years, when all the other ironbarks in the street look quite healthy. i think it is dying of thirst. since there are water restrictions in force, i need approval or assistance to lay drip hoses out the front of our property.

next door, all the trees have gone. people moved in, cut down all the trees and bushes higher than head height, and now do not live there but come occasionally to do renovations.

it’s a peculiarly australian failing, what robin boyd (1960: The Australian Ugliness) called “aboraphobia”. or, as the old aussie motto (sardonically) says: “If it moves, shoot it. If it doesn’t, chop it down”. two doors up, we have a vacant lot. when we moved here in 2005,  there was an old stone double villa, built about 1870. after it was sold to notable local developers, there was consternation about the house being demolished and also the trees being cut down in the back yard. i have detailed the story of the trees elsewhere…

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i just returned from a long drive to geelong to attend the association of societies for growing australian plants (ASGAP) biennial conference there. the drive itself takes about 10 hours or so straight, so i did it in 2 days, leaving about 11am each day and arriving for the evening about 4. the conference was held over 5 days, monday to friday, with 3 days of talks and presentations and 2 days of excursions to local reserves and gardens. on the way back i stopped in at seymour to visit my old school friend, and then we took a 2 day loll about to beechworth and rutherglen. victoria – the place to be!

anyway, of course i took some pics. the themes of plants and railways were prominent… in this post, a selection of plant-oriented fotos…

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Frank said he was leaving for Victoria, Garden State and land of overweening bureaucracy on Thursday. I’d been trying to get him to come over and lend me his truck for some time, also cut some limbs off one of my trees, the weed tree, the acacia that was growing far too well and cutting out the sun on some of the other trees I’d hoped would grow faster. I needed the truck to take a load of cuttings and other green waste to the dump. I needed to do it before I left for Sydney.

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pine in grounds of shrine, revered with shimenawa and white paper, yufuin, kyushu, japan

eucalyptus in rightful place, left alone in a vineyard landscape, barossa valley, south australia




in 1978, i was living in london, in a place where you sometimes caught sight of a dragon coming in to land on the horizon between the buildings. so close it looked as if it were landing just a couple of bus stops down the road.

a video from youtube saying more about me than anything else…

…well, tracing one’s internet/browsing habits might take the path of checking out what folder-names and actual URLs one has bookmarked in the favourite browser. even better would be access to browser history – obviously i do not use youtube to look for videos of trains and planes and aviators every day, but after a while a pattern does develop…

there are many videos of concorde – from inside and out – on youtube, but this is the one that makes me cry. about the time the second concorde comes back from edinburgh, my throat starts to catch, and by the time the next one is landing i’ve got the tissues out.             ..something about the sky, the people, and the commentary witnessing the last home-coming of these unbelievable flying things seems to tickle my weeping bone.