Sunflower

untitled - inspiered by cotton seeds

... Without Christmas.

Starting this Friday Saturday, December, 1st, I will give you my personal Advent Calender. Being not really a christmas person - I like the basic idea, the religious background, the family thing, but not all this kitsch consumption mania it’s become - it will contain no christmas at all - be it kitsch or otherwise.

Every morning I will give you one picture of mine. Some may be old, some may be new, some you may know, some you wont know, some may be gay, some may be grim - but all of them will have one thing in common: no christmas.

Stay tuned.

I don’t know about you, but for me the inside of a computer always looks like a strange map of a - very green and eco-friendly - major city.
Odd thing, my head.

But look:



Can you see the northbridge mall? With all the small cars parking on the roof?
And all the channels of the big harbour?
The warehouses?
The roads?




I think this block is some part of the paper industry




I honestly don’t know ... maybe a new form of igloo-shaped homes?




The city railway (with the broken power socket central post office blurred in the background)




All that green may be parks ...




And here’s the power plant, the heart of the beast.
(Actually it’s a ordinary coin battery powering the BIOS, which, in my case, is empty for about a month now and needs replacing anyway. Good thing I dropped the ...


Update:
As you may have noticed the patient is nearly healthy again.
The 'del' key isn’t working and the clock is running an hour late.
But apart from that it’s working fine.

Thanks my dear!

More often than not, dropping electronic devices is a bad idea.
Fortunately, my Dear got of comparatively easy and did only break the power socket on the back of her laptop.
compared to all the other highly breakable components in there (hard drive, display, cooling pipes etc.) this is one of the more repairable problems.
So, let's roll, this should be easy. One just opens the case and repairs the broken part. Haven't touched the soldering iron in a while anyway, could even be fun. - Oh ok, opening a laptop is not quite as simple? No matter. One just removes all the little screws, then one opens the c.... oh ok, turns out there are n+1 little screws (n being the number of screws you've found so far) holding the case together. Then one removes another m*2(n'+1)+n" screws (m being the number of removable casing panels which are held on by an even number of n' screws and hide n" more srews. n', and n"analogous to n) aaaaand generally fiddles and jiggles for an hour or so, memorising cable routings and building a little forest of screws and heaping piles of components until one can finally see the dc jack.
I wonder - do all laptops have fractal insides?
Oh, so the dc jack is completely buggered and needs to be replaced? no problem. Ah, so it turns out all ones electronic supplies got misplaced by 180km while moving flats? no problem. Let's make yet another foray into the realm of makeshift repairs and hackjobs under it's supreme ruler Angus MacGyver I. (don't forget to pick up your ballpen and chewing gum at the tourist office)!
Fortunately, at this point my brain started routing in emergency supplies of common sense before I started joyously ripping apart innocent household electronics and stationery supplies for spare parts...
Turns out the broken socket is a pretty common part used in dozens of laptops and you can buy it on ebay. admittedly this is a boring solution, but at least the guy selling these parts is from the netherlands so his username sounds appropriate for the whole enterprise (see above).

... and now I’ve done it. Dropped my laptop.
Not very deep, but deep enough to break some sort of power socket.
It needs a doctor now.

Luckily I have a boyfriend who knows his way around a soldering (what an ugly word) iron and a circuit board.

With a bizarre mixture of disgruntlement and glee he sprang into action and dissected the poor machine.
Took him about two episodes of DS9.

Now our living room feels like an operating room.
Everything is DO NOT TOUCH
Theres a whole forest of screws, plastic components, motherboard, CD-drive, more screws on the book shelf ...
And DO NOT TOUCH
WHATEVER YOU DO
- DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING

So, what am I doing when not spending the evenings crouching before the internet and it’s november outside?


Yes, standing in the kitchen, baking.

Looking forward to saying hello to my data sometime soon.

... fellow workers, I really glad that, when I told you that I’m not only a vegetarian, but that in addition I don’t eat buy any eggs, you didn’t went all troll on me but simply asked: "But how do you cook your 'Spätzle' without eggs?"

I've a feeling I’m not in Kansas anymore.

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a small exhibition near my partents hometown.

It really was a very minor thing happening, nothing big.

But as it was my first venture into the wide world of art shows and showing of your art, it was all very exiting and new to me.
I didn’t like all the tam-tam, fishing for compliments and ego boosting, but I have to say it felt oddly thrilling to see some of my pictures (I submitted four, they managed to show two of them) shown openly in public, hear people talking about them and reading descriptions fo them in the local newspaper.


This is one of the drawings they didn’t show.


I was something like a "Bunte Kuh" there with my chestnut girdle, snail shell neclace, ringed stockings and my paintings of animated nature amidst all the watercolours and copies of modern art styles.

In some way it was very nice, especially as I did not WIN the audience award, but got a special reference for getting the second place ... or somthing like that.

Also - and I don’t normally indulge myself in self-praise - the paintings really do look great with a proper passe-partout and a frame around them. Sadly I dont’t have any pictures to show you ...
Memo to self: MAKE PICTURES OF YOUR PICTURES

A thousand thanks to my dad who is something like a hobby-carpender and did all the frames for me.
Also a thousand thanks for the entity that took over my body that morning I cut the passe-partouts. I’m a very impatient person and doing these passe-partouts really was challenge for me.

I’m glad I don’t have to keep the Lovecraft. It frightens the other books.

As I am sitting here, typing, it’s friday evening.
As you are sitting werever-you-are, reading, its afternoon (or maybe not).

If all has gone well the book changed it’s owner by sunday morning.
Confusing? No, why?

Have fun, dear BeRúThiel.