it’s funny how much can change within a year, if you just decide to change.
on march 23rd 2004 - one year (and a week) ago - i wrote a little memo to myself, the content being something like this:

i want to be more spontaneous. i want to see the world. i need to get rid of some obligations.

with these simple three lines branded/carved deeply into my (sub-)consciousness, my life began to alter.
over time, i shed some parts of my life that i wasn’t 100% sure i wanted to continue, and i rearranged my priorities. with this landmark decision finally made, everything seemed so easy - and from what i remember, it was.
soon, some friends and i made a trip to munich, just because.
since then, i have been to south tyrol/italy, hamburg/germany, berlin/germany, denia/spain, budapest/hungary and south tyrol/italy again (not mentioning the trips&excursions within tyrol).

i guess what i’m trying to say, is, that i’ve made a 90° turnaround, and i’m glad i did.
it may not seem that thrilling, but from what i used to do before (especially before fall 2003), it’s a radical change.
you can only win, except if you die from a traffic accident ;-).

in another burst of short-term-ness, nadja, günter, fabio, lorenz, andi and i decided to spend easter monday in the car.
well, not just in the car - in the car, on our way through south-tyrol.
(unfortunately, andi didn’t feel too good, so he couldn’t go)

imagine a complete day of latent ambiguity and continuous equivocalness. :grin:

 
the route was set like this: innsbruck - brixen - salurn - bozen - meran - naturns (chapel of st. prokulus) - reschen - innsbruck.

because somebody (err... ok, it was me) overslept, we had to skip salurn. but we wouldn’t have had time for it anyway, since we lost 30 minutes due to my lack of sleep, skipped salurn (=saved at least an hour) and still arrived 1.5 hours late in innsbruck.

in brixen we had a nice, sunshiny breakfast at the cathedral square. and although we were just about an hour away from home, we had a considerable amount of fun with ...dialect differences.

english: kaisers/rolls >> german/innsbruck-tyrolean: semmel >> south tyrolean: semmarlan

afterwards we drove down to bozen and strolled around for some time, taking fun touristy pictures and had lunch in one of the very few restaurants that were open...

meran was a little crowded, but nice. taking pictures of "arches" would be one of the nonsensical highlights. LOL
we₁ (all of us) also found meran’s nice little protestant church where we₂ (nadja, fabio, markus) decided to sing some songs.

unfortunately we had to skip naturns, and its tiny and very old st. prokulus chapel (german link), but we were short of time...

we did make a quick stop at the village schluderns, where we had some extra fun.
we obscured some letters on their place name sign and created "luder" (german for hussy), jokingly pointing at nadja.
the best part about it was that suddenly there was a huge column of cars driving past us and watching us take that picture...

our final stop, reschen, is interesting as well: about 50 years ago a whole village was perished (after the inhabitants were relocated some 100 meters uphill) when a new storage lake was created. today, the original church’s spire is still sticking out of the huge lake.

nearly 12 hours later we arrived back in innsbruck.

 
for pictures, check back in a week or two. i’m waiting until we have them exchanged, so i can post the best ones.

i’ve done a new time-lapse project on frog spawn, because i spotted some in my pond.
the first post about this can be found here.

[skip all of that and download the video]
 

the phase i wanted to capture, was from the egg until slacking.
it would be too hard to record a pollywog’s growth in time-lapse - too much effort and clearly not ethical.
you’d have to give them tiny living space so they wouldn’t jet around all the time, or even slow them down somehow. there would have to be a special (=unnatural) way of feeding. water cleanness and oxygen problems would arise, and of course plants etc. would give them unwanted hiding places...
and i don’t presume to do that. (the environmentalist is shining through again ;-))

anyway, i did some internet research and found out the duration of my project would be about 2 weeks. in springlike-pond-climates, of course. it turns out, at room-temperature those little creatures leave their gelatinous eggs in less than 2 days!

 
the eggs would float around a lot, so i needed to fixate them somehow.
[more...]