The joy of nature

Spring is trying to arrive here in Adelaide and I was lucky enough to take a photo of a black and orange Monarch Butterfly the other day whilst walking around my area.

Butterflies represent hope and beauty to me and I'm very lucky to see so many near the hills where I live now.

This butterfly almost seemed like it had a death wish for a while, because it kept circling back and forth around me and nearly dived into my face at one point! But then it flew down onto a bush quite close to me and I quickly took a few shots while I could.

I also saw about 3 0r 4 Sulphur Crested Cockatoos all on one tree, 2 parrots, I think they were Rosellas, and a couple of Kookaburras.

I'm so grateful for nature. Exploring the world around us is a great way to forget the stress of everyday life, even if just for a little while. It also helps me brainstorm ideas to think of adjectives for descriptions! For example, one day I was taking note of as many adjectives as I could to describe the water going down a creek. I came up with a few like... flowing, gushing, gurgling, trickling, swirling and etcetera.

Anyway, back to my homework I shall go, wish me luck! XD

*Katz*

Truth is absolute

I had an interesting conversation with some one the other day and it got me thinking about what people's opinions are about the truth.

It seems there are various opinions about truth and whether it can change according to situations and points of view.

But this is what I know...

Truth is absolute. If it is not absolute then how can we trust that anything is real in our lives?

If truth was not an absolute we would question everything we do, see and experience.

If truth is relative, then it cannot logically be true. If something is only half true then how can we believe that it is really true?

For example, in the courts we are told to "...tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth etc." They do not tell us to tell 30% of the truth, or 90% of the truth.

Truth is not relative, it cannot change no matter what the situation is.

Perceptions are relative, they can change according to situations etcetera, but truth is not relative. Truth stays the same.

If you don't believe me, read these 2 websites, they make some very good points! They can explain it a whole lot better than me.

http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/absolute-truth.htm

http://www.hopeinchrist.org/truth.html

David Hockney

I'm sure David Hockney has been discussed in many other blogs before, but I have only just discovered his work so I feel inspired to mention him tonight. (It is 10pm here in Aussie-land.)

David Hockney is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer. He is based in Bridlington in Yorkshire and Kensington in London. (He must have more than one house, the lucky man!) He was born in 1937 and helped influence the Pop art movement in the 1960's.

Some of his paintings have an expressionist style while others use realism but all of them leave the viewer with something to think about. In his later works he also used cubism and a lot of his photos are photo-collages.

His use of colour is something I particularly admire about his work. I think most of his painting is a bit eccentric and not really my style but I do like the different experiments and passion he has used whilst creating his paintings and artwork.

Here are some examples...

Nichols Canyon 1980

Acrylic on canvas

A Bigger Splash 1967

Acrylic on canvas

Three Chairs with a Section of a Picasso Mural 1970
Acrylic on canvas

Some examples of his photo-collages...

The Desk 1984

Pearblossom Highway 1986

Place Furstenberg, Paris 1985

The Black Stump

HAHA! Finally a photo has uploaded for me! Hmm... maybe Blogger only likes me uploading one at a time! :S That could take a while.

"Hi" again everyone. Here I am at Paringa, a little Riverland town not far from Renmark where the Black Stump lives! (It is the large, round wooden thing behind me. It looks a bit like a wooden cobweb in my opinion.) We have a saying in Australia, "Beyond the black stump" which means: beyond the middle of nowhere, or something like that! For example the phrase can be used like this, "Oh you are travelling to Alice Springs are you? That's a bit beyond the Black Stump isn't it?!"

This "Black Stump" occurred because of one man's quirky sense of humour one day when he was out on the River Murray! However, I'm pretty sure it would've taken more than one man to haul this wooden stump out of the river and transport it to the front of his house. This is where the stump is now located.

I visited this stump not last week but the week before when I was on holidays. I came back to the Riverland for a few days to see my family and our current exchange student Jenny. I say current as she is our 10th exchange student so far. Jenny comes from Germany and is staying with our family for 10 months. She arrived in Australia in February this year.

Below are 2 photos of Jenny and me on the River Murray Queen, a paddle steamer permanently moored in my hometown Waikerie.

The photo above features an interesting koala sign we saw on the way to Paringa. There is a Koala sanctuary not far from that sign on the other side of the bridge. We visited the sanctuary for 10 minutes or so but didn't spot any koalas which wasn't very surprising... we were right next to the highway! The poor koalas probably hid in fright when they heard us roaring down the drive in our big mechanical beast (my parent's Ford)!

Since seeing this first koala sign I have spotted a couple of others around the Burnside area in Adelaide yesterday. However, the signs only featured an outline of a koala, they weren't quite as fancy as the koala sign in the photo above.

Anyway Toodlepip for now, I heard an old Englishman say that on TV last night so I thought I'd try it out... I don't think it suits me really. Oh well how about see-ya later? XD

*Katz*

Stories within a story

Life is full of stories. In just one day in my life I can come up with several different stories about people. Particularly in the job I'm doing now! I'm a checkout chick at a supermarket, but everyday I'm amazed at the many little stories that occur in people's lives. (This may be one of my reasons for my procrastination with my novel writing. There's so much detail, although it may be irrelevant for fiction writing.)

For example, today at work there was a man who was humming to himself the whole time while he was at my register! Okay so this is more like a mannerism, but there is surely a story behind how he came to always hum to himself whilst he is at the checkout!

When I worked at a bakery I once served a man who tried to pay for his purchase using keys- ordinary house keys. He said, "These should be worth something. How much can I get with them?"

He was elderly so he may have had amnesia but it was quite a strange occurrence at the time. I handed him over to another employee to sort out and eventually he handed over a $5 note for his purchases. That has to be one of the strangest stories that happened to me when I worked there though.

Other people will tell you the reasons why they are making a purchase, for example "We are having a party tonight" etc.

Even the smallest thing like going to the shops for half an hour can turn into a story about say... a person who tries to find a certain chocolate bar. They walk up and down all of the aisles in the supermarket until they finally ask an employee who tells them the chocolate bar isn't stocked anymore. Their reaction to this information can be the most interesting part of the story. They could either shrug this off and look for the product elsewhere, or they could complain to the employee about this and go on and on about why they should be able to find this chocolate bar or about their desperate struggle to find it and that if they can't find it how unfair it would be. This is a hypothetical story but these days shoppers aren't afraid to tell you what they think isn't fair.

But going to the shops is not the only story in people's lives. For example, last night I struggled a lot to get my printer to work. It still isn't working today. But my story didn't start from there. It started last night when I tried to submit my tax return. I was trying to lodge it over the Internet. This didn't work for some reason so I tried to print it out. That's when my printer trouble started and then my computer decided to slow down too. So in the end, one thing was leading to another and I finally decided to give up on the printer and computer for the night. This story isn't usually one you would find in a novel because it would distract the reader from the main focus point of the story. But I just thought it was fascinating how we can fit so many stories into our lives without giving them much regard!

Holidays

Okay. So. Finally it is the holidays and I can actually relax again! Starting from last Friday I officially have no more TAFE assignments to do until... 2 weeks time. Yuck. But still, 2 weeks of hols are better than nothing! Movies time XD

But now I have to work... so I don't have quite as much time to relax but that doesn't matter.

So many things have happened to me since the last time I've been on here. I had my 21st, yay! I got a job... yay. I have been using my new camera that I got for my b-day... okay I'm going to stop saying yay now! It would be nice if I could upload some pics onto here of my b-day but blogger just takes way too long. Hopefully one day I'll add some more.

I'm not a big talker atm. I need to really collect my thoughts and just focus on one topic but I have to go get ready for work so I'll talk to ya again some time!

Ciao.

Katz

Jennifer Byrne Presents...

Hi there,

I received a link last night from one of my writing lecturers at TAFE who suggested to watch a certain program on the ABC last night. It was called "Jennifer Byrne Presents" and on last night's episode Jennifer talked about "The future of Books."

There were 3 guests on the show and Jennifer interviewed each person on their opinions about whether less paper books are being read due to e-books, Kindles and iPads being used more often lately. They were also asked whether they thought e-books were a good way to get people reading or not.

Here is a link to some of the notes of the show, many other interesting topics were brought up.

http://blogs.abc.net.au/abc_tv/2011/05/future-of-books.html

If you would like to watch last night's episode (Tues 17th May 2011) for yourself, here is the link to watch it on Iview: http://www.abc.net.au/iview/#/recent

The show is usually broadcast on ABC1 on the first Tuesday of the month at 10pm.

P.S. Sorry that I haven't posted anything for so long. I didn't even have time to post the rest of my assignments up here from last year (Write Articles for Publication 2)! Although it did get very tiresome as I had to type everything out because I am unable to copy and paste text onto Blogger for some reason! I have now moved from Waikerie to Adelaide so that is one of my reasons for being busy but not the only one.