We’ve had cloud cover for a week now, which might be not the best light for photographs, but I’m trying to get the hang of consistent adding, anyway. So I played around with staged-in-my-room photos, too.
In case you didn’t know yet, I like insects, spiders and the like. So, bit of a themed post.
A short video I captured of an ant dragging a rather hefty lunch home:
Bits of my stuff:
Links:
Moths Use Sonar-Jamming Defense to Fend Off Hunting Bats
Dancing caterpillars put off predators (cute photo, found via neatorama)
a bug sculptures photoset on flickr
Origami arthropods found on deviantart, different creators:
That artist of the last one has a lot of other great models in his gallery, only with the thumbnail links disabled.
Well, what with cold and otherwise induced brainfog, this was a dead month, blogging-wise. Let’s start the next one off, then.
I’m way more proud than I should be about finishing the Zodiac Chickens series. If you want to see all on one view, try the “Zodiac” tag.
Insect Photos:
Stag beetles are supposedly very rare, yet we keep finding them in our garden. I think it’s because our family tends to leave treestumps in the earth; the beetles’ larvae feed on rotting wood.
Flowers and other Nature stuff:
And some old-ish buildings:
Last Monday was the last day of a two-weeks-straight frost spell, and I had a look around outside.
Frost itself can be stupendously pretty when you get up close:
Those were taken at the edges of the university parking lot. Since that one is pretty close to the Moselle, and since I’d heard that this not unimportant water-street had been closed for ships due to ice, I went and had a look. I stuck around for a short while, and saw an icebreaker pass through to push the floes around.
I can hardly believe it. Never seen anything like that before. Just for comparison I took some photos the day before yesterday, and yesterday as well:
And I got lucky in another way. I not only saw a kingfisher, but I even caught a photo! 
The photo’s not good, but here it is, anyway
On the way home I decided to have a look at the Wied, a small river – I don’t think anything bigger than a kayak goes there.
Excluding a few spots, it was frozen solid. Two people were ice skating – ON THE RIVER, I TELL YOU! I’ve never seen a river completely frozen before. And, well, while I don’t even have ice skates, I did take a walk. It did turn out a nice day for birdspotting here, too.
Around the edges I found some more wonderful ice and frost structures. I couldn’t really capture any properly… They were so amazing. You could see the water had been higher when the first layer of ice formed, then ther was another layer underneath that formed with lower water, and the structures that formed between, and the air bubbles, and the light, and the frost growing on the edges. Breathtakingly beautiful.
Nature is fucking amazing.
I thought some people might find this amusing. It’s a photo of a section of a road map at a bus stop in Neuwied.
Block is a village between Neuwied and Engers, the next town upriver on the Rhine. I have no idea why the street is named “Im Tardis”. (“Im” means “in the”, in the masculine or neuter form. However, the TARDIS is grammatically female in the German version, which would require “in der Tardis”.)
On Monday Don Rosa, creator of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck and other stuff, visited the local comic shop for a long singing/sketching session, and I was there, too.
The photo on the left shows him working on a sketch of young Scrooge McDuck, based on the “The Cowboy Captain of the Cutty Sark” story.
Below is the more finished version.
This is the sketch I got for myself. Not one of the more famous characters, I guess.
Hortense McDuck is Donald’s mother. He apparently got the temper from both sides.
Any character who cusses out the president of the USA and tells him “Don’t even speak to me until you grant women the right to vote” and punches him in the gut when he refuses her help with something because it’s “men’s work” is OK by me.
I uploaded a small bunch of photos. Some are already in my deviantart gallery, most are on my picasa account, but there are a few new ones, too.
…for my father’s cousin’s birthday.
My uncle and aunt picked me up on Friday afternoon, and we drove to the cute little airport Frankfurt-Hahn, from where we flew to Bratislava with a Frenchman in a chicken suit who flapped a lot.
OK, we flew with a Ryanair 737-800, and the guy in the chicken suit was one of the other passengers, but he talked a lot.
This was the first flight in my life, and I was lucky enough to grab a window seat (discount airline, no seat reservations). Just after takeoff, the clouds were beautiful. They were sort of scattered over the airport, so while the plane was gaining height, I could see the same cloud from different angles, actually see the shape… beautiful. A short time before landing we saw fireworks, too. XD
Drove to Eisenstadt with a rented car, and met up with the host in a bar, from where my uncle and aunt went to their pension, and I went to my quarters. There was a presently not rented out flat in the same house the host lives in which I shared with a friend of his, a woman from Berlin with whom I had a few nice chats. So I got a room of my own, with a bedsofa, and it was even facing to the back to a garden, not the street. I still woke up earlier than I’d have liked because I’m light sensitive like that.
On Saturday the family took a stroll through Eisenstadt, which had some nice old buildings and a very nice park. In the afternoon I took a nap, expecting things to take a long while in the evening, and, well, they did.
The supper/party was at a Heuriger, and pretty rustic. People other than me drank wine, some of them a lot, and there was a lot of chatting which was fun. One really good idea was that there was a long break between supper and “dessert” – very, very good cake – and then again a break before freshly baked salt sticks and cheese. The host and his girlfriend proclaimed their betrothal, and if everybody else was serious, I was the only one who wasn’t surprised.
On Sunday more or less everyone slept in, and the family met up for lunch. Afterwards the host and his girlfriend were kind enough to show me two of the nearby towns.
Rust has a very pretty old town centre, but I didn’t take enough time for photos. *sigh* well, one decent one:
In the late afternoon it was back to Bratislava airport for my uncle, aunt and me. We got lost and had trouble finding a petrol station, but had enough buffer time.
The Frenchman in the chicken suit was back again, and somewhat more quiet. I’ve heard France lost a football match against Austria, which would explain both his appearance and his not-so-chipper-anymore mood.
We had to wait out a short thunderstorm on the runway, which was a bit frustrating because the light belonging to my seat didn’t work, so I couldn’t read.
But over all I think flying is fun. Rollercoasters are more fun, but flying from point A to point B is more useful.
Back in Germany we had some trouble finding the car and the way back, it but worked out in the end, the end being me going to bed at something around 1 am. On Monday I was wiped out, but I think by now I’m back to normal.
I should do stuff like that, but with more sightseeing, more often. And the woman who shared the flat with me said if I ever wanted to visit Berlin, I could sleep on her couch, if I asked early enough. hmmm…
All right, so I’m a bit slow. Last Friday I went to the Historienfestspiele (history festival) at Ehrenbreitstein. The old castle was a great setting for such an event. It’s sort of stretched out at the top of a mountain or hill or rock, and has several yards. It was quite a surprise thinking I’d seen most, and then coming across a Roman military camp again as big as the market I’d seen already. XD
The whole thing started on Thursday, a holiday, and ended on Sunday, but on the other days I had to help prepare my grandfather’s ninetieth birthday. Since the workday-Friday had no presentations or shows planned at all, it was quite slow, which wasn’t the worst for me, since it meant no huge crowds.
So what was left? Market stalls and a few people in costumes, and the decorated tents, mostly, but sometimes you get lucky.
The knights who on the other days did showfights were there, and talked to people about their gear, including handing around swords, helmets and a chainmail shirt so you could tell how heavy it was. At some point when I was there, along with a gaggle of (other) small kids, two of them spontaneously did a short fight. So, Central Europeans duel…
…Huns loon on…
…Romans are on holiday…
…and Vikings test out the baseball bat.
The Roman camp, as mentioned, was pretty big; I didn’t count, but estimate about thirty tents. The fact that you could only walk past, not between them, and that there was a VW Passat parked in the middle somewhat ruined the effect, though.
I forgot going back to the Prussian camp (just half a dozen tents, and smaller, at that) and take a photo. Oh, well, maybe next year. Apart from one man watching the stalls, the Celts were not to be found.
As to the commercialism, A silversmith had a decoration that worked on me…
…an honest-to-god ratfur. Conversational piece, that. I asked about it, joined in a chat a bit later about how business was going, and ended up buying a precious stone doughnut disc – that’s the first piece of jewellery I bought in ten years or so.
I also had a chat with someone helping to run a stall that sold glass pens and leather masks, and, since I had found instructions for making leather masks online and had wanted to try that, asked about the kind of leather used. Bad news, it’s so hard to get they have to order it internationally, but at least now I know.
Later I talked to a bowmaker, because I’d be interested in learning, but would prefer to find some people interested in the shooting side of things, and not with modern sports bows, too – building a range in my garden just for me is both boring and not really possible.mh, the yard might work, if the neighbours would park their car inside…
The stalls were pretty mixed, from “handcrafted leather works while you wait” through “mass-produced ‘magical’ amulets” to “sand-filled toy lizards you can buy in any toy shop and tie-dyed clothes in psychedelic colours” – the latter seemed quite out of place between the leather and whatnot.
Anyway, all in all, I’m glad I went, even if I got my first (not very bad) sunburn in years, on the back of my upper arms.
