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Final Leg-shot

I thought we needed closure on the leg - so here it is, all healed up, and looking good.  I think it's quite sensitive still, though with Aiden it's hard to tell - draaaama queen that he is. 

Liz and Pete's

Liz and Pete have moved back to HK from London - and have a really cool house on the water in Lobster Bay - the other side of Sheung Sze Wan.  They invited us around for a Sunday arvie drink and a boerie roll - whatever that is in English (tasty).

Nice to have a pool, with a glass front, right on the water...Ev doesn't waste those opportunities (this child always manages to look slightly disheveled - how's the swimming costume?).  He put in a good chunk of time in the water, enough to build up a bit of a great white shark hunger, three hotdogs paid the price, in quick succession, when he eventually got out.  No rocking tonight, and definitely his mother's child in terms of metabolism.

Aiden's leg is pretty much tip top now - had the stitches out last week, I should have taken a pic to finish off the implicit leg series - tomorrow perhaps.  He gave the pool a skip in favour of  bat and ball - Daisy was fully involved, of course; added incentive to keep the rally going.

Brett and Carry - I know I say it a million times - but I do just love these people to the absolute max (and like the tree silhouette in the background too).

Ange kicking back - in a really good space she is after a nasty couple of weeks (work, leg, school stuff, sorting stuff out with her bathroom fittings distribution business plans).

School holidays here = small packs of teenagers; offsets all us increasingly aging old farts quite nicely.

Kaching kaching - all maths bling

Aiden had to do a grouping grid for his maths homework - it was like pulling teeth.  Eventually he got it together to do an ultra-slacker's job.  Not good enough I'm afraid.  Then I had a brainwave of bribery + tidying up + undesirable job + homework task - so I agreed to give him this absolute sack of shrapnel that I'd collected over the years, if he agreed to group it and count it.  So we used masking tape to set up a grid on the dining room table...and the rest was straightforward cash incentive - very Hong Kong - and from an educators perspective, very much not intrinsic motivation, sadly.  But I'm also one for the short term victory.  It was quite a job he did, with a bit of help; $320 was the haul; more lego coming I suspect.  I look forward to watching how much they love him at the till.

A little discomfort of my own

Realising that this is very lightweight compared to your brother's suffering - some discomfort of my own acquired at the yacht race - this rather insignificant little bruise -but man it is seriously uncomfortable to walk on - some types of shoes (running shoes for eg) are just unwearable.  It was thanks to one of those yacht things that you tie a rope around, mmmm, some bad language I confess.  Nice grubby foot too :-)

 

24 Hour Race - Black Shrimp (and bounce flash) in Action

Ange looking pirate.  These are all done with my new flash contraption - I think it is beyond cool - especially in the early evening shots below when it was more than just fill

Debbie - pretty much in charge - as you can see in the background, lovely day, lots of people out watching

Tracy and Simon - lurking in our area on the jetty

Roy and Ange - Roy's one of the better sailors in our team - which didn't save Ange from a swim when sailing with him last time (that's the thing about good sailors - they want to go fast - going fast means possibly flipping).  So she gave him a cuddle, but sailed with your pedantic parent.

Pete Brien - pure class human - he knows you - though you've yet to meet

As usual, plenty of advice freely offered by people on the jetty - festive atmosphere which is really nice

Rory Overton - I really like this pic - got the light just right

One of our two boats, not exactly burning past, but moving purposefully

Also liked this one of Tracy - nice light - people chilling on the jetty

Aiden looking a bit bleary eyed early on Sunday morning - peeking through gun-slits in fact

Took this one for Terry - his daughter Olivia in the red jacket, setting out for a session as a crew member in one of the Royal HK Yacht Club boats.

My favourite pic in years

I took this somewhere near Swellendam while back, and just love it - I think the detail in the foreground really moves me, if you click on it to make it bigger, and look carefully, you will see telephone poles - which give some idea of scale.  The colour version is somewhere else, earlier, on your blog.  I made this black and white for printing and I think it came out better than the colour one.  Just love it.

This is not remotely a comparison (if you go and have a look you will see why...), but I really really like the big Ansell Adams landscapes - medium format camera, ultra-detailed, impossibly fantastic - he was the prophet of landscape - google him some time - just the very final arrival point - yet in the past.

Friday night Leg(o) with Ev

It's been Aiden, Aiden Aiden, leg leg leg (it's well on the mend, btw) - after work tonight - Friday - sailing weekend ahead - Ev wanted a pic with his Lego, the backdrop was still out for some portraits that I did with Jackie and Mark - lovely child that he is.

Could not get the blog to post off our home pc - too weird and frustrating.  Read a thread on one of the Blogger forums (should be fora - sorry) which suggested going at it through Firefox rather than I.E. - the proof will be at the end - but so far it seems to be working.  Go Firefox, I will be a convert.  Hope you have a lovely weekend - will try you on the phone tomorrow / Sun.

A Leg-up (date)

Yesterday, above (looked really dodgy I thought - so went back to the doc today) which leaves us with tonight, below.  Definite improvement.

Jacques

These are unchronological, being from SA - but he's a diamond in my life - so I really like them. From a personal perspective, the second one, somewhere in the Knysna forest, is apt for it's halo.

 

Sunday morning with the patient

A great night last night - I thoroughly enjoyed the drugby - hope you watched - all sorts of reasons to feel pleased about the performance.  I tried the flash thingy inside today, it's definitely better outside (in the sense that the light bounces around the room anyway). 

But it was a happy breakfast with the patient, who was cheered even further by the arrival of his mate Jules who came to hang out - much appreciated. His mate Liam from down the parking lot made him a card - how cool? Are kids getting nicer?

 

Portraits with the new home-made thingy

The light is really really nice I think - especially given how simple and mobile the thing is (unless of course the wind is blowing - in which case I would imagine it to be unuseable; here is Dana above, and Jordan below

We went to Tracy and Simon's last night for dinner.  Courtney and Simon are off to New York today - superexciting for Courtney.  She's done really well, and has just been made a prefect (I think they have a different name for this, but this is the word that I understand) at the Aussie International School for next year - which is fitting - because she is a great human being.  The heavenly Brett and Carrie were there for dinner too - I think the Free's are one of the nicest possible families:

Courtney and Allie

And finally Jordan again with Daisy (a labradoodle - very cool dog I must say - cause of some considerable envy in the case of Evan and Aiden.

 

A new flash contraption

When I remember that perhaps I should do something other than work - and I mean that more mentally than anything else - I've really slid into this one-dimensional work-think-and-do only mindset - UNHEALTHY AND BORING - I occasionally diversify by reading a blog that Jens showed me called Strobist - which is an off - camera flash specialist lighting blog.  I like it particularly because it's full of stuff that you can do and make yourself.  Recently I saw a feature on it for a think called a bouncewall - which looks like this:

It's a smart little thing really - because it allows you to use your existing flash, still mounted on your camera, but produce an off-camera, diffuse light source - which looks much better than a flash shot.  You might be able to do this in a room by bouncing your flash off the roof, or off a wall - but outside you can'd do that - so you either need to walk around with your camera in one hand, and a flash in the other, arms stretched out - or you need one of these.  So Ithought it would be pretty simple to build one - the only vague complexity was findijng a plastic ball mount for the board - and attaching the two - this allows the board to rotate infinitely in terms of positions.  We have a long weekend this weekend - Saturday to Tuesday inclusive - so I made this my weekend mission (along with Trauma Unit 101 of course).  I got the ball out of a pvc ball valve, which I cut open in order to liberate, and made the rest out of pvc pipes (less groovy than the original's quite graceful S - but perfectly effective).  The result looks like this (somewhat awkward getting it to take a pic of itself):

Which might look a bit homeade joe - but it produces some pretty cool light and pictures as you'll see from the photies that follow.

A terrible wound

Aiden managed to fall out of a tree, and land on some rocks.  I cant explain how in doing this he managed to make a hole this size in his upper thigh - but he did - and it's been quite an experience.  He was at a mate's house, who promptly called the domestic worker (good thinking) who promptly called an ambulance (good thinking too).  So Aiden got to ride in an ambulance to the hospital, where they x-rayed him, cleaned him up and sewed him up (not without some serious discomfort, I might add). 

The next day we took him to our doc who took the bandages off and found this blend of stitches and steri-strips holding him together below - bleeding quite a bit still too - so she said there are not enough stitches here - and added another 4 to stop the bleeding.  That whole process took an hour and a bit - more wailing and discomfort.  Infection is the big risk, so we have to change the dressing every day - which means that all the pussy scabs get pulled off each time - the whole palava takes an hour - because the poor little oke is endlessly begging for a break, a rest, basically any respite.  I've tried to explain to him that there is no value in a delay - it just draws out the inevitable - but perhaps that is something that he's still got to learn from this whole thing.

Any way - I'm hopeful that the whole thing has really taught him something - and that would be to consider what you are doing (rather than not do things).  I dont have a good track record of this in my life - and have crashed in various ways as a consequence, bicycles, motor-bikes etc - so perhaps I'm naieve, and the whole thing is that you can't really anticipate everything.  I did, in an attempt to explain what I meant, ask him if he'd climb a tree over a pond full of hungry crocodiles.  He said not.  But that's the thing - we all might just - it's such a rush looking down at all those big lizards, after all.

I'm going to be spending a fair bit of time with this leg, so I'll whizz you a couple of updates as we go along - particularly since I've recently built a new flash system - more about that to follow.  Hope the quizzes wrapped themselves up in a helpful way - will give you a ring later to find out how.

The evening

 

The day

 

 

The dunes

Sean's children

My lovely friend Sean and Elize's children

Time flashes by

I wanted a blurred background, attached the camera to a tripod and spun around on the patio - occurred to me how badly you could waste your camera while doing this (whack it on a wall; get giddy and fall down; have it fly off the mount...etc) so I stopped without it really turning out as I'd hoped.  I was thinking about you today in particular - will give you a call later (post exams at 11am on a Sunday sounds like maybe still sleeping) - wondering how the quizzes went, thinking about how you might be feeling considering the date tomorrow; I hope OK.

Portrait of Aiden - June 2012 High Junk Peak

The woods and the saddle after rain

Every now and then I take a photo that I really like, and it's not an accident at some level; one of those ones where you think of the place, you convince the kid, you lug the kit, you set it up and it comes out as you imagined it.  I think maybe if you are a good photographer you do this all the time - if you want to become a good photographer, you try and try and very occasionally you surprise yourself.  So that's what happened today.  It's been raining terrifically.  In a gap in it all I convinced Aiden, to walk through the woods and up to the saddle, from where you can look down on the city.   Ev's got a bug, so was listless; Ange kindly stayed with him.  When you get to the saddle
there are some groovy patterned trees in a little clearing, and I thought I could take a nice portrait there.  But it's not the one above (which is very similar, but slightly overcooked on the flash, and I still really like - its the one in the post above). 



Cool having a radio-trigger again - hang the flash in a tree and photoambush the walkers with light - creates weird and surreal pics; in this one Pieter and Robyn in front of Aiden.

Anyway, it was GREAT out and about, water everywhere, mud and mulch, squelch squelch.  We'd taken the shots and I was packing up when Pieter and Robyn and Lara and Jordan arrived.  I watched the rugby at Pieter and Robyn's the night before.  A very lekker klap for the English :-).  They brought their two dogs and Jordan brought Daisy - who Aiden and Evan are in love with.  We walked a bit with them, the dogs were jolling in the mud and the bushes.  I took some more pics (ah that was it, this was all with my new radio trigger - which is the same as the old one which died so heroically next to the pool - just it has some extra switches (which the old one really lacked, and it has a much better range - and of course costs 170 (whereas the old one cost 80 - that's inflation polite for you - outrageous increase for 3 years, but add some stuff and call it an upgrade and everyone is smiling.  It was a lovely outing.



Daisy going wild with Jordan and Aiden wishing they could have a dip in that particular little stream (steamy hot, so just dripping with sweat and jungle water).  Daisy very different with a haircut and wet legs - very cool dog.

Aiden, Lara and Jordan having got to the top of the saddle, over the other side the city lurks - Tseng Kwan O in the background, and far in the distance the skyscrapers in Central.