Evolutionary Plume

Lutherstadt-Wittenburg with Side Trip to Worlitz Park May 23, 2014

Bob had read about Worlitz Park being a birding hot spot and oldest garden in Europe and a UNESCO World Heritage site so we wanted to go. We got up, dressed and showered and went for breakfast.

Afterwards, we hired a taxi that the hotel clerk called for us and we met it outside Luther's House next door (entry to the Best Western is a bit difficult) since there's no driving on the main street (although the rescue vehicle's can enter by lowering a post in the middle of the road, which is cool).

The drive to the park was spent discussing with our taxi driver whether he could move to the United States. I told him to look at the jobs pages for each of the states and check his qualifications and apply since he'd need a green card and that's easier done if he is hired somewhere, but Bob explained it isn't that easy to get a green card. The young man explained he had experience with electrician, mechanical and computer skills but not much about his education which I told him was in demand but Bob warned him most electrician jobs required an apprenticeship. He was working three jobs, his last position paid him 7 Euros and he wanted to know about the associated earnings in the US which we said varied, $40 an hour for electricians, $50-100,000 for computer specialists. We had a friend who had a PhD in Engineering who had moved to the US and continued to pay his German Social Security taxes because he wanted to return and retire in Germany. When we were let off, we arranged to have a taxi return to pick us up at the same spot at 5 pm.

Worlitz Park turned out to be a wonderful experience. It involved a long walk (with bathrooms located at three points inside the 700 sq. hectare property, over a large number of canals.

Many lakes were connected by the canals. The trees were a mix of deciduous and evergreen of many species, the walkways lined with wild roses, or grasslands mixed with wild flowers and even at one point a farm field of some cereal, a very bluish sort of wheat or barley, maybe.

 

On the property are a Castle House, a Castle, several houses, a building like an observatory with statues inside, many statues, and lots of decorative bridges.

We birded through the property finding many fun new birds. The Cuckoo enticed us on one side of a treed area where we couldn't find him until he flew over to the other side. His call is quite deep and resonant.

 

Later, I loved catching sight of the Great Crested Grebe found in the furthest part on the left side of the park (from the entry) in the lake. Their crests are raised and lowered and quite decorative. We searched through Scandanavia and England for these and it was fun to finally see them.

We had about an hour upon our return to town and we decided on drinks instead of touring the castle. We found our meeting point then walked a short way to the Landhouse Worlitzer hotel where we had Radeburger beer and a eis, apple strudel with hazelnut ice cream and vanilla cream.

The waiter had halting English better than our awful German and we learned the word for fork, gabel or kunchgable which is a dessert fork. Eventually, we were so humorous a man at the next table said why don't you speak English since I can speak both languages. He shared he was on vacation from Hannover and they were to take a dinner cruise through the park that night. He was surprised that with my family background I hadn't learned German and when I thought about it it was because German wasn't taught in our high school, we only had a French and Spanish teacher and though I wanted to learn Spanish, it was full so I took French.

We returned to the hotel and had dinner and another dessert and headed to bed.

Birds: Starling, Mallard, Wood Duck, House Sparrow, Common Blackbird, Great Tit, Willow Tit, Mute Swan, Hooded Crow, Pied Flycatcher, *Common Cuckoo, Blackheaded Gull, Rock Dove, Common Woodpigeon, *?Red Kite, Barn Swallow, *Mistle Thrush, Tree Sparrow, *Great Crested Grebe, Chaffinch, Green Finch

Travel from Lutherstadt-Wittenberg to Leipzig, Germany, May 24, 2014

The starting event for the day was getting to the train station, riding the crowded train to Leipzig, Germany and then to our hotel. Easy to do just eat breakfast, pack up, take a taxi each way. The main highlight of the trip was seeing both windmills and solar panel parks, Germany is going strong with alternative energy sources.

In Leipzig, we realized our train stop because it is quite noticeably a big city with lots of interesting architecture, I missed the best picture of some storage containers that I hope to get on the way out of town. I took horrid pictures with my phone during the trip but hopefully picking up some of the local companies. Bob had a brilliant guess that one of the crops we've been seeing is beets.

At the hotel, we were told we must wait for our room but they'd check our bags. When we finally return to our hotel, our room key's are waiting for us and we're set to go up, very quick helpful service.

Our first taste of Leipzig involved a walk through downtown central which is closed to traffic to get to Thomas Kirke where they held a Bach motet.

 

 

The service involved a talk by Professor Andreas Schule, a selection from Mendelssohn on the organ, Jesu meine Freude by Johann Sebastion Bach sung by the boys choir with alternating straight lyrics and lyrics sung in a round, a lovely piece by Brahms, a piece by Lesung which encouraged the audience to participate every other verse, the talk, and then a concluding piece by Bach played by the orchestra featuring several vocalists and the choir.

The church is quite huge and the music sounded very well acoustically, especially from our position in the balcony. The end of it concluded without applause which surprised me. While we waited for the performance, we ran into a very nice woman who often attended Covent Garden performances and she gave us some local tips and tips for Dresden.

Throughout the main part of Leipzig, we witnessed couples waltzing, a flutist, a guitar player, a group playing, a man talking to the crowd along with the numerous old buildings which we'll see more of tomorrow.

 

The main standout is the old Townhall and we saw the New Townhall on our way to the hotel and it is equally fine in architecture. 

The most beautiful building is the University of Leipzig across the street from our hotel.

 

After we ate our late lunch, we dressed for our ballet. Bob had a fright when he thought we were late but it turned out to be tomorrow's tickets.

The ballet Deca Dance was a world premiere featuring work by choreographer Ohad Naharin and it turned out to be a standout. 

When we arrived, we were able to pick up our tickets for both performances, go upstairs and find our seat with ease in a very lovely building with extremely comfortable seats with plenty of leg room to allow others to get by to their seats. I hope Orlando's new performance hall is as well designed. A dancer was on stage as we sat, pretty much adlibbing to a jazz selection, but as the audience arrived and the performance actually began, it seemed his piece was more choreographed than expected and fit into the next pieces.

Other dancers showed up and began to mimic him exactly or almost exactly. The next piece was a standout featuring unusual lighting to start with and showed the superb training of the Leipzig Ballet. The performance was very crisp, very sharply conveyed. Other selections followed including a duet, trio, quintet, solos, and male and female group pieces and joint pieces. The crowd pleaser was a selection featuring a surprise invitation onto stage. The Leipzigers selected held their own quite well. Mr. Naharin chose very unusual music with striking differences in quality while having movements tie the pieces together nicely.

The German audiences are always so pleased with their entertainment, applauding quite generously.

City Tour of Guayaquil, Ecuador

We woke fairly late at the Hilton Hotel Colon(Bob was up and dressed by 8:30) and I
did my exercises then dressed. We had a lovely breakfast—one of the best we’ve
had in a long time. The buffet had sandwiches (hot or cold), sushi, fresh
fruit, cereals, a full carver ham, bacon, scrambled eggs, eggs benedict (Bob’s
was cooked med. well, pastries and a made to order omelet bar, fried potatoes,
chips and salsas and I don’t know what else. The staff brought tea and coffee.
There was five kinds of juice and a bottle of water was delivered to my table
upon request.

After breakfast, we questioned the main desk about internet
access since it has a strange route to connect on Bob’s new Microsoft surface,
spotted the swimming pool, and asked for a map and how to get to the Anthropology
Museum safely. The answer was to buy a city tour. So we’re set up for a tour at
1pm. We returned to the room to do a little work—I wrote yesterday’s blog entry
and half of today’s, then logged into my class and answered the last question.
I found I was locked out of my Yahoo account and had forgotten to take my
Facebook password. Usually I can gain access to Facebook via Yahoo. Yahoo
allowed me to change my password then refused to send a verification code to my
gmail account. So now I have no access to most of my family members except via
Bob.

The guide called and told us to come at 12:30, so we went
downstairs but we found no sign of the guide. But our contact with National
Geographic was, so Bob went with her to get the coupons for breakfast for
tomorrow and free drink coupons. The driver showed up, and finally our guide
arrived. He lives near the airport and he told us with elections coming to
Ecuador in March, the President was in town. Guayaquil is the largest
population center and tends to not like the President as much, most of the town
is working class and has the bulk of the money. The town has had the same mayor
for the past three years. Apparently they passed a law changing it so that the
mayor could only serve for two terms and our guide intimated that they might
change it so the president could serve more than two terms, or maybe he was
just voicing everyone’s worry.

Our tour took us down to the Carreo Passeo Mirador. It’s a
guarded overlook complete with a play area, some flowers and a view of downtown
Guayaquil. It was overcast, so we could only see the closest buildings of the
old down town. The town has grown quite substantially, with a newer downtown
with larger skyscrapers. It was a bit reminiscent of Panama City, except for
the eerie start of downtown Panama City where 
you cross through salt flats seeing the buildings appear here and there.
Guayaquil is less developed in modern style.

Our next stop took us through town, past an old 1600 church,
along the two cross streets-Simon Bolivar Boulevard and Octubre 9^th
Boulevard. Octubre 9^th is the anniversary of when Ecuador obtained
their independence from Spain. Then we stopped at the town plaza, walking
through to get a few snapshots of the park and trees including an almond tree.
We went past the historic meeting place of Bolivar and the other general where
they agreed to not fight and go their separate ways. Our next stop was the
Museum of Archaeology and Modern Art, bypassing the Walk with its lush
tropical garden that was under construction.

 

The museum has a fine collection of carved rock and pottery
tracing back to the early roots of man’s appearance in South America, 7,000 ya
based on a find of a couple, man’s head crushed by a rock at the Vital site.

Many of the intact pieces of pottery were whistles with an
animal carving. They’d arranged the finds by local and habitat—monkeys in one
area of dry forest, pelican and crabs at the beach. The way people were
depicted was odd, their heads shaped, sometimes flattened boxlike on all sides,
other times pointed. The people used many piercing and other adornments.

One movie showed their kiln technique for working with shiny
mica based finishes. They placed three trees at 120 degrees and lit a fire at
their intersection. The pot to be kiln dried was set over the top and filled
with ashes. When the ashes melted into a finish, while still warm, dots,
streaks and other designs were rubbed out. They also showed the very precise
style of their circular art, star maps, and water flow maps that were incised
into the pottery. A grater used with soft vegetables was made by placing
pointed chips of rock into a pottery slab or the bottom of a bowl.

The modern art portion of the museum featured three
exhibits, Imaginarium by , a collection of paintings based on five themes of
Indian adjustment.

Improving My Technology Skills--Movies on My Nikon D5100

Today my skill building involves using a previously untested feature of my Nikon D5100 camera. I bought the D5100 after I dropped my camera in Panama, smashing the lens and damaging the lens connection, sigh. I need to remember to go slowly while carrying expensive equipment.

The easy start guide from Nikon explained how to make the movie in a step by step fashion.

First step was to put the camera in live view mode (the same mode that the Coolpix automatically starts in).

The second step was to set the automated focus and other features for use when making movies.

The third step was to make the movie.

The fourth step was to post it on Youtube. When posting the movie, Youtube flagged the movie for having different length audio and video tracks and provided a helpful guide for editing it into shape. That's tomorrow's lesson.

What I learned about making a movie with my Nikon D5100 camera was:

1) you use up your EN-EL14 lithium batteries very quickly with continual autofocus and movie recording

2) I was introduced to BestBatt.com, where I found I could quickly buy 2 more batteries and a charger and get a free mini tripod delivered to me in two days--why go on vacation and not try a movie or two?

3) you should plan what you will say before you record

4) moving slowly helps keep the camera in focus

5) closed in areas complicate recording since it is hard to step back and bring items into focus

6) movies made with the Nikon D5100 can be stored in two formats,(I used the common one for the US)

7) movies made with the Nikon D5100 are stored as QuickTime movies

8) I can record up to twenty minutes with the Nikon D5100

9) It takes a long time to upload a long movie (I guess that's why people keep them short)

All in all, my experience recording a movie with the Nikon D5100 was much happier than the result with my Canon Camcorder since I had an easy start and stop and play and upload.

When my movie is finally uploaded, you can see it at:  

 

I made it about my trellis garden, showing the frame, the flowers, the hedgerow and other plants. I didn't remember all the names.

Improving My Technology Skills--Technical Illustrations

I was advised to produce illustrations for my haiku chapbook so I've taken this on as a challenge to re-remember my technical drawing class. I would do drawings of the visions I had while writing the haiku to offset the image that popped into mind. 

I worked with an illustrator Angela Powell when I worked at Boeing, and several others. But she produced the illustrations for our local newsletter. She'd often make the drawings on hand, then very carefully recreate them in electronic form using a drawing pad. I picked up the Wacom Bamboo Create which has 8.5 by 5.4 drawing surface and I can use Adobe Photoshop Elements as the software for using the input. At least one of the drawings I make, I'd like to join a drawing with a photograph--that may mean quite a bit of manipulations with the images.

My technical illustration class was very basic--mostly focused on how to build various views of objects and at various angles. I had to pick up a few tools at Staples--a flexible curve (it helps make your curves smooth, a variety of sketch pens (varying in sizes from .1mm to .8mm), sketch pencils (including a white pencil, eraser, and a template with small circles, and tracing paper.

To get the drawing pad to work, I have to connect it to my computer and install the software. Following that, I may need to try out a bunch of the tutorials they have provided. I'm not sure how much I will get done before I leave on vacation.

 

Anti-Ice and the Tacoma Museum of Art

Went to the Tacoma Museum of Art with my parents, found easy parking and handicapped access and some great exhibits. It's next door to the Glass Museum, but we didn't see it this time. There is many Chiluly works in the Tacoma Museum of Art, and the shared courtyard has an interesting showcase with his works. We went to see the new St. John's Bible exhibit. Artists in Wales are doing a modern version of a Celtic bible with handscribed pages, original artwork, gold leaf and an approved version that most religions accept. It was quite beautiful and interesting to see.

Finished reading Anti-Ice by Stephen Baxter--it was a fun trip to the Moon, some alternate history of the time between the two World War's and some neat inventions including an energy source brought from space.

My art books at amazon.com

I have a collection of art books that I put into a listmania list at amazon.com  See My favorite art books to feed the imagination. I also pick up some real deals on art books at the year end sale at Barnes and Noble. When writing scenes it's helpful to have some visual connection to where you're writing. I also picked up some home design and lots of garden design books for the same purpose. Alternatively, taking photographs while you travel the world and even your neighborhood helps build authenticity.

Park West Gallery--art online and available for sale

Jean Claude Picot, an artist in the French impressionist landscape style is currently featured at the Park West Gallery web site. The actual gallery is located in Southfield, Missouri and has an affliate in Miami Florida. The collection hosts the work of 400 artists, their biographies are provided online. The fun thing about this site is you can peruse samples of the artworks by selecting the artist and clicking on the name of their painting. The gallery sponsors auctions and auctions at sea for cruise lines. They also have some fall specials right now. I was interested to see the gallery is run by an unusual CEO named Albert Scaglione. Mr. Scaglione used his background in magneto hydrodynamics on the NASA Mars project and an SST study before starting into the art auction business. The website has more to say about the gallery and it’s CEO. This is a paid post.

Fusions Artists Gallery is an interesting place to visit

Fusions Artists Gallery is an interesting place to visit

Review of: Fusions GALLERY, Uncategorized

By: Sheri F. on Judy's Book

Rating: 4 stars

Read review on Judy's Book.

Fusions Artists Gallery was a fun stop in Ocean Shores with all sorts of artwork from area artists. I even found a new artists I liked, Glenna P. Parker and bought two cards with her work. There were other painters work displayed, blown glass including many yard art sticks, "nebulas"--a type of work combining clay with glass with an interesting effect, lots of gorgeous jewelry, unusual pottery. The owner was very friendly and helpful. Her husband does some of the displayed photography. And we found out she's a "wrestling mom" just like my sister.

Real beauty found in the Johsel Namkung art exhibit at the Asian Art museum

Real beauty found in the Johsel Namkung art exhibit at the Asian Art museum

By: Sheri Fresonke Harper

Category: Opinion > Other

Read the article on Judy's Book.

The Johsel Namkung art exhibit at the Asian Art museum is pure pleasure. The exhibit is in one room just left of the main exit. Here you find rocks, trees, water, metal captured with true inspiration. My favorite was a picture captured at dawn on the Yakima river where ice had formed among some rocks. You have to see it to believe. Lucky for everyone the artist caught the photograph before it melted. Also on display is the heavy special camera used to capture big pictures with every single part of the photograph crisply in focus. Most of the pictures were digitally re-mastered using a high quality scanner. Several photos were taken in Korea. The picture of water has so many pine needle shaped plants, it's hard to believe you're not in grass but it also has a surprise -- it took me about 10 minutes to find the small dragonfly. The exhibit is on through to October, so if you have a moment, stop by on one of the free-First-Thursday showings and check it out. You'll be tempted to buy Johsel Namkung's new book.