Dappled Air

When I grew up in Switzerland and started school in 1960 I had to learn my first foreign language: High German. School books, books and newspapers are all written in High German. What is High German? It is the language that is spoken in Germany and Austria. Then what is Swiss German? It is the dialect of German that is spoken in Switzerland. People bordering Switzerland like Southern and Western Germany and Austria have a similar dialect and can all understand each other easily. Once you move North past Frankfurt in German the accent changes and to understand each other people switch to High German. FontPlay about Switzerland read the translation here What is the major difference between High German and Swiss German? It took me about 20 years after leaving Switzerland to figure it out and suddenly it made sense why I found learning English so easy. Swiss German and English share the same sentence structure. I can take a Swiss German sentence and translate it word for word and end up wi...

When I saw this video , I just had to download the font of it. I find it ingenious to create a font, by drawing the letters with a car and then converting it to a font. I am a 'fontoholic', that means I collect fonts. What do I do with all those fonts? One way is to combine my photos with quotes and fonts. It is called a ' FontPlay '. I love creating them as they combine 3 of my favorite interests. Unfortunately, I have just been way to busy lately to create any new ones.

Sounds like a contradiction, but it isn't. I just started a course by Carol Tuttle about Energy Profiling and find it extremely interesting and highly recommend it. Over lunch while talking to my husband, I realized that I had already learned something valuable in this course. Hubby told me that President Barack Obama is in trouble for using the word 'stupid' for the event in Massachusetts where a black Harvard professor was apprehended by the police because they thought he was breaking into a house. In fact, the professor had trouble with his front door and was literally breaking into his own house. To me it looks like President Obama has 'carbon' as the dominant energy. He is a great orator and always says exactly what he means. So when he said it was 'stupid' he meant that situation could have been handled better, it was not up to par. For any person with another dominant energy the word 'stupid' would have meant exactly that 'stupid', b...

Depending or where you lived when Apollo 11 went to the moon, the lunar landing took place either in the late evening of July 20/1969 or in the early A.M. of July 21/1969. For me it was July 21/1969. I have strong memories of the event as I spent that summer with relatives outside Geneva. I was 16 years old and listened to it on a small transistor radio with a single ear piece so that I would not disturb them. Armstrong stepped on to the lunar surface on July 21/1969 at 02:56 UTC in my time locality of Geneva. For me it was in the middle of the night and I gladly gave up sleep to witness such a monumental event. I was so excited and wanted to tell my relatives but they were asleep. So as soon as I heard somebody walking around I got up and excitedly told them the news. The other strong memory of that time was that I finally discovered the Beatles. My relatives had a bunch of Paris Match magazines lying around with tons of pictures and articles about the Beatles.

I was brainstorming with my son after the wedding about the direction I should take for bringing in more money and decided that I should take advantage of my age and computer knowledge and focus on explaining social media to my age group. In the last few days I have come across an ever increasing amount of information about social media and its importance. Ok, I get the hint. In this morning's Globe & Mail newspaper was this really interesting article by Susan Krashinksky called: The teen heard 'round the world (and it wasn't on Twitter) . There was nothing really new in it, just a confirmation what I already know. Then no sooner did I read that article when an email arrived with a link to this interesting 15 minute video about: How social media can make history . I found this video by Clay Shirky very interesting and informative. Now I am slowly seeing how I can put my computer knowledge and social media information together to explain it to others. Stay tuned for th...

I received the link to these videos this morning in my emails and was very impressed. I usually don't like ads, but this one is very creative. It reminds me of the last year, when my youngest went as a model for a body painting competition. Amazing what one can do with paint and a body as canvas. Here is the link to all the New Zealand Air YouTube ads . Don't forget to check out the bloopers and behind the scenes videos. At first I didn't even realize that all the clothes were painting on the bodies, so pay close attention when watching the video.

A friend of my just posted a video of "Live and Let Die" and "Hey Jude" from the McCartney concert. Thanks Benny! I found it interesting to see the fireworks, but they did no seem to be as loud at the concert as what I heard in my bed. I missed the encore as I probably had fallen asleep and also it was an acoustic number and so the sound did not travel as far. Here is "Mull of Kintyre" with bagpipes. Sir Paul only plays this song in Canada and Scotland.

Last night Sir Paul McCartney was playing an outdoor concert in the Halifax North Commons. I did not attend, but I still could listen to the music. I live in a straight line about 4 km away across the harbour in Dartmouth, just on the other side past the first hill. As I go to be relatively early (10:30pm) I could hear the music through the open bedroom windows. At times you could make out the voice at other times just the melody and beat. It was very relaxing to be sung to sleep with "Let it Be", "Live and Let Die" - that one must have had some fireworks with it as there were very loud booms and lots of applause, I fell asleep just as "Hey Jude" came to an end. Thank you Sir Paul, I had a wonderful sleep.

The reason for not posting for so long is my daughter's wedding on June 30/09 and me coming down with a bug afterward. As I am slowly getting back into the groove I discovered that I had totally forgotten to make my July wallpaper. This also gives me the opportunity to start posting wallpapers in my graphics blog called Grafika. For the July desktop wallpaper and/or calendar I used a photo I took in June of a man fishing while standing on a stone in the lake.