Another dose of everyday stuff
It's been a pleasant day despite the weather, which has been miserable, alternating in a half-hour rhythm between sunshine and cold and windy with heavy rain. I spent the afternoon with Princess talking about art and the meaning of life, and why living doesn't always get easier with experience. Forty-two. I'm in a mellow and quietly cheerful mood, perhaps because of our conversation.
Now I'm home again, posting flowers and blogging. After this, I shall set to work on tweaking a few minor problems in the database in preparation for making the English-language version.
Today's photo is an architect's heartbreak. The enormous glass panes in the ground floor of the Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart keep shattering, this is the third to have broken. One can clearly see the direction of the stresses which fractured them in the larger photos on Flickr. Presumably the glass manufacturer miscalculated the rate or amount of thermal expansion, but in any case such damage is in the first instance always the architect's problem no matter who was at fault.
In related news The competition jury sat on Friday; given that it's now Saturday evening and I haven't had a phone call, one may safely assume that we lost. Ah well, it's all just blood under the bridge as Edward Albee said.
In other news there will be a total lunar eclipse tonight, starting just before 11 pm and ending at 2am. Given the weather right now, there will probably be dense cloud cover. I shall in any case wait up to watch whatever can be watched.
[Updated at 23:13] I just looked up from my balcony and saw the moon in the gap between rooftops, in a gap between clouds. It's about half in earth-shadow, divided at the equator rather than pole-to-pole, the difference is subtle but very disturbing; the shadow's edge is a vivid sunset-red and looks somehow ragged.
[Updated at 23:34] There's just a sliver left, about two-days-after-new's worth. The shadowed area is clearly visible against the night sky, a dark dried-blood red.
[Updated at 23:49] The whole moon is now in shadow, although there's still a vague white glow at its north pole. The shadowed area remains clearly visible. How annoying to realize that my camera does have a full-manual-control mode which I haven't bothered to learn to use, but which would (could, might) have allowed me to get decent photos of the eclipse.
[Updated for the last time, on Sunday] here's an excellent compound photo on Flickr. At last count there are some 3000 photos of the eclipse; there doesn't seem to be a consistent tag so just search for "eclipse 2007." None of my photos came out at all. Bah.
Labels: miscellany, night sky, weather
posted by Udge @ 18:08
5 Comments:
Too bad for the architect, but what wonderful images to photograph!
Very pretty, like heartbreak.
Cloudy here just in time for the eclipse too.
I wish I had read your site earlier! It would have been great to catch the eclipse.
The glass is pretty for a picture, but that has to be hard to bear as an architect.
Somewhat related but not really: the local university has a large architectural department. The building for this department was designed by professionals and they tried to add a moat around the building. This did not work and caused problems with the structrual integrity of the building. It was always an interesting story that the building with the largest number of problems on campus was the architectural one.
We've seen and photographed the eclipse too. It's funny to think that so many of us, in the night, were on their balcony with their nose in the air.
too cloudy here but i was out anyway looking for it ....
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