Yesterday I went to the "Family weekend event" at the local animal shelter in Berlin-Falkenberg.



The shelter is built in an interesting futuristic style, and it has even been used as a location for some films.
I met a lot of doggies, among them a big bulldog mix, or maybe American Bulldog, who begged me to scratch him through the bars. When I tried to get up to say bye, he gave paw and gripped the bars with his toes and groaned for more ... I couldn't help but stay with him until he was satisfied and went to play with his blanket instead. Phew.

There is also a minipiggy called Eddy staying at the shelter.



See more photos and read about my trip on Flickr!

I didn't adopt any doggie, piggy or kittie yesterday, but today I did ...

I went to a used clothes store to find a cheap skirt or something with nice fabric that I could use for a jacket sewing project. On the way out of the store I passed by a basket with stuffed toys. Something in it called me ... I couldn't help but go dig in the basket ...
And so, I found Serdar.

He was on sale for only 30 cents. ;_;



Serdar is watching me work:

Activists of Free Gaza will try to challenge the economic blockade on the Gaza strip and deliver a (symbolic) cargo of 200 hearing aids for a deaf school by boat.

I only found out about it today through Osama Qashoo's article in the Guardian today, and it seems quite interesting.

"Mission Statement
We want to break the siege of Gaza. We want to raise international awareness about the prison-like closure of the Gaza Strip and pressure the international community to review its sanctions policy and end its support for continued Israeli occupation. We want to uphold Palestine's right to welcome internationals as visitors, human rights observers, humanitarian aid workers, journalists, or otherwise.

Who are we?
We are these human rights observers, aid workers, and journalists. We have years of experience volunteering in Gaza and the West Bank at the invitation of Palestinians. But now, because of the increasing stranglehold of Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine, many of us find it almost impossible to enter Gaza, and an increasing number have been refused entry to Israel and the West Bank as well. Despite the great need for our work, the Israeli Government will not allow us in to do it.

We are of all ages and backgrounds. Back home, we are teachers, doctors, nurses, engineers, truck drivers, youth workers, musicians, secretaries, parents, grandparents, lawyers, students, activists, actors, playwrights, politicians, web designers, authors, international training consultants, and we even include a former Hollywood film industry worker, a former Marine, an aviator, and an explorer. We are Italian, Irish, Canadian, Greek, Tunisian, German, Australian, American, English, Scottish, Danish, Israeli, and Palestinian.

What are we going to do?
We've tried to enter Palestine by land. We've tried to arrive by air. Now we're getting serious. We're taking a ship."

www.freegaza.org

Even though I've got a pro account for Flickr now, I try to limit the photos I post there to the better ones and the ones with at least a story or an interesting subject.

Still, here are some photos I opted to not post back when I had a free account and a 200 photo limitation, but which I posted now ...



I bought a used phone from a very nice couple who live in this building in a "whiter" concrete highrise suburb of Berlin. Germans generally have very funny names, and this was a good example.

It was the evening of the great Turkey vs. Germany football game. While walking around in the area I encountered stupid German kids chanting "Turkey boo, eat my shoe", but I also encountered a valiant older teen Turkish boy who was wearing a Turkish flag bandanna, a Turkish flag T-Shirt, white pants and a humongous Turkish flag over his shoulder. WHY DID I NOT ASK HIM TO POSE FOR A PHOTO????



From the S-Bahn station Wedding I spotted this. But it isn't very representative - on this day there were pretty Turkish flags everywhere! Big and small, tiny and really huge!
Oh yeah, and some German flags, too, I guess. :op

In the end, Turkey lost, but they gave ONE HELL OF A FIGHT.



I went to buy batteries for the phone at a mall on Alexanderplatz, and the evening sky was nice and kitschy.

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Over to Mollösund, Orust:



The people who own this fisherman's hut must have found this piece of a shipwrecked sailing ship in the sea. Kick ass!

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In other news, I'm working intensively on the map overlay of Stockholm and Auschwitz, and it has given me repeated nightmares about endless concentration camps where I have to trace the outlines of all the structures.

I HAVE INTERNET AT HOME AT LAST

...

Accomplished July 31st-August 9th:

- Made a sketch of an overlay of Auschwitz and Stockholm with the help of Google Earth and some maps.
- Lettered Rampokan - Celebes pages 4-54.
- Mailed my Swedish ID card to mum so she can pick up something for me at the post office in Sweden.
- Fought my way to the internet (this, and the psychosomatic problems the hardships of it led to has occupied the most time in this period).
- Made an A3 sized version of this collage from scratch, to maybe have printed at some point. I've realised how many nice photos I have made since I got a digital camera, and they would look even nicer on my walls than the couple of crappy photos made with my Zenit film camera that I have there now. (Especially since we're going to refurnish the kitchen to make it more homely to create more Lebensraum now that Ilan is also moving in here.)
- Wrote a couple of Chirayliq entries.
- Researched changing the dripping shower tap by myself. I'm leaning towards having someone else do it, though. In fact I am hoping that it's a summer thing, since liquids expand when their temperature rises. V`(oo)´V
- I think I also figured out what was necessary for me to continue on my comic, after being stuck (again) for far too long.

In other news:



When I came back from Spain these two little plants had started growing in one of my pots, out of the blue.

I usually put the stones and seeds of fruits I eat in my pots. There is a little lemon or grapefruit growing shyly in the blue pot to the right.
But this was a big surprise. Out of the blue some weird plants start sprouting like crazy. They smell and look like tomato, but I can't remember having put any tomatos in there. Mum thinks they might have come with the earth, but that earth has been sitting in that pot for years.

And ... already on Tuesday Ilan will be here! Finally I have a reason to clean the apartment.

I don't have any contact at all with my dad. Ainur does, and so, recently he revealed to her that there was a period when he suspected that I was lesbian. As Ainur has witnessed, dad actually has problems with accepting lesbian women: he feels offended if he sees two women kissing in the street, etc. So this was kind of funny.

That period was before I started having confirmed male love interests a while after moving away from home. When they started to appear, dad was relieved that his suspicions had been unfounded.

But now that I think about it, in that period I was less of a closet lesbian and more of a "sworn virgin".

In Albania, there is an ancient tradition where the eldest daughter takes on the role of a "man" if all males in the family have died, and dresses in men's clothes and handles men's responsibilities. The gender segregation in the traditional Albanian society makes this quite reasonable. There are still some sworn virgins in remote parts of the country.

When my parents divorced, when I was 16 or so, I was very disappointed in them - especially my dad - and how they to me appeared to be self-absorbed, overly emotional slaves to their feelings and passions. I instead tried to mold myself into how I thought a father/parent figure should be. Responsible, always ready to help, calm and patient and a hard worker who puts the family first. Of course, I was just a teenager, so it didn't always work out, but that was what I aspired to. And I still try my best to be that way today.

Running after boys was not really something that interested me back then. Due to those pubertal hormone surges I had crushes on guys, but I never acted upon them. A while ago I was telling my boss and his girlfriend C. about sharing my bed with my son/pig Sergei when I was 17-18, and C. giggled that that was indeed the age for having a pig in your bed. I was a bit confused until I remembered that "normal" people have boyfriends and stuff when they are teenagers.

My sexual awakening came much later, on a fateful trip to Israel, when I would be scarred for life with a fetish for dark and hairy men. :op

That fetish for very manly men would seem to refute any suspicions of lesbian tendencies in me. But in fact I am open to bisexuality - it's just that I've never had the fortune of experiencing mutual attraction with a woman. Maybe because it's so common to assume that everyone is hetero, so spontaneous flirting usually happens with the opposite sex.  

Ilan pointed out that I have this slightly "butch" way about me that could raise questions. But at the same time there are obviously tons of guys who are attracted to me, butch or not. I mean, all I have to do is walk out the door and there are guys all over me. V`(oo)´V

Accomplished since I came back from the Iberian peninsula (July 28th-30th):

- Finished the guts of Klezmer book 2, sent off PDF for proofreading.
- Typeset Rampokan - Celebes pages 1-3 and title pages.
- Erased the Dutch lettering from all 74 pages of Rampokan - Celebes.
- Fixed my bike's flat tire.
- Worked on this blog book project for Epix.
- Was finally able to reach someone on the cell phone number supposedly leading to my building supervisor, whom I need to unlock the basement for a technician who has to fix my phone line so I can have internet at home again, only to find out that no one by that name was related to that phone (anymore?). WTF.
- Got a weird sudden flash of an idea for a short story comic when riding the S-Bahn to Wedding, and seeing an advertisement with the title "Up to 600 Euro reward!". (I had to write it down promptly on the only paper I had with me - a piece of cardboard for concealing my ID card in a letter to my mum so she can pick up some confidential mail for me in Sweden. That unfortunately delayed the sending of my ID card because I had to get another piece of cardboard for it.)
- Retouched and uploaded all my holiday photos. :op


See them all here.

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Something completely different, that I wrote weeks ago but hadn't published here yet:

I routinely have to handle Mac/PC problems, working in publishing with a PC. People (myself, for example, by mistake once) make CDs on Macs that can only be read on Mac computers (why is that even an option?!), people send me fonts that are Mac only, people compress files to un-Windowsy .sit archives, and file extensions for some reason often disappear when burning files on CDs with a Mac, so I have to try various extensions to get the files to work.

There are a few applications that are a big help with these problems, such as Stuffit for Windows, TransMac and CrossFont. But still.

Sometimes I wonder whether a refurbished Powerbook might not have been the way to go, after all, when I got a new laptop this spring after having fought as a graphic designer with 258 MB RAM each and 20 and 40 GB hard drives on my old computers, and a keyboard problem on the laptop. I had saved up some money, which I was going to use either for visiting the dentist or buying a new laptop. Guess what I chose in the end. (There isn't anything urgent about my teeth, I just haven't been to the dentist in four years or something. I guess I'll go when I have healthcare, soon.)

I am actually very happy about my Dell Vostro, and there are so many ways in which a Powerbook is actually inferior to it. The biggest reason is of course the price tag, those little Macs being redonkulously overpriced. But there's more.
- USB ports - I have FOUR of them, arranged in PAIRS, not just two, as far away from each other as possible.
- I got superior RAM, hard drive space and battery life with no additional cost.
- The CDs come out when I want them to, not when the computer maybe feels like it.
- As for the "virus" and "crashing" arguments, well, I've never had a virus on any of my Windows computers in my entire life, and (unlike previous OS versions - yay Win98!) XP really does not crash. As on Macs, the applications might crash, but to be honest I've had applications crash on me much more often on Mac systems. And on Macs I've much more often had to restart the system after some application crashed, which has almost never happened on my PCs with XP. Maybe it's because those Mac computers were not my own, handled with care as I handle all my dears, but I've seen the beach ball of doom much more often (so often I can't count) than I've seen the blue screen of death (once) since I've been using WinXP ... and I've worked a LOT more with PCs than Macs.

There are, of course, many very nice things about Macs (being pretty, for example), but since "everyone" is always talking crap about PCs, I wanted to bring light on some of the positive sides.

Of course, if Adobe weren't such tight-asses I might as well be running Linux.

Taking a walk in the area around here.



Cows grazing.



On a slope above some stupid golf course, the hurricane Gudrun uprooted all the trees a few years ago. Today, the whole area is full of raspberries. Most of them are not quite ready to be picked yet ...



... but there are ripe ones here and there.



We went to check out the remains of the dead moose calf that died in 2005. This is what it looked like in April 2005, and this is what it looked like in August 2005.



The skull and a few scattered bones are all that remains.



Nice teeth. But they should be brushed!



Orust Witch Project:



There is a cliff nearby that the previous owner of our house claims was a "cult place" in the olden days. It's one of (if not the) highest points here. Close to it, we found these three stone rings. Probably from some fireplaces set up long ago, but you never know ...

(By the way, I never dared to finish watching the Blair Witch Project. I watched it alone here at mum's house once. As I made a break in the middle, I made the mistake of reading a spoiler on imdb.com of how it ended. And how I saw the ending in my imagination probably surpassed anything that the actual movie could achieve, because it actually really scared me. I had some interesting dreams based on my imaginations around the film for a while after that ...)



Here is an ancient apple tree at one of the former small farms here that have been abandoned since a century or so. When the herring industry on Orust died in the early 20th century, life became very hard here. Many people left or perished in hunger and poverty. There were no forests here back then (all the wood had been used for fires under the herring pots in the factories). The forests of today have grown back on the abandoned farmlands within 100 years.



Ancient fruit trees in weird places, stone foundations and stone fences still remind of how the landscape has changed since then.



Due to the mild winters lately, the ticks are thriving like crazy. For some reason they like mum much more than me. Maybe it compensates a bit that mosqitoes like me more than mum.



Foxglove, back in our garden.

It is possible that I subconsciously manipulated the "Multiple intelligences" part, because my boundless arrogance would not permit me to be "less intelligent" than Ainur. :op

I regularly downtalk WordPress, because it has no word verification for comments, which apparently leads to a serious spam comment problem that everyone I know who uses WordPress and has commenting enabled suffers from. I used a (secret) WordPress blog at one point, and did not enable comments for that very reason (besides the blog being secret).

Meanwhile, WordPress themselves are proud of using Akismet, which catches spam comments from being posted and helps them shut down spam blogs. But the user still has to go delete the spam comments. (Don't they take up a lot of space on the servers?)

Blogger and even Blogdrive here have enabled word verification, and I've never gotten any spam comments since it was enabled. I often asked myself: why would a sophisticated service like WordPress not do the same?

The great WordPress lover Ilan pointed out that "WordPress is not a company... it's a movement and the PEOPLE run it." (I guess he knows I have a weak spot for rhetorics like that, with the word "the people" in all caps and shit. :o)
And luckily, among all those people, there are a couple who have taken it on themselves to write WordPress hacks with word verification for your comments, and are sharing it with everyone.

Gudlyf has made AuthImage, and among Peter's Useful Crap is Peter's Custom Antispam Image Plugin for Wordpress.

We took out a neighbour's hunting doggies for an evening stroll. Otherwise they only get to go out when/if they go hunting with him.





Some more photos here!