flung

After the green infatuation, i might slowly be fallin' for some Black&White, as evidenced by these 3 shots that i took within 3 minutes of each other.

Or it might have just been one of those flings.

Sky by Rothko

He doesn't often do them, but one of the skies last week was a genuine Rothko

Guillaume Nery base jumping at Dean's Blue Hole

World champion freediver Guillaume Nery and his girl and fellow champ Julie Gautier have just published the most beautiful freediving movie i have ever seen

freediving Siegburg

Turns out there's a bit of heaven about 2 hours from here. A pool in Siegburg, Germany, which is 20 meters deep and allows freedivers. It's called Dive4Life, it is very photogenic

and when you get to play there, bliss is all around

and 2 world records were set there by us; world's deepest noodle, and 0 to -20 back to 0 in 20(ish) seconds.

flying without fins

Made a new neckweight, Big Fat Bastard IV -even bigger, fatter & bastarder- and went for a test dive. My new approach to max dives is to treat them as though i'm going for a fly, trying to drift as long as i can. It went like this:



Turned out to be a new personal best. Been training hard for the safety i'm gonna do in Greece at the 3rd Mediterranean World Cup, but since i might get an opportunity there to do some deep(ish) dives myself, it's nice to have this in the back of my mind.

for Nadine

What Good Am I by Tom Jones by seaninsound

orange reflection

spring colors for ducks

Green crush still going strong, seems to be developing into a preference for willow

though grass and moss are extremely romantic too -especially when you're a duck cruising

Ceci n'est pas une grandmere Smith

I'm definitely falling in love with my window



but the theme of the day was apple. Hence the salut to Magritte

seems i'm also falling in love with green -but i blame that on a very cold and rainy spring: it is greener than a virgin frog around here.

the glass is gleaner on the other side

old fuzz

Why do most of my associations with the word 'fuzz' tend to revolve around variations of incompleteness, accompanied by a hint of tenderness towards anything fuzzy? Young animals are fuzzy, the women we love are never hairy but fuzzy, even the men we like we'll call fuzzy when we don't want to call them sasquatch -fuzz being an embryotic form of hair. Logic can be fuzzy when it's not fully formed yet, but calling logic fuzzy is not a devastating critique, is it? The logic can still grow an actual beard and become very scientific. And when we ask what the fuzz is, we usually imply that there's a child-like excuberance about an event that in and of itself needn't necessarily warrant such high anticipation. Justin Bieber springs involuntary to mind. Fuzz is youthful and has the softness of being not quite there yet, which makes it endearing in a similar way to babies.

Oddly enough, this quality of fuzz extends to the opposite as well: old sweaters, for example, acquire a whole lot of fuzz being worn and their weariness (excusez le joke) and fuzziness endeares us just the same. In that case, fuzz is a result of age, and though some of the fuzz might be as old as the sweater, due to it's softer nature and to the fact that the sweater was there before the fuzz, the fuzz is viewed as young relative to the sweater. It's probably impossible to have a sweater made of fuzz -and that fuzz would over time accumulate another layer of fuzz, some sort of metafuzz, anyway- so fuzz is always incomplete. There can always be more fuzz, its job is never done.

This endearing softness and paradoxical quality to make deterioration look youthful is probably one of the things that caught my eye and got me associating, when i saw this on my old travel bag



The bag underneath this fuzz is 14 years old and has been through more bagage belt hells and overstuffed abuse than i care to count. It is remarkable that it's only showing some fuzz; lesser bags would have ripped, exploded or simply laid down and disintegrated long ago. But it's not the bag that i photographed; it's the fuzz. The way this old fuzz managed to play with light as we were once again traveling and it was once again being thrown around carelessly made me a believer in the power of fuzz. The signs of wear and more to come made soft and youthful, that's the fuzz.

light weights

My father collected weights. Not for excercise -though moving them to every new house has proven to be quite the work-out- but because he had this idea that a philosopher is a weight that wants to way itself, and he was fond of the shine of old metal objects that had been used a lot. So i also have a collection of old nails, and tin inkpots, and all sorts of things that are a nightmare to pack but a little gift every time you unwrap them.

Today, in the window, the weights proved quite light.

beholders

Twice this week i saw exceptionally beautiful eyes -two on the floor



and one in the sky

the colors of my house

Well there's redredredred



a cloud of white



and the kind of blue that suits a dog saying goodnight



and of course lots of variations on yellow and orange

why did the chicken wear the pants?

It needed more plockets.

A couple of weeks ago, i thought i saw a chicken wearing baggy pants.

Now it was disgustingly early in the morning, plus i was tired from filling up and hauling boxes like you do when you move to another house, and it was only a passing glance as i was in a bus, so i figured it was more likely my brain had gone to sleep a bit again and i had a semi-waking dream, rather than having actually seen a chicken in pants. I texted a friend about it, saying that if i saw a giraffe with a tie, i'd take a day off.

But last week i had to move my bike to the new place, so i figured i might as well ride it there, and because the image had stuck with me, i decided to take the same route as the bus, on the off chance that i'd be able to check if i had been dreaming or not. What i saw was this:



Now it is very obvious Mother Nature has a healthy and bizarre sense of humor, but i'm kind of hoping this is one of man's creations, like the chihuahua. Or maybe it's the answer to why the chicken crossed the road: to get a pair of pants.

yellow beyond the hedge