Yay, spring!!

It's not quite as colorful as I dreamed of, but it's a start ... !! Precious!

Turtle attack

The camera strap will be defeated ... !!

Mmm, berries

Swedish raspberries and Norwegian blueberries. Yum. :-)

Pandas at the Nordic Ark

I got a request from a Youtube viewer about pictures of the red pandas at the Ark. I've posted some from previous years, but this year the animals are new. The Ark's previous panda, a female who had produced several cubs there, had gotten too old to breed last year when we were there, and they were getting ready to put her out to pasture, so to speak ... she was going to be sent to another European zoo, I don't remember which one, that doesn't participate in the breeding program so she could live out her last years in peace and quiet.

Earlier this year, in late spring/early summer, two new pandas arrived to begin their lives together at the Ark. They are still young, but hopefully they will get along well and will produce new cubs in their new home. Like the giant panda, the red panda is a difficult species to breed in captivity, and not all zoos manage it ... but the Ark have been successful 13 times in the past, so I for one have every confidence that they will manage it again with these two. The male came from somewhere in Finland, and the female came from Chester Zoo in the UK.

This is where my fellow Youtuber comes into the picture. She is apparently mad about red pandas and she lives close to Chester Zoo, so she visits there often and has seen the female panda - her name is Lily - many times. You can see some wonderful footage on her Youtube channel, here. She was interested in seeing pictures of Lily in her new home and wondered if I could help. Yees ... well, yes and no.

I do have some pictures of the panda enclosure from this year's visit, but not really any good ones. Last weekend was very hot in that part of Sweden - like 27 in the shade - so the pandas were, like most of the other animals, very lethargic and quiet. They kept to the shadowy treetops. I got some shots, but I think my correspondent will be disappointed, I'm sorry to say. I can't even tell which of them is Lily. She seems to have unusually pale facial markings, so if we had seen them up close we'd probably have been able to tell. But as it is, well ... You take a look.

Spot the panda ... :-)

Tanumine, Anne Ida, KAS: Do you have any better pictures? I know I probably had the best camera, but you spent a little more time at the panda enclosure than me, so ... maybe? I remember that someone showed me a couple of shots where at least one of the animals' faces was very clearly visible. Can you post those somewhere - whichever one of you has them :-) - so our panda fan can see? :-)

And seriously: Next time we will have to go sometime a little later in the year.

Same, but better

Does anyone remember this blog post - pictures I posted back in March of an unfortunate situation where someone had left a bike locked to a rain gutter, but had left it there rather too long? Bike having become partially enclosed by ice? Well, here's the same thing again, but so much prettier. Bike left locked to a lamppost by the cathedral ... now become partially enclosed by the sea of flowers surrounding the building in memory of the July 22nd victims.

Money for nothing

Anyone else seen these around downtown? I wonder if it's an art installation. Maybe they're trying to say something scathing about our capitalist system and fundamentally flawed economy. But I wonder who paid for the copier and/or printer that they've used.

Oslo from the water

Some pictures from last weekend. Not very good ones. What can I say, Oslo isn't all that pretty. And the weather wasn't all that good. What are you gonna do. :-)

Lilacs in bloom

A couple more pictures from my new camera. These are some closeups of one of the lilacs that grow outside my building. I love lilacs ... they smell so wonderful and they are such a beautiful sign of summer. The dark purple ones are my favorites, but sadly they are by far the rarest around here. I'm lucky enough to have one pretty close though. :-)

Gratulerer med dagen!

Some more pictures from my new camera. Like I said, there were more fun things to shoot at the Folk Museum. :-) The weather was soo much better than the forecast said. I'll never trust yr.no again. And I can tell I'm going to have lots of fun with this camera. :-)

New camera!!

I've got a new camera! Yay!! Happy! :-) I've been wanting a new camera for a while ... not because the old one is broken as such, it still works fine for the most part, but it is two and a half years old and that is quite a while in the world of the digital camera. As I'm sure all my readers will know. :-) It's also kind of broken ... it's fallen to the floor a few times and been banged about quite a bit, and it doesn't work quite right all of the time.

What it mostly struggles with is the macro setting, and that really sucks, because I take quite a lot of macro shots. You know, the turtles and whatnot. Then the night before the trip to Hemsedal, it looked like it had actually really broken. It couldn't read the memory card at all, no matter what I did. And it had worked just fine a couple of hours before and nothing had happened to it in the meantime. o_O Of course I freaked out. The next day I brought it to work with me ... well, I always bring it to work, I bring it everywhere :-) ... and I showed it to O., who managed to fix it with some CRC product that we sell. :-D I was soo grateful ... I hated the thought of going away on this once in a lifetime trip with Tanumine and the others and not have a camera that was working. :-(

So that really decided me that I would get a new one. Like I said I've been thinking about it for a while, and now I just decided that there's no way in hell I will risk being at Tanumine and B.'s wedding with no camera. No way in hell. :-) Today seemed like the perfect day to buy it, since it's Constitution Day tomorrow and I will have lots of opportunities to experiment with the new camera. :-) I can hardly wait. :-) So I bought it today and already I'm so happy with it. It's exactly the one I wanted. I probably should have gotten another slightly different model - I was thinking this one - but I just wanted one particular camera so much. This one. Coolness.

It's so tiny, I can hardly believe it. Minute. It weighs hardly anything. I love the color. :-) But of course I do understand that more than appearances are important here; it takes great pictures as far as I can see so far, and it has all kinds of fun settings to play with. Unfortunately the most exciting thing I've had to take pictures of tonight is the view of the sunset from my balcony.

All the cool effects, they don't really show up that well with this kind of picture. I should probably have crowd shots or something. Tomorrow ... !! :-D

Spring is here!!

Not In Daily Use

Board game night at Calyx and N.'s place tonight. Across the street from them someone had parked a bike against a wall. Not recently.

Yes, you really are seeing what you think you're seeing. Item is not in daily use ... o_O

Pictures from Barcelona Zoo

Of course I had to visit the zoo while I was in Barcelona ... it's supposed to be a good zoo and it has a reptile house. :-) So I just had to go there. The weather was wonderful, warm and sunny, almost more like summer than spring. Aw. Here are a few of the many many pictures I took. :-)

Like many zoological gardens, Barcelona Zoo is infested with peafowl. It was quite extreme, in fact. They were everywhere. Photo ops galore ... ! :-D

There were daisies growing on one of the lawns. Daisies!! In the middle of March! These people don't know how good they have it, I tell you.

The preserved skeleton of a whale that washed up somewhere in Spain a few decades ago. Mmm, whale ...

There were quite a few turtles in the reptile house, and one of them was ... in a really good mood. He kept trying to mate with one of the females - if indeed it was a female - and she was SO not interested. :-D I'll be uploading a video of it on Youtube soon. Something to look forward to. ;-)

One of the elephants was having its feet cleaned by one of its keepers. You may not be aware of this, dear reader, but foot rot is the leading cause of death in captive elephants. It's a very dangerous condition, so proper foot care is essential for pachyderms in captivity. Barcelona Zoo's elephant keepers were taking advantage of the lovely weather to carry out this chore outdoors, so visitors could see it. Smart. I was pleased to see that they practice protected contact, at least while in sight of visitors. What you see in the photo is testimony to how used this animal is to this procedure ... standing still while the feet are tended to may become boring for the elephant, so another keeper served as a distraction with a bucketful of tiny treats (radishes, strawberries, goodies about that size). The elephant - as you see - folded its trunk away on the top of its head and stood with its mouth open waiting for treats to be inserted. :-D As Homer Simpson would say, FOOD GOES IN HERE! :-D

Pictures from Barcelona

Some of my best shots from the trip. IMHO. :-)

The longest bench in the world, by Antoni Gaudí in Park Güell.

Interior, Santa Maria del Mar. The church made famous by the novel Cathedral of the Sea. A brick, but well worth reading.

Facade, Casa Batlló, also by Gaudí.

Interior, Sagrada Família. Guess who. :-)

There were soo many lovely and decorative streetlights.