I'll retreat

"I'll retreat to my corner
when you get back in yours,

I'll retract all my statements
when you retract your claws,

But darling,
I don't,
wanna lose you.
Not tonight.

No, not tonight."

- "I don't want to lose you tonight", The Devastations, 2007

Yuri et. al.

Pocket Symphony

AIR didn't go with my idea after all, but they definitely produced another masterpiece.

Still an enormous fan...

With card output!

Just back from 10 days in Berlin.


There is this weighing scale in the subway station near where I was staying. It's probably been there since before the war...


A fine piece of German engineering!

You stand on it, and stick a 10 cent coin in. Suddenly everything starts spinning and moving and shaking and rattling, producing a whirling, buzzing, mechanical sound, for about 10 seconds.

Then everything stops, and it spits out at you a little white piece of paper with the date and your weight minimalistically printed on it.



I just couldn't get enough of it...


PS. Please subtract 6Kg for my boots and raincoat and all the rest of my clothing.

complications

Last week, I met with a lawyer. Things were serious. I got some advice and I was satisfied. For a minute. Just long enough to realize the advice I was really in need of wasn’t of a legal nature. Then I met with a doctor. Turns out, it’s not advice I need at all, it’s surgery.

Emil

I came across some old pictures the other day, while sorting through some folders full of university lecture notes (which I ended up throwing all away). Most of them were family pictures spanning around 35 years, the kind that mean so much to you, but when you show them to someone else their reaction is likely to be a fake-polite "ah, that's cute...". (Or sometimes nothing).

Anyway, among those, there were some pictures of Emil the Sterling. I found him and his sibling in a sailing club I used to frequent (and race some J's). I took them to my place (well, it was not really mine, I had a German flatmate, but he deserves at least one entire post of his own, if not more), but the other guy didn't make it through the first night, so I was left with Emil in my care.



I used an old cardboard box to make his new nest, two lamps to provide heat, and I would come back from my lab every 3 hours to give him water and feed him.

After 3 weeks I decided that he needed more professional care, so I took him to the Chesapeake Wildlife Sanctuary, where they told me that apart from some dehydration (ok, you try making a 3 week old bird drink enough water, and then tell me about it), he was just fine.

Parting with Emil was a lot harder than I expected. Embarrassingly so.

About a month later I received a "certificate" from the sanctuary, telling me the date and location where they released Emil back to the wild. I remember feeling a lot more proud than I really deserved to.

Sparks

Perfume, Hello Young Lovers, 2006(?).

How cool is this... Disturbingly cool.

No ridicule here!

I was watching that great TV show Top Gear the other day (first time I switched on the TV in months, I swear), and they had invited a certain Justin Hawkins, former lead-man of The Darkness to participate in their Celebrity Laps thing.

I had never heard of either Justin or The Darkness, but they played a little bit of one of his videos, which I thought was quite cool (in a post-glitter-glam-hard-rock sort of way...):



A couple of google searches later I found out this guy is most likely to participate in that ridiculous Eurovision song contest thing for England, and as I was about to completely loose respect, I read this statement of his:

"I don't anticipate gleaning any respect or anything. What on earth could I possibly hope to achieve by being the object of ridicule for millions of people? Everything I do is almost trying to hammer home the point that I don't care."

So he's on our blog, falsetto and all!

Mom's back

(again)

if she was drugged

If she was drugged
or relieved and the baby whisked away, still
she gave this child every intricate bone of her feet,
the hollow vertebrae, tiny liver,
lungs that fill with air for the first time
and begin, without a lesson,
bringing this world in and releasing it.

From “The Human Line,” by Ellen Bass


The buka is rolling, falling, almost crawling. And so is her mother.

From the garden

Exactly one year ago, almost to the day, the relatives of this little guy showed their face in the garden.

Same dedication.

P in a box

Falafel

[Market in Lebanon - not my photo]

I wish I had one now...

letter to the editor

Dear Steph,

Thanks for February. We did it, didn’t we? We updated every single day. It wasn’t an original idea (the blog convention is to update daily in November), but I had my reasons for proposing it. Whether it was my turn to post or yours, every day I had sth to look forward to, a communication between us and whoever else wanted to share it. February is the kind of month that can pass quickly, without much to notice or remember, just one rainy day after the other. This time, I felt an obligation to take notes, to pay attention to detail, to be conscious of what was happening, and to make sure I had sth to say, even if I didn’t end up saying it on the blog. I’m glad that happened.

We ended up with some fluff, but also some really great posts (your tennis post is one of my all-time favs) that might not have happened if we hadn’t been pushing ourselves. I’m not saying that all the cute stuff is fluff; it’s part of our lives like anything else. As my friend LJ used to say, nothing is wasted. A little joie de vivre to offset the rain is never a bad thing.

So here’s to March, and whatever comes next.

Yours,
Sissy