Joe here shows his opinion of gardening, refusing to be impressed even by the relatively substantial leek harvest (these have been in the ground at least a year). Only the promise of a picnic got him up to the garden in the first place, despite the decent weather — but here it is still 10 minutes away.
Clare and Joe’s last full day in Australia before the end of their break here, so let’s feature them on today’s picture. Taken with the old Fujifilm camera with which I took the first 366 photos on this blog: it still takes a decent shot but the zoom is half-dead so I do need to repair the other one.
Clare’s, to be exact: imprinted on the sand of Home Beach, North Stradbroke Island.
Joe, doing his cool dude act, as we have a drink after seeing a show at the Opera House (Frankenstein: a brilliant version). Mind you, whoever thought that the bland apartment blocks of Opera Quays would benefit the classic view of Sydney harbour from this point is an idiotic philistine of gargantuan proportions. Doubtless that gives him a role to play in the urban planning department of many a municipality around the world.
This is a tree that grows in the Botanic Gardens, and was planted in the 1870s. It is a marvellous tree, which sends creepers down from its branches to seek more sustenance, these eventually growing into substantial new trunks from the top down. The biggest banyan tree in the world is in India, and covers more than 1.5 hectares, with more than 1,000 distinct trunks. This one isn’t anywhere near as big but if you ask me is still the coolest tree in Brisbane.
And, oh yeah, the family turned up this morning… for three weeks 🙂
Light Render is an art installation by Caitlin Franzmann, currently on display at the QUT Art Museum. According to the blurb for this exhibit, in which a video camera is pointed at a mirrored cube and the image displayed on the wall behind, the point is to allow visitors to the gallery to insert themselves into the art work in various ways by interposing themselves into the camera’s line of sight and/or the feed itself. So that is what I have done here – the two man-shaped shadows you see here are both me.
And seeing as this blog is my own ‘work of art’, an extended record of my life, here Ms Franzmann’s work of art inserts itself into my own work of art and everyone’s work of art becomes a small part of everyone else’s…. in some giant recursion. Or something like that.
A 2-day journey through the global lymphatic system that is the air travel network, largely on night flights, is never going to produce great photography, so here’s my attempt to encapsulate this day of pure transit: me trying to keep myself busy in the good-value transit lounge in Changi airport. It gets another country onto the blog – Singapore – but in the most mundane way. Australia tomorrow…
Instead of more of that snow crap, here’s a more personal view on current events. Clare here helps me focus the definitive pic of the completed tattoo, first prefigured way back on 3rd September, and subsequently completed in five sessions, of an average of four hours each, of various degrees of pain (the most recent one, on Friday evening, being a shading session of exquisite agony).
Some people have said – ‘but you don’t get to see it!’. The thing is, I do. As much as I see my face incognito, at least. But I know what I look like, I don’t need to see it every day to remind me, and I think I look just fine.
This is turning out to be a rather different weekend from last weekend… and it’ll be rather different next weekend as well. In the meantime, here is Joe out gathering material for a missile. Plenty of opportunities to take cliched snow shots of picturesque old Hebden Bridge today, but I was trying to avoid that.
As verified by the Guinness World Records people, the world’s biggest working pencil is 26 feet or 7.9 meters long, and weighs 984 pounds or 446.3kg. It lies suspended from the ceiling of the Cumberland Pencil Museum in Keswick, above Joe’s head as he rests after the exertions and celebrations of yesterday.
Tomorrow it’s day 500 of this daily photo blog – quite a milestone. To celebrate I will add some more photos to the Best of the Rest page, and also update the Stats page.
Being 42 