overflow

You probably know by now that Max and I also have 2 City Daily Photo Blogs (Port Elizabeth and St Francis). When we first joined, we thought the hardest committment would be that you have to do a post every single day. But as it turns out, that is not too bad. The hard part is that you are only supposed to post ONE photo a day. Now, for an over the top, larger than life person like me, this is excruciatingly difficult. I mean, I can't even tell you what my favourite colour is, because I am crazy about colour per se, I can get high on colour, I revel in rainbow colours and blends of colours, how could I possibly single out just one? Well the same applies to photographs.

I have always had the philosophy "why just take 1 photo when you can take 50!" And I also feel that in so many areas of life there is the diamond, and then there are the individual facets that make up the whole, and sometimes focussing on some of those tells a more interesting story. When I had my Photographic Exhibition several Years ago, I called it "Series" and it consisted of framed groups of photos, many of which were quite abstract, and made no sense alone, but when seen in a group with others, it made a Big Picture that showed the many aspects of the subject.

Well sometimes the Daily Photo subject has lots of photos that capture somthing different, but we can't stick with them one after the other, day after day, because we don't want the blog to get stale, especially if the subject is a current event. Occasionally (because I also, sadly, believe that many rules are made to be broken.... I wish I was joking but it is true, I really do!) we do stretch the rule and put a few on a post when it is necessary to explain what we are saying. But sometimes it is not justified really, so when that happens, I'll post the overflow here, with a link back to the City Daily Photo blog in question.

Today on PEDP we posted about the Shark Rock Pier, looking all festive for the Ironman Event.

Here are a few of the overflow pix......

The top two were taken on Saturday evening around sunset, and the bottom two at sunrise on Sunday, as the main event was starting.

Summer's here, let's find a Cool place to eat out....

One of the things I really enjoy is trying out new restaurants. I love eating out, experiencing the atmosphere, enjoying the view if there is one, and people-watching if there isn't. If there is music thrown in, that's a bonus. Primarily, I love not having to cook!


This has to be balanced against the fact that Mr Farty is a creature of habit, who likes the familiar and resists change. His first choice would be to stay at home, but if he does go out, he has a few favourite places where he knows what is on the menu and what he likes to order.


So we are very good at compromising.... and I must admit he is very good about indulging me and allowing me to drag him off reluctantly to some new place I have spotted. In return, I also allow myself to be dragged off to the old favourites.... or to stay at home and dredge the uninspired brain cells for new ways to make bunny food (bearing in mind that we are reformed characters since his heart attack!) hehe, no no, of course I'm exaggerating, we are both pretty flexible and easy going about this stuff!


Anyway, last week he had his heart set on a favourite salmon and avocado salad at a favourite restaurant on the beachfront (the Mediterranean, owned by a Portuguese guy who really knows how to cook fish, and believes in personal service!) As luck would have it (for me) there was a power failure (like THAT'S a surprise!!) and the Med was closed.

But nearby, beckoning us in was Coco de Mer, a new place I have been wanting to try out. (I mean who could resist this stylish black and white decor, washed with soft coloured lights?) It was open because they do everything with gas. So in we went, and had a delightful meal (he still got a Smoked salmon salad, I had grilled Cape Salmon with caramelised lemons...yum) As it turned out, the power returned 5 minutes after we ordered anyway, so we got to enjoy the coloured lighting after all.

It was so good, I took my friend Julie there for lunch the following day, and again had a great meal and superb service. I embarrassed the poor girl terribly by getting all excited about how stunning the lemon and ice looked in my glass, with the bubbles on the black straw, and insisting on taking photos!

What we also liked was the clearly separated cocktail lounge, and smoking and non-smoking dining areas. We have come across many other cocktail bar/restaurants in town which we would have loved, except that the smokers hanging around the bar alway polluted the whole place, and we hate going home stinking of stale cigarettes!

We were a bit early for the live music, but found out that they have a Blues Rock evening every Thursday which starts playing at about 9pm..... so we will definitely be back this week, if us old fogies can stay awake long enough to hear the first note!

transparency.....

As anyone who has been around this blog for a while will know, I am dotty about light reflecting through translucent things,
glass bottles, stained glass, leaves, just about anything colourful and transparent can look wonderful when magically glowing with light passing through it..
Window at the Port Elizabeth Main Library built in the late 1800s

Manmade stained glass has made a transition from traditional styles to wonderful contemporary ones.

But Nature has her own form of this translucency. As the Northern Hemisphere is cloaked in spectacular Autumn colours right now, we have our own leafy phenomenon going on here in the Southern Hemisphere.

Many of our indigenous trees have "autumn colours" in their new foliage as it emerges in spring. The upside of this is that, instead of being old hard solid looking leaves, they are young and tender and very translucent, so that as the strong African sun shines through them, they look like nature's stained glass.

Leopard tree in our garden

Gone fishin'

You know how your life sort of rolls along in neutral sometimes, one day follows the last, all pretty average, and then suddenly one comes along that is an unexpected gem?

Yesterday was like that. J finished work early, and we had arranged for K, J ,Ethan and I to go out to Seaview to visit I, C and little Amelia. The weather report had warned of pretty foul weather, and for a while the wind was a bit hectic, so we bundled our jackets into the boot (or trunk if you are American. To us here in S.A. a trunk is either a large box-like suicase, something that holds a tree up, or something that hangs usefully on the front of an elephant's face... but I digress...)

When we got there, it was surprisingly pleasant, so the girls and littlies went off to the beach to collect rounded pebbles, and Ian, J and I went off further down the coast to do some fishing.

When I was telling you about some of the Coastal Villages the other day, I stopped at Seaview. The next one along is a place called Beachview, which is similar, houses hugging the first dune overlooking the sea, facing south towards Antarctica. It is a wild rocky section of coastline, with little rock pools, and tiny stoney beaches. But if you carry on a little way past beachview, you arrive at the Maitland River Mouth, one of the most pristine beaches you will find, it is magic! It is not built up, so no village here, thank goodness, just miles of unspoiled beaches.

The Maitlands river flows into the sea here, so in one breathtaking spot, you can wade through the river, swim in the freshwater lagoon formed when the mouth is blocked by a sandbar, walk across miles of wide clean beaches, swim in the sea (not a great idea here, the riptides are fierce)fish or collect mussels from the rocks that start on the Beachview side and continue past Schoenmakerskop to the East, or slide down the huge dunes on one side of the river mouth. (if you follow the link, it takes you to a post done in May, when we stopped by on a day when the wind was HOWLING and I showed a few views of the sand sweeping off the dunes, with the river and lagoon in the foreground.) However, yesterday, we were on a mission to catch fish, so it was all business as we waded into the sea (surprisingly warm) and cast out.

yours truly

Jason

Ian

There were all kinds of fishermen on the beach, it seems the little ones with wings were way more successful than the big ones..

Some of us were more serious than others...

Max joined us there when he finished work, and wandered around taking pictures, including this one showing that I was only half concentrating on the fishing, because I was taking a big chance with my precious camera round my neck in the waves, snapping away at the beautiful scenery!

As we were packing up, Ian went to cast a final line, and a few minutes later called us to look. A cape clawless otter (usually very shy and nocturnal so seldom seen) was sneaking up the beach near him, on the lookout to score an easy meal from his supply of bait on the rocks! What a magic way to end the day!

In my previous "gotta love africa" post, I showed some of the wonderful inventive ways that people make the best of their circumstances here. Sheila commented "Imagine what they could accomplish with the proper resources..?".

She is so right, there is a level of creativity here that makes Heath Robinson look boring! You must admit this is really clever ...how to get hot water! Given the right conditions, I believe there is enormous potential here.

stop the hamster wheel, it's spinning out of control!!!

I have a ton of cool news and images to share with you, from recent travels and events, and life in general, but i just don't have 2 seconds to reduce the images for uploading, or put my thoughts together in any sort of coherent form! I'm preparing for a huge decor expo, and also getting ready to sell my art there for 4 days at the end of the month, and it is getting way too close way too fast! So please can I appeal to your patience, watch this space, I will be Back! in the meantime, here are a couple from the archives to whet your appetite!.....

A springbok taken at the Mountain Zebra Park near Cradock, last winter (we were insane enough to camp there, but it was so stunning and snuggling to keep warm in the tent had its compensations!) Will share that trip one of these days....along with twenty others i have already promised you...(do i hear you muttering Yeah Yeah, I'll believe it when i see it?)

Can't remember when or where, just love the light in this cloud!

ANOTHER trip you have to go on one day, to the semi desert of Namaqualand which bursts into stunning floral glory for a week or 2 each spring, on the way back we went via the western cape mountains.

And out comes the old soapbox…..

DebR was chatting about her disappointment in one of Stephen King’s books recently, and said her one rule is that there must at least be a glimmer of hope in the ending. I fully agree with this, it doesn’t have to be a mushy ‘happily ever after’ thing, but I hate ploughing through 400 odd pages, just to be left feeling flat at the end, as if the whole thing was pointless.

I just finished reading an old Wilbur Smith novel, written in 1991 (Elephant Song). It was one of Smith’s usual rollicking adventure stories, set predominantly in Africa, and dealing (with a great deal of perception and insight) with the issues particular to this tortured continent. I enjoyed that aspect of it.

His main character is a larger than life hero, there is also a heroine whose path happens to cross the hero’s at some point, and there is the usual selection of unremittingly horrible baddies. By the end of the book, he had tied up all his loose ends, hero and heroine were alive and in love, pristine country was saved from the ravages of greedy oppressors and exploiters, and all the baddies had met with particularly gruesome deaths.

The odd thing is that, despite all that, I felt I was left high and dry at the end. The worst of the baddies is killed by the hero, and after the lurid description, that is it, end of book, and I sat there reeling from the grossness of the final scene. I almost got the impression he got bored writing this book, and so, having tied up the final loose end, couldn’t wait to put down his pen (metaphorically speaking, it sounds better than “left his keyboard”!)

I was stewing about why I was left feeling this way, and concluded that it has to do with the following:

I have commented here in the past that I seldom enjoy books or movies with 2 dimensional characters, because we all have the capacity for both good and evil to some degree. What got me thinking with this book was that, while the baddies were uniformly evil with no discernable redeeming features, I personally found the so called hero of the piece almost as bad, because I just could not buy in to the motives for some of his actions.

All the nastiness committed came down to 2 things, greed and revenge. The greed of the baddies was, naturally portrayed as inexcusable, while the revenge undertaken by the hero was portrayed as somehow noble… ‘Don’t worry, Johnny, I will avenge your horrible murder’….. and off he went to commit some rather nasty murders himself.

Clouding the issue further was the whole justification that, while in peace time certain acts are not in any way acceptable, it seems that, as soon as a state of war exists (declared or undeclared) it suddenly becomes heroic to perform the same bestial acts in the name of patriotism.

I just can’t buy into this reasoning. I don’t think that sadistic or murderous acts, whether for the nation in a state of war, or for personal revenge, are any more acceptable than cold blooded murder.

The thing about revenge is, whilst it sounds all heroic and noble, it simply perpetuates the evil ad infinitum.….
…You don’t like what I stand for, I don’t like you OR what you stand for, you protest with the odd petrol bomb, I send in a unit or two of my armed forces, you smash a plane into my building, I invade your country, (And I hope I can fool the world into thinking that all this was purely based on “noble” revenge, because the fact is that you also have so much of a commodity I really need….) you kill a bunch of my soldiers, I publicly execute your leader, you……

And so it goes, round and round and bigger and bigger. So tell me, is “greed masquerading as revenge” any better as a motive for killing than Religious fervour or just plain bigotry and hatred? Bottom line, everyone who commits this kind of thing is just as culpable as anyone else. Evil is evil, however it is rationalised or dressed up.

I have done a lot of reading lately about the opening of this continent, the early explorers, the colonial era, the slave trade, the wars, genocides etc.
From the perspective of the explorers, those who lived here when they arrived were uncivilised barbarians, capable of unbelievable savagery. Then you start reading about the acts committed for ‘king and country’ while the lands were being colonised, and you have to notice that the veneer of civilisation on the part of the colonists was extremely thin. No matter how they rationalised it, they committed atrocities equal to any the ‘savages’ lived by. (They just had tea and cucumber sandwiches afterwards, and built a few roads and railways, which made it all so civilised, you see!!)

If violence and killing were made unacceptable, no matter what the motive, so much of the ugliness that takes place on this planet would evaporate.
I realise this is all wishful and pointless speculation, because there are so many vested interests in keeping the world in a state of war that it is never going to end. The theatre may move around and different surgeons may be involved, but the operations will continue!

The bottom line is that human beings are all, (yup you, me, the sweet old lady down the road) ALL capable of some degree of ugliness when provoked enough. I have been shocked at the inner rage and desire for revenge I have grappled with since having a few personal experiences with violent crime recently. I find myself wishing all sorts of nastiness on the perpetrators, and then thinking ‘who are you and what have you done with good old easy-going pacifist Sue?’ Even though my veneer of civilisation is thick enough to prevent me from acting on the thoughts, I have been shocked that they are even there at all!

I guess the best we can do, on a personal level, is to examine our motives and actions, and choose NOT to embark on any form of vengeance, no matter how tiny or petty (I don’t think any of us are likely to commit a revenge murder anytime soon, but even hurting someone with a few well chosen words is a form of revenge…) And we can refuse to condone it or applaud it as noble when the politicians try and sugar coat it and sell it to us.

OK, the soap box has been kicked back under the bed…

More Spring Tide madness...

look at the height of these waves above the main freeway leading into town! Glad we were on the other side of the road!

Daily Pix:

Bonus pics:

Even ugly old powerlines take on some magic when bathed in orange light.

I love sisal flowers...

OK, that’s it for today, Cheers

Sherlock Holmes strikes again!

It was a dark and stormy night… (well to be accurate it wasn’t stormy at all, …yet)

A certain lady, well known for her erratic sleep habits, was awake and pillow punching at 2am. Since she was in the beautiful Port St Francis, she decided to make good use of the time by taking some night shots over the water. At this stage it was so still that the lights left long reflections in the mirror-like water of the harbour
….like this. (the storm came later…but that is another story.)

While enjoying the cool night air, and playing with settings on the camera, our insomniac became aware of 4 shadowy figures behaving strangely at the entrance to the jetties. One after the other, they started climbing over the railing, and clinging to the side of the guard-house, they edged around to the path leading to the bridge which leads to the yacht jetties. Our enterprising observer immediately set up the tripod in that direction, and photographed the “breaking and entering” in progress.

When she saw the 4 hanging around the yachts, she toyed with the idea of phoning the police emergency number, but was still not sure that an actual crime was being committed, and not just a drunken prank. So she crept out, and went up to the top of the hotel, then out around the side to try and see the emergency phone number on the National Sea Rescue Building, next to the guard house.

Unfortunately there was no way to see it without standing in a place where the 4 intruders could see her. Having learned her lesson after the injuries inflicted the last time she accosted an intruder, (you can read about that here and here) she kept out of sight, and returned to her balcony to watch and see what they were up to.

Suddenly, the silence was broken by the chugging of a motor, and a boat came in from the sea, and headed towards the yacht that the intruders had climbed aboard. Aha, thought our watchful guardian of the law…. It must be a drug deal about to go down and this is the rendezvous. But the boat went past the yacht and the 2 people moored it and then walked right past the yacht, ignoring the others. They got to the security access gate, and found that it was locked, and the guard was not in the guard-house. They went back onto the bridge and whistled, and within a short time a security guard appeared around the corner and unlocked the gate for them.

Not wanting to miss the opportunity to report her obsevations to someone in authority, our intrepid sleuth scurried back upstairs and caught up with the guard as he was about to disappear around the corner again.
She explained what she had seen, and voiced her concern that perhaps the yacht was being broken into. The guard assured her that the 4 people she described were the owners of the yacht, and had already told him they would be sleeping onboard. They had told him they would be arriving very late, and had asked for his key. He had refused to part with it, so they had obviously decided that, in his absence, they would get in another way!

Our would-be crime buster slunk back to her room. Fortunately, since her husband slept through the whole thing, and no-one knows about it, she doesn’t have to admit to feeling rather foolish for her ridiculous paranoia (obviously brought on by watching too much TV and having too many recent brushes with criminals)!

The (previously mentioned) storm…..
During the whole paranoia incident, the wind rose steadily, from nothing at 2am to really howling and whistling by 4am.
In the morning, a walk to the harbour wall revealed that a huge fleet of chokka boats (read more about them here) was drawn up outside the harbour wall, obviously sheltering from the coming storm.
The waters of the bay were relatively calm, compared to the open seas beyond the point, which were extremely choppy.
During the downpour, the fleet assumed a ghostly appearance as they rode out the storm.
Later in the afternoon, the sun came out, and the wind dropped below gale force. The sea took on a lovely deep blue, and the bright colours of the boats gleamed.
and the cloud remnants looked wonderful with the sun going down behind them
Most of the boats stayed where they were during the night, with their powerful banks of lights blazing to attract the little squid. (These halogen lamps are each larger than a man’s head!)
At sunrise, they were just turning them off, but the sea had risen during the night, and yesterday’s peaceful bay was running a large and erratic swell.
As if to reward the sailors for their courage and patience in riding out the storm, the sunrise was spectacular.

The kids came out to join us for lunch, and we went round to the penguin rehabilitation centre. Needless to say the wee E adored the whole thing, all those boats and waves and penguins... so cool!
With the Equinox a couple of days away, the seas are already building up to some extreme spring tides. By late afternoon yesterday, the waves were pounding so hard right over the harbour wall that it was impossible to walk to the end without a serious drenching.
It is hard to give you an idea of the scale of these waves, but if you look at the top smooth section of the harbour wall, (click on the picture if you need to see it bigger) that is the height of the inside walkway, and the wall is so high that you cannot look over it without standing on a step 500mm high. So bear in mind that this is high tide, and there is still about 4 times the height of the smooth bit below that, showing above the waterline!

We finally returned to the car and very reluctantly managed to tear ourselves away and return home,

......the perfect ending to a perfect weekend.

A lovely surprise in the post!

Today 3 lovely ATC's arrived from Janet. Thanks so much, Janet, I love them. I don't have my camera with me today, so can't show them to you, but watch this space!

Daily photos: