Rubénerd!

There seems to be a theme developing here. In part one of my mid semester walk around the park photo set I had images of ducks and other aviary animal critter thingys, and in part two I had photos of plants that looked like breakfast cereals. True story.

Here we have some photos of flowers I thought were particularly pretty and all that. If anything these serve to show I have yet to master the art of composition, but at least they make nice desktop backgrounds :). You can also view the full Flickr gallery.

Funnily enough I wasn't terribly hungry when I took these two photos, but you could be forgiven for thinking food was foremost on my mind. For some reason I could see food and food related whatnot everywhere in The Nature.

For example, in the photo above I have depicted through my camera conveyance a picture of an All-Bran tree. I presume the Kellogg's cereal company has fields of these trees that they harvest the All-Bran from and possibly toast or something before finally packaging for the morning crowd who subsequently have no trouble maintaining regularity. Super duper!

The other picture below is somewhat less interesting, but I loved the [purely accidental] interesting depth of field. I thought it kinda looked like wheat, which makes my use of the word field in the previous sentence a delicious pun, and the word delicious that was just mentioned was also a delicious pun because we're talking about food! I don't get paid enough for this gig.

In case you're wondering, these are part of the same mid semester break nature walk photos I took and talked about a couple of weeks ago and started a Flickr gallery for. Over the next few days I'll be uploading more stuff.

My shrink and good friend in Alaska Sir Jim Kloss esq. suggested I take a break from computers and see some nature. I didn't have time to take an entire day off, but on Monday morning for several hours I left the house and walked around the gardens in Mawson Lakes taking photos. It did me the world of good.

I took far too many [amateur] photos to upload all at once, so I'm staggering them over a few days. Today's selection are all the photos I took of avian friends. Well they weren't really friends, aside from the ducks they all flew away as soon as I got close :).

Taken with my Nikon D60 and my 55-200mm Nikkor lens. You can view the evolving Flickr gallery here.

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Time to quickly share some more photos I remember I took earlier today with my iTelephone before I head off to bed.

With all the recent rain Mawson Lakes has been getting a lot more ducks quietly waddling along and quacking. Perhaps these ducks grew up around the sounds of people and are used to us, because unlike the other birds that fly away as soon as you approach them, these are more than happy to walk over and say hello.

I was walking back from the post office this afternoon and saw these two rather well fed little ducks walking alongside me. I sat down on the footpath cross-legged and reached out with my hand and they came over and started tapping on my fingers :). I was even able to pat them lightly on their heads before I stood up and kept walking.

As with watching a silly series like K-On, when you're dealing with a lot of stress sometimes it's worth taking time out and doing something like this to make you feel happy again, even if only for a short while.

Quack quack :)

By the time I rushed home and grabbed my D60 it was far less vivid, but it was still pretty.

NEENZ: If you want your favorite restaurants to stay in business, you have to eat there and share with the world! - http://bkite.com/0blZR

Done and done :)

Not that I'm addicted and suffering from withdrawal symptoms or anything. Hope all the construction going on in our neighbourhood here hasn't broken or damaged any phone cables. Anyone else in Mawson Lakes or other northern suburbs of Adelaide having internet trouble with The Node?

In an ironic twist, I can also see I made a critical mistake with my super detailed diagram too. I'll pretend I did it on purpose for a reason so inspired I haven't even thought of it yet.

Now ladies and gentlemen, as far as being a neighbour goes I reckon I'm pretty easy to get along with. All I need is a reliable internet connection, water and electricity. The only loud music I play is jazz fusion. When people living across from me have a gas leak and call the fire department in at 3am I just roll over and go back to sleep. When Jehovah's Witnesses come to the door, I hide my copies of The God Delusion and The Portable Atheist and pretend to care about what they're saying.

Presenting exhibit 1936a, the photograph above. Ever since I started studying here in July last year these telephone access covers have been sitting here without a footpath around them. When it rains it becomes a river of mud, when it's dry the temporary fencing which has been standing there longer than some of the houses surrounding it serves to snag feet and bags.

I submit dear reader that Telstra should stop sitting on whatever part of their corporate body they primary sit on instead of helping taxpayers and come down to Mawson Lakes here to fix this problem, because I'd very much like one of these days to be able to walk to uni without tracking mud for a few hundred metres or tripping and falling flat on my arse which not only hurts but looks terribly unsophisticated and tends to make me look as though I'm trying to pull off a John Cleese walking impression. I'm flattered by the comparison, but honestly all I want to do is walk without the aforementioned events occurring.

Please Telstra, look at the rambling nonsense you've reduced me to.

I finally got around to uploading some photos I took in late July and adding them to the surprisingly titled Mawson Lakes 2009 set on The Flickrs. These were taken one afternoon in Mawson Lakes, the suburb in Adelaide where I'm studying. Even though it had finished raining by late morning, by the afternoon the sky was still dark, the air was eerily still and presumably because people were afraid of venturing outside for fear of being soaked the entire neighbourhood felt deserted. No people, no moving cars, nobody! Not only that but one small gap in the clouds was casting some pretty crazy long shadows everywhere to add to said eeriness.

It was surreal, like I was walking on the set for a movie or something. It was as if I was Will Smith in I Am Legend. It was as if everybody had been beamed aboard a space ship and I had somehow been spared. These analogies doing anything for you?

Both these photos were taken in Mawson Lakes with my beloved little Nikon D60. I only had my 18-55mm kit lens with me instead of my prime 35mm f/1.8 but I think they came out okay. Aside from a little cropping/scaling they are exactly as they were taken without alteration and all that whatnot.