This will hurt me...

We're getting the last of the Cruise Ships before Winter hits. I'm kind of surprised that they're still coming, to be honest. There were a lot of Canadians on this one. Canadians remind me of a New Zealander cross bred with an American. In a puffy red jacket. Aye.

The sun always shines on TV Bellerive. April, 2010. Word was passed on to me the other day concerning a disturbing event that confronted crafty knitter, sometime blogger and erstwhile commenter Blackie in the middle of the night. Awoken by a rustling sound, Ms Blackie assumed that the culprit must surely be a roaming dirt magnet . However, a brief spot of reconnoitring revealed the true malefactor was not of the toddle genus, it was in fact a plain old Mus musculus exploring some half finished knitting. Now, it is not my business to get into the rights or wrongs of musophobia, nor have I any knowledge of whether or not a Gertrude of Nivelles appeared in the guise of a strapping young man. What I can say, however, is that in the middle of the night I'd rather find a mouse explore my half-completed shrug still on the round (in a Continental fashion) than a tattoo-d escaped convict doing a poo in my handbag!

The Moon as seen in the evening from a backyard in Geilston Bay in March, 2010. Like Henry, I am somewhat infatuated by the moon. One day, I shall like to visit the moon. Unlike Henry and Ezra, I don't envisage getting there in some kind of modified carrot.

Yesterday we were looking down, today we're looking up! Here is the sky as seen mid-afternoon on Clifton Beach. Like most Rorschach designs, I'm never very sure what these clouds are supposed to look like, so I shall go with my default answer that generally involves something sexual. "Two lovers in embrace." There you go. Diagnose that Hermann! Time for a top five. Yesterday, Henry managed to sweet talk the good folk on the Steenholdt's Organic Produce stall [the tastiest apple and pear producers in the known universe] out of a good eight or nine small Crofton apples, which prompts today's Top Five Apples That I Like To Eat ! 5: the little seen Catshead ; 4: the Pink Lady ; 3: the Ginger Gold ; 2: the Jonathon ; and, of course, 1: the beloved Granny Smith !

Sometimes the process of lining kids up for a photograph can be a more interesting photograph of some kids lined up.

It isn't every morning that you see a [however small] warship parked out in the middle of the Derwent River! On war - segue like a pro there - I am enjoying what has proven to be a challenging read at the moment: Heinrich Böll's Billiards at Half-past Nine . Like many German novels, conflict lays at it heart. The novel itself is structured beautifully (if a little obliquely). The plot itself emerges through the use of flashbacks by multiple characters, and there are a number of things going on. Being German, there's a central dialectic happening. Loaded with Catholicism, there's another dialectic happening. The tale of father, son, mother, son ensures that there's at least another couple of dialectics happening too. I haven't finished yet, but if you're after a challenging, but rewarding read, I can heartily recommend it!

Sometimes the best view of the sky can be found by looking down on the ground. Here is a puddle on a patch of ground at the bottom of Elizabeth Street. Here is a little poem about power . Doing Stuff ACTION! ... wait ... wait ... waiting ... ... nothing ... ... wait ... wait ... waiting ... ... ACTION!

So yeah, it’s Theme Thursday again. What’s more, it’s kind of relevant to where my head has been as of late. I say kind of because it is one degree of separation removed from the today’s theme, but well within the spirit! So tell me, dear reader, what is the first thing that comes to mind when I say “ CLOCK ”? If you’re wired like me, you’ll be sagely scratching your chin, suppressing a tear and muttering to yourself “TIME”. TIME . There is rarely enough of it. I took the above photo the Wednesday before last. I was sitting in the front passenger side of the car, on the Gordon’s Hill Road/East Derwent Highway intersection. The connection that this photo engenders to me with the concept of time is somewhat ambiguous. When I look at this sky, awash as it is with colour as day bleeds into night prompts a very specific memory, albeit of a sky in a different place and separate context. I have an incredibly vivid recollection of swimming in the ocean under a similar sky. Of course, that ...

There were some very interesting clouds behind our house this morning, as Henry and I conducted our regular reconnaissance looking for the moon. he sky was pink out the front, and deep orange in the backyard. This photo doesn't quite do it justice. After a slight misconception the other day, I was give to ponder which was more embarrassing: to be a man mistaken for a woman, or a woman mistaken for a man?

So here is the sky this morning, at about 7:45 am. Some interesting cloud formations going on, and if there are any meteorologists out there that can explain to me why you get these ‘cotton ball’ clouds, I’d be most appreciative. I don’t watch a lot of TV. I do stick it on for the morning news headlines though, so even with my limited exposure I haven’t been able to miss the almost-pornographic orgy of grief that appears to have overtaken Australian television screens over the past few days. I’m all for covering important stories, and I understand that capturing the ‘human element’ is important when endeavouring to understand the magnitude of an event like this, but there is a point that aiding comprehension becomes gratuitous exploitation of other people’s misery . This morning the TV crews appeared to have run out of locals to goad into crying for the camera, and had resorted to the old standard of “one branch of the media talks to another branch of the media about the locals”. In ...