instead of hanging around, surfing, chatting, working, idling, waiting for the sun to come out, i did something completely different today, namely helping to chop two trees. which was kind of fun. haven’t done any “real” work for some time, and now i’m feeling quite tired. and happy.

yesterday i stumbled about the gathering‘s latest live dvd, a noise severe, recorded in march 2007 in chile. a few months later, their singer, anneke van giersbergen, quit the band. (which, in my opinion, is the end of the band; if they will continue, they will be something very different…)
the dvd contains a lot of songs from their older albums, like the “debut” mandylion (their first album with anneke and, in my opionion, their best one), nighttime birds, how to measure a planet? (which i don’t like too much) and if_then_else. the first two can be more categorized as atmospheric doom with progmetal and gothic influences, while how to measure a planet? drifts off into a very experimental alternative rock/prog direction; the last, if_then_else, is more into a trip rock.
well, so much about the facts.
i’ve already mentioned several times that mandylion is really good. and i’ll do it again. it’s one of the few albums (next to sentenced‘s frozen) where i like every track, to which i can listen for hours, again and again. so filled with energy, groove, raw power, emotions. so beautiful. (my favorite song is probably leaves, whose music video you can watch here.)
well, mandylion is their best album, i’d say, but they also have other good ones. one which i don’t really know—shame on me!—is nighttime birds, mandylion‘s successor, which seems to be very good, too. and there’s if_then_else, which has several really good tracks, like the melancholic saturnine or a beautiful instrumental called beautiful war.
somehow it’s really a pity that i never managed to see them.

“the day you went away
you had to screw me over
i guess you didn’t know
all the stuff you left me with
is way too much to handle
but i guess you don’t care”

from saturnine by the gathering.

clouds fucked up my plan to watch today’s lunar eclipse. so no pictures from me, just me being tired the whole day… :-(

[...later this day...]
ok, here’s one photo from tonight, though it doesn’t depict the sky:

some more photos from today:

the barbwire picture is actually a 1:1 excerpt from the image generated by the camera. and the ivy picture is a downsampled version of a 3616 × 6368 panorama made out of five photos.

floating:

not floating:

can’t decide which is of more beauty…

today, the sun was shining bright, even though it was really cold outside. i decided to do a small trip. here are some impressions, taken in another nature protection area nearby:

actually, i was able to catch a bird flying high up in the sky with my telephoto lens:

i’ve got another toy:

well, it’s more a tool than a toy, and it’ll become an integral component of my daily life… at least, for the next three months. here are some close-ups:

just more or less finished a project. well, it’s done except actually receiving the last part (which i don’t have to do myself), putting everything in an envelope and sending it off. that feels really good.
and my todo-list is clearing up, too. just kicked out five organizational points i wrote down, and one i forgot to write down. this feels even better.
now it’s time to concentrate on getting some interesting things done :)

yesterday, we had the third rendition of the try to bring the north western german tradition kohlfahrt (literally: cabbage tour; a description in english can be found here) to switzerland. (actually i missed the two previous renditions…)

i’d guess that for everyone except the people living in north west germany, it must seem utterly strange to see a group of people going around with a hand cart, playing a strange game involving two balls rolling around, and drinking hard and soft booze all the time. whatever. we had fun.

actually, this was probably the first kohlfahrt featuring a view on the alps! (at the first rendition, one couldn’t see the alps from the place where it took place, and even though the second was at the same place than this time, the weather was too bad apparently…) here are two shots of our view on the alps:

finally a view on the beautiful sunset we were able to watch: