Happy 10th Anniversary

Today M & I celebrate our 10th Wedding Anniversary

For those who do not know, M is on the left and I am on the right

Four Starlings…

A good few years ago M had gone back to Ireland for a month to see his parents and I had stayed at home.  One Saturday I decided to go to Liverpool to take photographs of architecture and general life.  Liverpool is a pool of things to see everywhere you turn.  So, lunch time came and I was walking south along Queens Dock and decided to go to McDonalds to eat.  Being a bright sunny day, the starlings were there waiting for people to drop food or feed them.  I had sat my camera on the table and was eating my fries.  More and more birds came over to see if I was feeding them.  I decided to break up the fries and gently throw them onto the next table where the birds were now gathering.  Seeing that they were all coming to the same spot I decided to turn my DSL camera to them and press the auto focus.  Again gently throwing fries to the table for them they all of a sudden arranged themselves in the position you can see from my photo, and I clicked the shutter and snapped this photo.  Needless to say, when I looked at the photo I decided to give them all the rest of the fries as I thought they had earned them.

I hope you like the result of my photo day.

Goodbye FaceBook…

I had grown tied of Facebook some time ago, but kept it open due to the dog training as they only communicated via that and posted the classes and so called homework on it.  So, as we no longer go to the training classes I decided to get rid of my account.  I joined 12 years ago, and at the time I thought it was a great thing, however, over the years I have grown tied of it and with the data handling and general BS all over it I decided, enough was enough.  Yesterday I dowloaded all 3558 photographs I had on it, and pressed the delete button, with no regrets.

Today I imported all the images into my iMac’s iPhoto, and it was nice seeing all the things I had done over the 12 years, and especially seeing photos of Lilu, from when she was young back in 2006 up to a few days before she passed away.  Some of the photos I did not remember, so made me smile, and others that are very close to my heart.  One of them I have added to this post from back in 2006.  I have far to many ones that I am fond of, but this is one of my all time favourite photographs, so I hope you like it too.

Letter Writing…

Well, my letter writing seems to be at a steady stream.  I have 5 penpals so far, a guy in France, and ladies in Germany, Bath, Finland & America.  I had written to a lady in Belgium but received the letter back saying that the address was incomplete, so messaged her as I had copied and pasted her address from her message.  Yesterday, I received a message asking if I would write to a guy in Russia, so what the hell, although I find writing the first letter always a little hard as I never know what to say or how far to go.  Do I just do a page intro and leave it at that or do I write something longer with no reals scope on discovery?  Getting a happy medium is quite the thing.  My penpal in Hamburg sticks to one sheet of A4 paper, both sides which work well, but I can be a chatterbox in the letter writing side, and when sending to my one in Bath manage usually 9 pages.

Postcards are coming thick and fast from Postcrossing, and with extras from my friend at Cupcakes & Canter, who was a great help with the penpals and quite an authority on the subject.

Now my mission is to get a penpal in Japan.  I learned to speak Japanese many many years ago and loved everything about the culture and the place, so thought I penpal there would be fun.  Maybe find one in New York as it is a place that I love to see on films and the TV, and maybe one in Australia or New Zealand. Oh, and Iceland too!

Andy Warhol Was Right…

Andy Warhol, who would have been 90 on Monday said: “Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” I quite agree with his sentiment, although I may have had more than 15 minutes. Many years ago, well, 9 years ago, we rescued a dog called Sky. She was locked in a bathroom with what may have been a brother surviving on only the toilet water. Their owner had ended up in the hospital and had died.  No one knew of the dogs in the hospital, and only due to a neighbour, the RSPCA were alerted.  We adopted Sky and the BBC asked if I would be in their program “Animal 24/7”, of course, I agreed to it and had lots of fun filming.  Sky had a lot of fun too.  It was really interesting watching how they make the programs and constantly repeating things from different angles in order to make it all look fluid.  Although we no longer have Sky, her photo sits in our hall of fame with all our other animals past and present.  Yes, that round ugly mug is me.