Titirangi Storyteller

Gone Mushrooming

Titirangi Storyteller — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:37:37 +0000

I know it’s rude to say – sorry, I’ve not been around, but I’ve been busy. So – I’ll reach back to my Estonian roots and say that I’ve been mushrooming. Literally… Went to the Coromandel for a short holiday and photographed mushrooms to my hearts delight. Came home and discovered there are untold mushrooms in my own garden that I’d never noticed before… I can just nose them out. Like a pig after truffles I suppose.

I was going to post one here – but somehow I inserted my favourite eight without intending to. So here they are. What do you think?

Amanita Muscaria

Common mushroom
Ramaria, also known as reindeer antlers
Common Brown Mushroom found at the side of the road
Amanita Muscaria

Amanita Australis

Amanita Muscaria

Mushroom in my garden

Safer on the Dark Side

Titirangi Storyteller — Sun, 12 May 2013 13:42:31 +0000

Sometimes you want to walk in the light, but it’s just too dangerous and you have to find your way in the dark…

Searching for Dystopia

Titirangi Storyteller — Sat, 11 May 2013 12:13:30 +0000

Why else would we build this?

Birthday picture

Titirangi Storyteller — Fri, 10 May 2013 13:01:21 +0000

This is what happens when your husband is also a photographer. And you go out for your birthday dinner. And you’re all dressed up, looking good, feeling good. And you ask him to take you photo cos it would be nice to have one on your birthday, to mark the occasion.

But he’s so busy taking photos of everything and everyone else, that he totally forgets. So you end up with a reflection of yourself in a sheet metal column.

It’s not quite the same thing…

Baboons live in Paradise

Titirangi Storyteller — Fri, 03 May 2013 10:04:09 +0000

If I was a baboon, this is where I would want to live. Hmmm… I’m pretty sure I’m not a baboon (though there are those who might disagree, I’m sure) but I think I would still like to live here.

Two sides

Titirangi Storyteller — Thu, 02 May 2013 09:34:27 +0000

Coupla squirrel monkeys playing in a palm tree. I suppose Peanut the Monkey might have been more tolerable if he could have played in the trees year-round. But half the year he was stuck indoors… I wonder if I would like him more today if I ran into him again.

Mournful Gibbon

Titirangi Storyteller — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 05:55:48 +0000

It’s been a while since I posted a shot of my primate friends. This is Kera a Siamang gibbon who’s just moved into the Auckland Zoo with her partner, Iwani… She’s a tree living gibbon, native to Sumatra, Malaysia and Thailand – one of my favourite corners of the world.

I’ll be heading off to Thailand for a two-week holiday in August – and I hope to track down some of her kin in the wild and get some shots of a wild gibbon… I gotta wonder – do they all look so mournful?

Autumn Lingers

Titirangi Storyteller — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:15:27 +0000

Those in the northern hemisphere seem to forget that those of us in the southern hemisphere are deep in the midst of Autumn. And a most beautiful Autumn this year… I can’t remember the colours ever being this vivid…

Sorry for being absent – still convalescing a bit – and, I suppose, taking advantage of the situation – as one does…

Playing in puddles

Titirangi Storyteller — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 03:45:21 +0000

Remember when we used to run and jump in puddles instead of carefully walking around them… fortunately, the raindrops have never grown up and got so dull…

Red Sky at Morning

Titirangi Storyteller — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 13:38:51 +0000

You never know what you get when you shoot the dawn. It didn’t look like the day would be much. And then, well, here is the sun peeping over the horizon, painting the sky an untold number of explicit scarlet hues…

By lunchtime I didn’t feel so well and by 2 there was a rash on my lower left leg. By 4 I was in bed feeling feverish. Slept for 16 hours, sweating and chills, with the electric blanket turned up to 10.

Went to see the doc the next day – she said do not pass go, do not collect your things – go directly to hospital.

Shifted here and there around the Emergency department, managed to score an IV drip and a dose of anitbiotics.

Around 4am they moved me upstairs – another dose of meds. Serious chest pain. EKG. Sweats, nausea. more bloodletting. It passed at last and I slept fitfully – dreaming all sorts of unsatisfying dreams – demands for decisions I couldn’t make.

Chest x-ray, experts – just a reaction, not a cardiac event.

Four more days of drip drip drip as the minutes stretched to hours and the hours to infinities – in a ward with three other women, who came and went. All pleasant. Even the poor Pakistani woman with a bad heart, fluctuating blood pressure and out of control sugar. She had every right to be cranky. But merely dropped her head and wept when the kitchen sent her her first meal after 2 days of nil by mouth – pork chops. My worries were so small…

My time so big. But it did come to an end.

And I have the chance to look at the photos I took that morning.

Red sky at morning – sailor, take warning!