Guitar Girl

Tickets have been booked and I'm off to Genova in February.  I cannot begin to tell you how good it feels to have the promise of wandering back in my life.  It's time ... more than time.

Miss 9 and I have begun reading a new book series together.  It's delightfully creepy.  And I have 'Italian for Dummies' here on my desk.  Now to open it and begin serious work.

I have been struggling to fulfil my daily foto commitment.  And I'm intrigued because I see it's so much about my inability to give myself too much time off.   And the battle is there in the fact that I can't 'snapshot' this commitment.  I climb into photography, working my way towards the right angle perhaps, seeking out the right light. I have to be prepared to do ... just do the photography for an hour each day.  It's an interesting battle.

And emails ...   I've been caught up in a few email exchanges that make me stop to take notes.  And I'm printing out interesting blog posts and articles, sticking them into my journal. 

My super-talented niece called Katie sent me an email containing the static digital image she made at school and it's stunning.  I must ask permission to blog it.  Katie's the one in the foreground.

So, I did a 'girl and her guitar' series for the foto-a-day shoot today.  I was using my 17-40mm lens on the Canon EOS 5D MkII and I was all but climbing onto the couch as I took the image you find at the end here.  I think, in future, I might just stick with my 70-200mm lens.  I love that lens.  It's my way of seeing ... and being. Potentially my photography subjects may appreciate a bit of distance too.

Midnight in Antwerp, on New Year's Eve

It just went crazy here at midnight, in that Belgian city where fireworks are illegal on New Year's Eve.  Just before midnight it sounded like a warzone.  19 minutes later and there are still explosions but it's no longer the ENTIRE city anymore.

Kids on the streets, neighbours too, some rain, and cloud cover.  Weather Underground tells me it's 7 celsius as I write this.

And so it is, 12 hours after New Zealand crossed over into 2014, we've arrived too.  Happy new year to you.  I'm posting a shot taken in New Zealand around this time last year.  The tree with the red flowers ... the NZ Christmas tree.  The Pohutakawa.  Cooks Beach.

Note: In Belgium, in general, it's only illegal if you're caught ... or that's what the locals tell me.

A Little Bit of Happy

We left New Zealand, a 1am Singapore Airlines flight, on this day a year ago today.

The days leading up to leaving were full of the things I love best.  Solitary early morning walks, the beach, good people, and sunshine at Christmas.

The clothes- line pictured is loaded down with swimsuits after a swim in the river at Cooks Beach.  And the little hut at the end reminds me of the much-hated longdrop toilets that occasionally featured in my  childhood memories.  This was was decommissioned and could therefore be  defined as picturesque.

It's a blue-sky 5.2 celsius day in Antwerp as I write this.  It reads colder than it feels.  I have the bedroom window open and we've already been out for a short walk.  Coats and scarves were involved but we still haven't even had many serious frosts.  There was blossom out there.  And there was that one evening of snow that didn't settle a while ago.

Gert was cautioning me, explaining that the Belgian winter kicks in in January and February.  Last winter was simply brutal and long.  December through into June, more or less.

Anyway, from the backyard of a New Zealand crib (South Island) or bach (North Island), holiday home (rest of the world) ... a little bit of simply happy.