grasswire

Dear friends, we are off to celebrate the Labor day with a week of holidays in Bosnia. Apparently without the computer as my laptop just crashed. Anyway, enjoy the week.

Sometimes the real surprise does not await in the doorway but rewards a more persistent snooper. Like this cast iron railing on the staircase to ISH library. Am more and more in love with Photoshop, though I overdid this pic a bit.

For about a month or so I have been playing (in my mind) with the idea of photo pairs. I really like the effect of good juxtaposition of two images but as it turns out, it can be a bit tricky if you want to get it right. Anyway, I started it this week so expect to see some trials and some (aesthetic) errors in near future.
Some initial inspiration came from port2port and simply photo who also features really nice photos of her morning delicacies at simply breakfasts.

If four was the number of the week, five is the number of the weekend. As for PB, up to now I had two bikes stolen out of four I owned so far. Currently, my biking is limited to quick trips to downtown Ljubljana when I storm the streets on Dragana’s old bike with only front brake working (am seriously considering buying a new bell but I already more than doubled its value last autumn when I bough two new tires for it).

Another week&weekend passed in the blink of an eye, as Slovene’s would say. Not much to share of it but this weekend snaps on Flickr. Unless I start complaining about my students whose essays tend to be so boring (well over three quarters picked the same topic out of eight different titles and at least half of them mentioned Mona Lisa as an example of a famous painting). Augh.

Four days after it was taken,
- or four days of computer problems,
- or ten hours of lectures later,
- or about hundred graded papers later,
- or one lazy afternoon coffee in the city later,
- or two spotted notes for lost keys in one day later,
- or another Bosnian baby-related superstition later…

here is the number of the week.

There are more casual signs of aging than discovering new grey hair(s) in the mirror and I was of course well aware of this before one of our friends made a remark that spurred this post. But it was just one of those moments when things you take for granted turn out to be very age-specific knowledge. Like when the football players you knew suddenly become coaches or when clerks begin humming to the 80’s songs on the radio (like Bangles) and you just know that they learned them by heart the same time you did and that only the deceptive aging of their faces makes them look older than you. Or when people from diaspora use the vocabulary petrified in the time they left (and which they than pass on to their children, perpetuating this time capsule language).

But most commonly, its the phrases that will give you away. The other day one of our friends commented on the look of some of the young mothers with strollers saying: “Some of them look like, what was that guy, Bud Spencer.” Bud Spencer, ha ha ha. Anyone remember Bud Spencer? The hero of crappy Italian action comedies of my childhood that solved all his (and others) problems the old fashioned way – using his fists. Anyone? How about his partner, Terrence Hill? C’mon, don’t make me fell that old. Anyway, according to the great mind of the web, the good old Bud is now 77 years old and you can buy his films are out on DVD.

Had a wonderful mixture of hot weather, booming spring with whiteness of cherry tree blossoms and intoxicating sweet scents lurking from the neighbourhood gardens, and three visits of our friends. Even the Saturday morning course for part-time students did not spoil the mood. And it is true what they say – that the real friends are those with whom you get can get together after a long time and continue as if nothing happened. Like the coffee with a friend whom we haven’t seen in two years who had now just moved to Kamnik. A new partner and a kid later, it was like we last saw each other not two years but two weeks ago.

Hope you get some of the atmosphere from the pics, there are some black-eye specimens among them.
And have a good start of the week.

This welded number on a shaft sort of reminded me of my high school “past” when I was training to be a machine technician. From machine technician to social scientist, I really stick out at high school reunions, not to mention the shocked faces of my colleagues when they find out I did not attend “gimnazija”. :)) Welding was one of the practical courses I did and it was not that tricky, though my number ten would definitely not look as good as this one. Perhaps after ten years of practice.

Hurrah, the new issue of Cornucopia has arrived!! The photos are great, as usual. Articles seem inviting as do the recipes. Not to mention flyers for kilim shows and conference on beads and beading in Istanbul in November. Am looking forward to some quality afternoon reading on the sofa.

And a note for the uninitiated - Cornucopia is a magazine for the connoisseurs of Turkey and features a mixture of articles on textiles, food, traveling, art and ethnography.