Backyard Milkyway

"And it's something quite peculiar,

Something that's shimmering and white...

Leaves you here, despite your destination,

Under the Milky Way tonight"

Playing around in the backyard tonight, before the moon came up.
One of the wonderful things about the southern hemisphere - so much less light! (although you can see the light from Toowoomba in the bottom right of the sky).
Anyway, a pleasant experiment.

As you wish....

Sitting on a VERY late night teleconference with people from 4 countries.
Had fun over the last couple of nights watching "The Princess Bride" with the boys.

It is still one of my all time favourites...

Twas the night before Christmas

And a lovely night it is too....
The Christmas tree has everything it needs....
everyone is tucked up in bed (except me obviously).

It is a beautiful night outside...  A gentle summer storm, a bit of lightning and thunder, but nothing scary.  Just enough to keep it cool.

To everyone who I care about - have a great Christmas!

Celebration???

Work Christmas party this weekend.  All went well.

Not 100% sure about the celebration aspect of it....  (this of course was my reaction to having my camera stolen off me!)

But I am sure that somewhere in the world there are people who have done things worthy of celebration over the last few days...  And I definitely hope they did indeed celebrate!!

Oh... and as a complete side issue... I was photographer for the night and the D750 behaved extremely well in the challenging light conditions.

Hiding from myself

One I have been meaning to do for a while...
The topic for the photography competition this month at TPS is "Selfie"... so I thought, why not?!


Photogeeking:  This photo took several years of planning... 4 or 5 years ago, I started developing a clone of myself (he is the one in the red shirt)...  he is not much good for most things, but was useful for this.  He sees things fairly simply and spends a lot of time cranky, so convincing him to do this was not hard.  A flash through an umbrella was used for the blue me... a direct flash for the red me, with another one filling in some of the detail.

Impact at a distance.

Took this one on Friday the 11th on my way home from work.

It is impressive what the sun does.

Millions of miles away, completely oblivious to us,

Yet still impacts on everything we do.

Clan of the Cave Bear

Well, it looks like a scene from one of the books to me anyway!.

Life is not a movie

Izak wrote a play this year, that he performed with one of his class mates….

One of the more memorable parts of it

I:  Oh look…. a time portal!!

H:  How do you know it is a time portal?

I:  Well, cause it says so in the script!

But from what I have heard, life in not a movie…. Which unfortunately means we do not get scripts to work out what is going on.

As far as I can work out… if it were a movie, there would need to be more work on the sets!

 

If it was a movie… . I would hope it was something exciting!  Something like a spy movie where you get to paraglide over cities and stuff...

 

It isn't one... cause there are complicated bits, and parts with no scripts.
There are plot twists that make no sense - bits that are tragic or frustrating with no payoff.  There are things that seem important that are introduced to the story, but go no where..

Things that make good stories, are often terrible, confusing or painful to live through.
(but just cause something was terrible, confusing or painful does not necessarily make it a good story!)
People do not come in only 2 dimensions, they come in 3 (or many many more) and cannot be easily read.  (Luckily - this is my favourite type of person! - I must like being challenged or confused [of course being where I am right now, I have a lot of opportunity to be confused!])

But regardless of whether or not there is a director... I am happy to be here!

Wow - obviously feeling all thoughtful today!  I am in hyper-ramble....

Oh Look…. A  time portal!!  (it is not just mogwai and gremlins you find in Chinese shops!)

Away...

Well the set subject for my photography club back home is "solitude"....
If the theme was "birds" or "blue skies" or "family fun" then I would have some trouble....
but solitude.... yeah.... there is plenty of that around if you want it...

Remembering the day

We remember,
there are the solid bits to structure the memory around, then there are parts we think are solid and then the whispy cloudy bits at every single edge, and in all the spaces we did not fill up with details....

Motion Sickness

The moon was huge this evening.  Sitting just above the houses and the tree line.
If I watched hard enough, I thought I could see it moving.

Not good.

If you get motion sick from the movement of the planet, there is no where to get off to regain your composure.

Shot in China

Blythe and Russell, shot while shooting in China.
The whole pool hall was stinking hot... people taking turns standing in front of the struggling airconditioner.

I did not see Fast Eddie the pool shark, anywhere!

Crash into you...

Happy 4th of July

This is some fireworks
Of course - I have no idea who set them off in the middle of the street in Miluo.
You will have to draw your own conclusions....

Down side of an older car...

So, there are all these things you take for granted when you have them....
and when you make a decision to go back to an older model, they are no longer there....

In this case, in every car I have owned for the last 2 decades I have had a little thing that tells me "distance to empty".  I no longer have that - and it turns out that I use that a lot...

My car decided to stop working on the highway on the way home.
I pulled off to the side, called Ruth, who soon arrived, (laughing the whole way) with a fuel can.

Luckily I had a camera to record the whole experience...

Clothesline Star Trails Of Unusual (size)

Ok weird title, I admit it....
but it goes with the weird photo.

Shot with the camera open for about half an hour under the clothes line... a tiny bit of playing with the colour and out  comes this....

(oh and the title was attempting to be ROUSs, but it just missed hopelessly... {and if you are the person who the title was really directed at, then I know that you already know what an ROUS is... [and if you do not, you need to read / watch one of the all time classics.....]} maybe I should stop trying to do multiple messages in my titles.....)

Foreign Money Day

...
I was going to call this International nothing happened day.

I am still not heading off to China... but I am sure it will happen soon.  So nothing happening there.

Did some astonishingly boring work... so nothing happened today....
Something must have happened on this day of the year once... but not today.

We are 193 days of the year in and we have 173 days to go... both a prime numbers and this only happens this way in a leap year.  Surely that must make the day important!?


To celebrate the nothing, I thought I would show you a strange little thing I do...
In my wallet, along with the Australian Dollars, and the Chinese RMB, there is always $5 US.  It has sat in there for a few years.
I like having it in there, but would not be able to tell you why - (I doubt if I could bribe anyone for $5....) but I think in a pinch in most of the countries I would visit... I could at least get a diet coke or something!

And given that little revelation, and because the day has not been claimed by anything else... I am calling it "Foreign Money" Day.  So celebrate "FM" day for me by trying to spend some non-indigenous money somewhere and tell me how you went!!

Not on a plane....

I am meant to be on a plane to China in 4 hours time....
But there is some confusion with some paperwork.... (at least I think it is just paperwork...)
and so I am not flying off anywhere for the moment.

I do not need any flight angels making sure I get to my destination ok today.  Maybe I will need one again in a week or so....

So instead of packing this afternoon... we went to a shopping center.  I got to have a play with a bungy-trampoline!!  I was a little bigger than most of their clientele.  This is me in the middle of a backward somersault.  My double somersault did not work so well.... but luckily I do not have a photo of the result of that!!

Stop

Sometime what is said is different to what is meant...
Sometimes you need to understand the sign rather than hear the word.
Of course it is possible that...
You sometimes get it wrong.

you can love your iPod (or Android...)

but it doesn't keep you warm.......