Sunday Selections

Sunday Selections is hosted by Kim from Frogpondsrock and is the perfect opportunity to post those photos that are otherwise hanging around aimlessly in folders on your computer.

HEADS UP

So, last week I posted their bottoms, and today I’m posting their other ends. Their heads. Well, I tried, but some just didn’t want to look at the little birdie.

Like that middle cow. Stubborn thing.

 

And this is the other end of Mozes. He’s probably looking at another little birdie.

 

Mozes and Biggles putting their heads together.

 

The Biggles Face

 

You’re not photographing my bum again are you?

 

Yeah (snigger), but I’m also making some shots of your beautiful head.

 

Hullo?! What’s that big bum doing there? The chickens are fascinated by this particular posterior too (Too? What do I mean: ‘too’. I’m not. No, honestly. I’m not!)

Now I have to post a photo of his head too.

And of that of his little ‘brother’. Ugly, but nice. (Tumtum is the one in front, Nufnuf is… well… looking at Tumtum’s bum. Are we all posterior-obsessed here?)

THE FRONT END

All About Evie

It's hubs' birthday today and I made this as a present. Well, obviously he has the live version of this book. He's pretty chuffed with it. It's all about Evie's first year and there are some really nice photos in it. You can view the entire book by clicking on the link below (hehe, you can even buy the book if you want. Please do. It's a hideous amount of money, but well worth it if you want to follow Evie from her birth at April 8, 2009 to her first birthday. But I guess it's for a niche market *sigh*). For a full page view, click on the four arrows in the bottom right and click on it again if you want to return to the smaller size. Be warned though. There are a lot of pages. A lot! But most of them are worth a look.

Okay, I'm biased.

Evie by Carolina Brinkman | Make Your Own Book

Oh pifflesquit!

Uncle Skip, who has his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, gave me an award.

First Suldog gave Uncle Skip an award.

No.

First some poor innocent soul gave Suldog an award, which he accepted in his own unique way. Then Suldog passed the award on to Uncle Skip and some other bloggers.

And then Uncle Skip passed it on to some other bloggers and me.

This is it:

THANK YOU, UNCLE SKIP (I’m not even sure if the comma was necessary there. If it isn’t, feel free to ignore it.)

Of course these awards always have strings attached. A ‘thank you speech’ alone will not do. I understand that one must mention ‘stuff’ about one’s self in order to be a deserving recipient of this particular award. One must also link back to the presenter of the award, which one has done at the very beginning of this post and will do again at the very end of this post.

And I too can post a picture of a laughing animal. Better yet, I even took this photo.

So here’s some ‘stuff’ about me:

• I’m 1.80m tall
• I have published my first book last week, but I’m pretty sure no one will ever buy it
• I’m hopeless at remembering birthdays
• I have never smoked anything illegal
• I have never smoked anything legal, apart from fish
• I have a great sense of humour
• I have no earlobes
• I can make a damn good lasagne
• I’m a Shaun the Sheep-fan
• I used to visit bloggers who joined my list of followers to thank them, but apparently that scared the hell out of some people and they immediately stopped blogging. So I don’t do that anymore. I just ignore them and hope for the best.

Another string attached to this award is that I have to pass it on to 5 other bloggers. Most bloggers I know live in an award free zone, so there’s no point in bothering them with such a wonderful award as this is. Hmm, to whom will I pass this award on. They must be people who will really appreciate it (no pressure):

1. Mara of Weighty Matters
2. Liz of Backward Leonard
3. Karen of A Good Snapshot

Okay, it’s not 5 exactly, but I’ve never been good with numbers.

Oh, and pifflesquit? You’ll have to visit Uncle Skip to find out what that means.

Sunday Selections

 

Bottoms

My Sunday Selections (hosted by Kim from Frogpondsrock and a really good excuse to post those photos that are sort of aimlessly hanging around in your computer somewhere) is all about bottoms this week. Perhaps it’s only fair that I’ll dedicate the next Sunday Selections to the other ends of these animals; their lovely faces. Although I don’t have a photo of the last one’s face. For some reason it kept running away from me.

 

 

 

  

THE END

Sunday Selections

Hosted by Kim from Frogpondsrock. Finally a good excuse to post those photos that are hanging around aimlessly in all those folders on your computer.

This birch has interesting bark…

…and an interesting face? Big nose though.

These dried flowers of the Hydrangea aspera look like lace.

It’s not as sharp as I’d like it to be; it was quite a windy day. Oh I know the background is blurred, but that is deliberate. But the foreground could have been crisper too. I’ll have to try again, on a nice and calm day, to make a decent shot of these beauties.

And how did that horse sneak into this post?

Of Spring and Chickens

Yesterday, when I was walking through our garden, I saw this little clump of Bluebells, bravely sticking their noses through their warm Winter cover. A definite sign that Spring is in the air.

Today I noticed that, like magic, next to the Bluebells these cute little Snowdrops had suddenly appeared from under their blanket of leaves. Can they grow that fast? I might have to get my eyes checked. I really didn’t see them yesterday.

 

Talking of chickens…

(Oh, I know we weren’t talking of chickens.)

These are our chickens. Six chickens and a cockerel. ‘Zes kippen en een haan’ in Dutch. I promise you they all have heads, even if they appear to be headless in the photos.

The two larger, black & white ones (right side of the photo) are silver pencilled (or silver laced?) Groninger Meeuwen. A local, rare breed, very recognizable because they have blue legs. They lay white eggs and are a tad on the neurotic side. I have never even threatened to murder them, and still they act as if that is my only goal in life.
We did have a beautiful Groninger Meeuw cockerel too, but he was murdered last year. Probably by a buzzard. We’ve lost a couple of chickens and another rooster/cockerel to buzzards, of which we have a breeding couple nearby.  Still, we like to let our chickens roam free in our garden. They love rummaging around under the cover of shrubs and trees. Usually I open the door of their coop around noon to let them out. And when the sun sets they return to their coop again.

I’m not sure what kind of breed the three smaller, brown chickens are. They volunteered to come and live with us. Actually they used to belong to our neighbours, but every morning they negotiated the fence and ended up on our side and every evening they went back to the neighbours’ coop. So at one point I lured them into our chicken coop and then they were ours. A couple of weeks after I kidnapped them I asked the neighbour if he missed some chickens. He didn’t. So….

They are quite hard to spot aren’t they? 

The larger, somewhat darker speckled black & white chicken is a cross between our late Groninger Meeuw cockerel and one of the brown chickens that used to belong to the neighbours (that’s why they used to hang around at our place; they fancied our beautiful Groninger Meeuw boy.) And our new cockerel is a .cross between those two breeds too. Both were hatched in our neighbour’s coop, but they didn’t want to keep them, so this time we legally obtained these two additions to our flock.

This is our coop. We used to have a bigger one, but they only ever used one of the nest boxes. And since they hardly ever have to spend their whole day in their coop, we bought a smaller one. That turned out to be too small, partly because of the (il)legal additions to our flock, so hubs built a nice run-extension. With a roof. They are pretty happy chickens and their eggs taste so much better than shop-bought ones.

Sunday Selections

Some time ago I decided that I wouldn’t join memes anymore, because: a) it takes so much time to visit everyone else on the list and b) it started to feel like too much pressure to come up with something original every week, but then I visited Jay at the Depp Effect and she joined this great new meme: Sunday Selections. A meme, started by Kim over at Frogpondsrock, that ‘allows’ you to post those photos that have been sitting in folders on your computer, doing nothing. Waiting for an opportunity to be shared with others.

Now, I think this is a wonderful excuse to bore you with more of my photos, so I’ve decided to join this meme.

You see: my best photos, or the photos that I consider to be my best up till now (because I haven’t taken my best photo yet; I haven’t even taken a really good one yet, but as long as there is life there is hope) I put up on my photo blog (link can be found at the bottom of this blog). Photos that can illustrate a story or just seem to be suitable for my ‘normal’ (using the term ‘normal’ very loosely here) blog I put up here. And yet there are more photos I don’t want to throw away, but that are not suited for posting either. Unless there is a really good reason. And this meme is a good reason. So… here they are: photos that did not have a purpose until now. If that isn’t a happy ending… Or a happy beginning?

Evie & Willem

Naloma

Don’t worry, they won’t all be horsey photos. Just wanted to get these ones of our horses ‘of my chest’ so to speak.

So, if you have folders full of photos on your computer and haven’t found a good excuse to post them yet, here’s your chance: visit Frogpondsrock and join Sunday Selections.

The Truth About The Ghost

Spotted the Ghost in the previous Post?

This particular graveyard isn’t a very well-kept one. It belongs to the Reformed Church. There were unnerving holes in some of the graves. Certainly big enough to let a ghost or two escape.

And when I was walking around there, carefully manoeuvring between the tombstones, now and again my foot landed in a hole in the grass. Probably made by a zealous mole, but it felt like I could be swallowed up by the earth at any moment. Forever disappearing in one of the graves.

 

I’m not easily scared, I don’t think graveyards are eerie places, but this did something to me. Perhaps it was the freezing cold fog that added something very gloomy to the ambiance.

And you know me by now. I don’t do gloomy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So I decided to put the Photoshop course I did last year to some good use and do something creative to one of the photos.

Recognize the ghost? It’s actually my mother. We were visiting her parents’ grave.

That’ll teach you not to believe everything you see. Although I actually almost believed it myself. ‘t Was rather convincing wasn’t it? Sorry for leading you up the garden path. Or up the graveyard path in this case.