Ah, this season...

Home made doughnuts. Some mothers-in-law are the fabest :D

... fifteen hours later.

Safely home. Mission accomplished. Got about 1300 shots to sieve through, plenty to work with. Mental note - next time more sandwiches. And better maps. And an umbrella. It wouldn't have been a challenge without a pregnant nimbus overhead...

Minus seventeen and road-trippin' #2

Another big road trip tomorrow and although I don't expect it to be as super sunny as the other time, I just hope for the roads to lack frost'ing. It's about a seven hour drive, if we don't get lost anywhere along the way, and about a four hour field work. Sun rises at 7 and sets around 6... we'll see what we can see :)

 There and back again ... :)

On a related subject, I placed the first month (out of six) today. Few more days and the text will be ready for proof reading and then, fingers crossed, I'll ship it off to the editors and then we'll know whether these past months of research have been well done or entirely amiss.

D

Oh, and... to the boy with the white hair, gunmetal eyes and the-most-expensive-paper-like skin... To the man with the book-monger soul...

I really fucking missed you today. I know that I am the unforgiven, but today I really missed having a friend.

I am allowed one of such days every ten years, am I not, old times storyserf?

And Tamara... :)

These were never used, because the commissioners said they sucked donkey balls. Ah, well. I'm fairly certain Tamy liked them and she's who counts.

Some of the old pickies of Špela, from warmer days :)

Landscape photography

Lately I've been put in a position where I am supposed to take lots of landscape photies. Everyone knows landscape is not my forte. I am sucky at architecture shots and mediocre at sunsets. Best I can do is take good reportage portrait, but for that you need events with happy folk aplenty and lately I've been simply cheating on catching those.

So I am trying to decide what sort of landscape shots would I like to try and make.
...The really over-lit and kind of kitschy ones? (That I like.)

...The classical, B&W, excellent grayscale ones? (That I like.)

... Or, for obvious reasons, the infamous HDR... (Which the jury is still out on.) Not that I have anything against hysterically dramatic shots, but while they may look super on iPads, I am not so sure they would in print. Maybe. But if you ask me, too much hustle.

... So... Decisions, decisions :))

Skara Brae

Why reading informative books in better on iPad than on paper. 

Lately, living with the General, I have gotten into the habit of multi-reading. That's like multitasking, only while all the tasks regard reading. I am a sucker for Wikipedia and also Google Pictures, so when I come across things such as, say, Skara Brae, I urge to instantly learn everything about it – in mid-sentence. If I was reading from a book, I would have to abandon my position and go sit behind my comp to enter the search. On an iPad, all you have to do, is poke the word and first the definition and then a link or, two pokes and one swift away, there's Google with Wiki in tow. I can read and poke and swift without ever having to interrupt my train of thought. Author only needs to brush the subject, only mention how amazing something is (at times taking for granted the fact not everyone studied something and hence does not instantly remember who did what to whom in the middle ages in the far north) and I have any number of other people’s photos and travel blogs and archeology dissertations at my disposal.

Reading the latest Bryson (At Home), my favorite non-fiction author, I've come across a really fascinating thing I haven't really ever been told of before. Oddly enough, you wouldn't believe the stuff they taught us in school, or in the university, neither my friends’ classes or mine. Some of the really cool bits were skipped. Granted, not only is our world full of stuff, add history to it and you get a three-dimensional mess you can never untangle, but it took me ten years *after* I left school to ever hear of Picts, Marcomanni or the Suebi. And just yesterday was the first time I ever heard of Skara Brae – which struck me as, archeologically, Neolithically, European, the cutest thing ever.

Orkney itself is a fascinating land, even for a non-historian. Even just geographically. I knew a girl who travelled it, and she brought back stories aplenty. Weather wise, I suppose, it would be tricky. Even in summer. I traveled Norway in summer and it was – on the plus side – always day – and on the minus side, always late autumn. Foggy, drizzly, rainy, windy, moody climate. Hitchhiking it would be predominantly moist. But I certainly wouldn’t mind trying. I have slept I far less fascinating archeological locations than this temporal anomaly.

Cause, just in case you’ve missed it – to me archeology is the one that got away. My life probably wouldn’t be any different if I had finished studying it, but just like literature, I rather abandoned that program and forever kept it at an arm’s reach, a mystery, a mistress, than to end up being a boring curator in one of the dumb local establishments. Archeology – and all that comes with it – anthropology, history, art, crafts, ethnology, restoration, entomology… is like the second best thing. It’s like chocolate to pancakes. I love both and could probably live off each, though preferably pancakes, but both together make for a perfect meal. I don’t think I will ever get enough of this.

And the best part is, archeology is an hourglass: so many things have happened that we know so little about and are yet to uncover so much. :D

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skara_Brae