Lawn Status Update

Following a few weeks of growth, and then a few hours of hard work this morning, I am pleased to announce that the lawn status here at Chez 6000 has officially been downgraded from

Oh Christ, we’ve lost the bloody beagle again, to
Could probably do with a cut.

I’m not sure why we chose kikuyu grass for the lawn. It grows like a weed if it’s looked after (i.e. watered) (ours was), but it dies like a dead thing if subjected to partial shade or minor drought. The buffalo on the other lawn (firstly, in this context buffalo is a kind of grass, not a huge mammal (the presence of which would surely negate any mowing anyway (or at least make it far too dangerous to cut the grass)), and secondly, I’m making my garden sounds much, much bigger than it actually is), but anyway, the buffalo on the other lawn is robust and took almost 30 seconds to mow.

Yes, I now realise that the kikuyu was a mistake.
I predict some rebuffalisation in 2015.

Detectorists

I watched the six episodes of this first series of everyday Essex metal detector(ist)s, on the plane and I loved every minute of it.
The very real, very believable, sad lives of English middle-aged men, together with the bewilderingly tall tales of a true British comedy. There’s human drama and hidden subplots alongside the constant laughs as well.
Mackenzie Crook wrote and directed and stars, but Toby Jones as Lance is the one who really makes it all so perfect.

Oh, and then there’s the music. No wifi on board on this flight, but we need to do some investigation on Johnny Flynn and Dan Michaelson.

Consider me entertained.

P.S. If you’re reading this, I’ve landed safely.  🙂

Winter Landscape Photography Tips

Yes, I’m aware that it’s not winter in South Africa, but it’s very wintery here and if you are here, you might need to take some landscape pictures to record just how wintery it is right now. Fortunately, 500px has all the hints and tips you need to to take the perfect winter lanscape photograph. Unfortunately, much like their previous tutorials, it does seem to be advantageous to live in Scandinavia as a starting point. This effort of the Lofoten Islands by Stian Klo refers:

2048

Sadly, we’re fresh out of fjords here right now.
Still, while out on the hunt for snow this morning in the hills above Sheffield, I did get this, which I quite like:

It would probably look even better if I hadn’t just juxtaposed it with the best example of a professional landscape photographer’s winter landscape photography like I just did. Honest.

But it was bleak up there at Redmires this morning, so there wasn’t much opportunity to get much else as the wet, cold, near-horizontally blown snow closed in and chilled the kids towards an ugly and early hypothermic death. They’re not used to those sort of temperatures and I have to admit that I was struggling to hold the camera (or anything else) in the face of the icy blast. It wasn’t even nice snow – it was wet and heavy – but that didn’t bother them. They’ve never seen anything like it before and it was fascinating to watch their reactions.

As for my winter landscape photography, it’s back to the drawing board – and the holiday home in Norway – for me.
(Although in the meantime, I continue to update this Flickr set.)

Anecdotal evidence

This has no scientific evidence to back it up, hence the title. Although some people just trot out these things and pretend they’re gospel.

Not me. I have nothing more than my undocumented observations and general gut feeling on these.

  1. Egyptian Geese are taking over Cape Town. Also, Sacred Ibises (Ibii?) are on the increase, while the drab, but lovable Hadeda is getting harder to find. And hear.
  2. Sticking with the nature thing, there are fewer Christmas Beetles around every year.
  3. Cars: Audi is the new BMW when it comes to driving like a cock.
  4. And CF is the new CY when it comes to someone being 5cm from your back bumper on the N2. (Although CY drivers are still uniformly stupid foolish* and dangerous.)
  5. There’s traffic on the roads in Cape Town all day now, too. I witnessed this change in Sheffield as well. You can’t get anywhere quickly by car any more, at any time.
  6. But still, never use Main Road to go anywhere if you don’t have to. It’s always slower than any given alternative.

It strikes me that the above post makes me sound like a grumpy old man, but I’m only ever two of those things at any given time. And I’m not actually complaining about any of these things, I’m merely documenting them.

How else is Cape Town changing? What differences have you noticed (but have absolutely no evidence for)?

 

* revised my adjective at the request of @anib, an unashamed CY driver.

Holiday Snaps

Not mine, you’ll be pleased to hear. No. These are from the Rosetta holiday mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about these photos, save for the fact that they were ever even taken at all.

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You can surf through a couple of hundred pics, all the while marvelling that you’re looking at images taken on a piece of space rock moving at thousands of kilometres an hour, some half a billion kilometres from Earth.

It’s all rather humbling.