Seeking the World’s Soul

We had a great anniver­sary day yes­ter­day — spent it out at a mid­dle ages fes­ti­val that was like a mini Ren­Fest but with more alco­hol and more chil­dren with weapons. We got some very fine mead in a stoneware bot­tle, reuasable as an oil lamp with the appro­pri­ate wick, for 12 euros and sat on the river bank watch­ing goth­lings flock and sip­ping it slowly. Mmm… excel­lent stuff. Good mead is like dis­tilled sunlight.

There was a bless­ing cer­e­mony of a newly built Viking river boat, a small demo com­bat, and then a long walk home along the river­bank. Six years. We may be pere­nially broke, but we’re rich in experiences.

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It’s the short­est night of the year. I’d much rather be out at a bon­fire than here at the dig­i­tal hearth, but at least Tony and I went out to the Friedric­shain Folk­park and climbed the big hill out there. We had some good bread with local goat cheese on top, and split a bot­tle of “Odin’s Drink” honey ale. Very lovely. Get­ting up and down the hill is a bit like walk­ing a labyrinth on a cone; lots of cir­cling around and get­ting very dis­ori­ented. It’s all forested and you can’t get much of a view. I like it.

On a side note, I’m try­ing out a new ser­vice, Ping (http://ping NULL.fm/), which lets me cross post from my blog to a vari­ety of other sites — LJ, MySpace, etc. So here’s hop­ing it works.

Also, Tony took some pic­tures of me for pro­file pics and what­not — take a look and tell me which you think I should be using, please! They’re linked off the photo below.

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I’ve been pretty busy this week try­ing to get some web soft­ware work­ing — back in April when this blog crashed so did 4 other bits of online soft­ware I was run­ning, and I’m finally get­ting them back up to speed. Any­way, I’ve been work­ing with some mod­els this week, includ­ing Tony who wanted some shots in his Viking gear. I’ve got 2 uploaded cur­rently but will get some more up shortly. I’m try­ing some new soft­ware called Zen­photo for online gallery man­age­ment — it doesn’t allow prints but it should be indexed by Google, which Zen­fo­lio isn’t, some­thing of a prob­lem. So maybe I’ll put my stock pho­tos in Zen­photo and casual shots in Zen­fo­lio — and what is it with the “Zen” thing anyway?

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(http://photos NULL.kira­ha­gen NULL.com/p983484220/?photo=169322112)

Had a friend from the States vis­it­ing this week­end, and got out to a cou­ple of muse­ums for the free Thurs­day museum nights. The Perg­a­mon museum show­cases archi­tec­tural antiq­ui­ties — here’s Dawn sit­ting on the steps of the enor­mous Altar of Zeus, which is not exactly the sort of thing you expect to find in North-Eastern Ger­many. 19th cen­tury archae­ol­o­gist Hein­rich Schlie­mann dug it up in Turkey and sent it home for re-assembly… rather makes you won­der how much the Turk­ish peo­ple would like to get it back! It does still have that sort of tin­gle old tem­ples give me, but I kept wish­ing they’d paint the walls with murals of what the land would have looked like in Greek times; tem­ples like this tended to be sited over very pic­turesque views.

I may have got­ten spoiled by vis­it­ing the tem­ples at Dougga, in Tunisia, though; they’re mostly intact and the wind was blow­ing over the hills and ancient olive groves when I vis­ited, and the sheer beauty of the site made me feel as if light was burst­ing out through my skin every sec­ond I was there.

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Just got some older pho­tos uploaded. They’re from the trip I took to the Sey­chelles Islands in early 2006 — mid­win­ter hol­i­day from work in Moscow to go meet up with fam­ily there. My dad was work­ing on devel­op­ing a marine pro­tected area and it was a great excuse to Moscow’s Jan­u­ary bleak­ness. At any rate, the islands are sim­ply stun­ning. I don’t want to paint it as a par­adise, exactly, because I find descrip­tions like that seem to de-humanize and plas­ti­cize a place, strip­ping them of cul­ture and his­tory in the search for the per­fect stretch of sand, but being there was awfully nice.

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