No shrooms :/

Not THE most sucesfull mushroom hunt, from a mushroom-search perspective, but the morning was so pretty it took me 2 hours for a half hour drive, as I kept pulling over for Kodak moments :D #Kozjansko is beyond magical. I go into total Snufkin mode most times I see its glory: just sit down, smoke my pipe (well, okay, take photos), marvel at creation and feel tremendous gratitude for being alive. Maybe write a dirty poem. Optional. But certainly find the dog. Stupid dog. Stop picking fight with salamanders, you'll lose!

PS Aprile found two perfect chanterelles. Fuck mushrooms.

 

It

Was just in the right mood to go see a horror movie last night, then walked the outskirts of the town until midnight and finally crawled into G's car while he was at work and slept in their parking lot listening to freight trains pass and the southern wind push trash around while bright industry smokes billowed :D

Liked the movie. An actually good S. King adaptation, who would have thought. 

Retrish (retro-ish) seaside pickies ...

I've bought a set of actions and effects for Photoshop, which allow me to make a fuck-shiny endgame pickies, that seems to be what people like these days, and so I've been going wild in between playing WoW with G on his last vacation days ... It's raining outside, lovely, and I'm enjoying my September indoors :P

I had the weirdest dream that my skull was re-used... I mean, I was combing my hair and found a very old scar - large, bulging, with star shaped crack leading out, but healed - a typical result of a bulled wound healed up with makeshift tissue... But it would have to be shot from inside out, so, probably, someone shooting themselves into the brain through their mouth, but missing both lobes, going between and somehow surviving.... And then instead of giving me a brand new, my own skull, they incidentally mixed them up and gave me this used one ... Sometimes, rarely, but sometimes, an unprocessed camera film would end up in a new case and get re-sold, so then the double exposures would make people think they're photographing ghost images. that's how it felt. Weird as fuck.

The birthday cache

The final piece of my birthday puzzle arrived today, and these are now the latest contribution to my library
Kirsty Mitchell's Wonderland (fantasy portraits), Magnum Contact Sheets (a cross-section of a century of photo-reportage), Glory of Duchy of Carniole (a delicious accounts of a rich old guy pretending to be a historian), Tone Stojko's Slovenian Spring (photos he took during Slovenian war for independance) and a bi-lingual bookie of Shakespeare's sonnets. Thank you all my girls who contributed to this majesty treasure cache, to my crazy man and to the universe which has made me a bookworm extraordinaire ..

Summer vacation days, pt. 2

After the medieval fair, early Monday morning, knowing the weather will hold for the better part of the week, we set sail for the stony cape of Istra, Rt Kamenjak:

G wanted to go somewhere closer to Opatija, that's why we drove mostly as far from the seaside as possible, but after checking out several other camps and sites, finding each time something displeasing about it, he finally agreed to check out the bit that attracted me (cannot explain, just did) - the resort on the wide end of the peninsula. Though the camp was closed, we found an awesome post-season accommodation..

... And some day maybe we'll be able to afford nice buildings like the orange on in the back as well :D

We were both addicted to hamburgers by then (Thanks, Stari Pisker), so G had a classic and I had a chicken-wrapped-in-bacon diner. Then we moved into this cool place for a few days - a two-bedrom appartment lent to us for post-season price:

G took the smaller bedroom, because it had a bigger window, and I cotted on the couch, because I had the full view of the bay from it and I like waking up to the sound of great outdoors <3  (Plus the beds were too soft for me and would make my back ache.) 

Early next day we drove all the way down to the end of the world and found a secluded rocky platform to camp on and go swimming. Alas, we were soon joined by every other tourist who had the same idea. The current coming from the Bay of Koper down to the Adriatic pool was so strong you'd be washed out of the shore range in a minute if you didn't keep swimming back. That said, it was beautiful.

There was a little island very close by and a lighthouse a little further out, but, like I said, the current made it entirely impossible to reach either. As consolation, last night's storm brought in millions of the mnemiopse (Some call them sea walnuts, I call them sea onions). Nobody was sure what to make of them, so we all waited for someone to make the first move, jump in and try to swim through them. A Russian gentleman did so as we held our breath in case he starts screaming. But as it turns out these lazy little fuckers are entirely passive and alien though they may seem, they're mostly water in a kissing mood. So, after I photographed them oodles, we went snorkeling. 

Bored after a few hours, not really in a mood to read any of the half a dozen books I brought along, I offed to explore the cape, capturing the impenetrable vegetation (and I mean impenetrable - the Istrian flora is impossible to break through even by just a few inches) and the terran curious fauna.

The cape is a maze of footpaths, so I marked my forks to know my way back...

Plenty of wide cracks or endless holes in the ground - just that kind of terrain ...

Many curious rock gaps, some designed for diving in, some designed for jumping off... 

In the eve we drove home and had a 'plate for two' dinner of local BBQ and veggies... Yummmm..

And I offed out in the eve to photograph the sea ...