Post christmas hue , pre new year resolutions

Dear sisters , what is this ? Am I the only scattered one left out there ?
Have you both become "unscattered" ?
I must admit I am still definately scattered and I hope you are too.

Here is a little post christmas / pre new year Quiz on the origin of words :
( from a book lying around that had been under the tree )

Quiz
a)Latin for "who is?"
b)Hindi for "unclaimed property"
c)Chinese for "escape"

Clue
a)A ball of yarn
b)A skeleton key
c)A love letter

Karaoke
a)Japanese for "singing under water"
b)Japanese for "howling"
c)Japanese for "empty orchestra"

Slogan
a)An Algonquian prayer
b)A Celtic war-cry
c)Russian for "repetition"

Boudoir
a)French for "sulking room"
b)French for "gun room"
c) French for Peeping Tom"

Theasaurus
a)A riddling lizard from Greek mythology
b)A treasure chest
c)The book of Theseus

Aardvark
a)Swahili for "grandmother"
b)Dutch for "earth pig"
c)Croatian for "Jesus"



Thats it for now , you can send your answers now if you please and they will be posted in the new year . I am sure that you can not wait. Be strong.

And now for a series of Happy Birthday images for the scattered sister number one !
( Yes, one day late , I am sorry but I have lost track of dates due to christmas indulgences ,home made carrot cake and 15 episodes of the Killing)
But my instinct did not let me down , I knew that your birthday was a few days after christmas :)

Here is my birthday present to you , a postmodernist dress from London, I hope you like it.




And here is a lucky coloured sneeuw vlok blob for the new year :






And to peacefully and gracefully end all my brabbles I present both sisters and compagnons and family and friends with a song in appreciation of a lovely christmas , it was great.

Eartha Kitt , Cest si bon

( Thankyou Sister Two for introducing this amazing singer to us :)

Lots of Love
Happy New year and what are your new years resolutions ?
Mine are to do a tap dancing course and to be healthy and happy and to keep to my resolutions!

S3

P.S. Let the wise Owl look over us and protect us all :)

The winter dance

Dear all ,

Here is something beautiful to treat our eyes. It is a special dance that will keep us warm during the winter months to come.
Just click on the following grey orange words
Winter dance
By the way , i would love one of those dresses for christmas! Dear mama, maybe we can get the sewing machine out and make a family costume for all of us to dance around in , incase we get fed up up the sherades? I'm sure dear Papa will be very happy to participate:)

That's all for now,

Take care and keep colourful



Love ,

S3

new tracks and the cavewoman

Dear Sisters,

It has been a while. The crushed moth is now a distant memory...and the clocks changed, which means night comes in early now, like an inky sandman who does his work by making the air thinner, stroking your ankles with a cold breeze and filling your lungs with a sleepy sigh that longs for cosiness and sleep. The moon sits half-finished in the sky staring at you with a cheeky vanilla smile. Turning yellow as it moves across the sky, ever so slightly.


Would a cheap telescope on offer at the local cheap supermarket, I wonder, in terms of quality, would it be close to what the first makers of telescopes would see, or would it be Even Better? I do not know. If I were to look through it, would the planets and the stars be like my marbles collection let loose in an art class?
I do not know.
I said to them: imagine a vacuum cleaner is sucking the planets to one place, would it look like this?


Here is a poem on this subject. I think it is so beautiful.
My trainpass is getting full of scribbled destinations. I love travelling by train. I see lots of different things. Church spires and rippling water, falling leaves, and a railtrack that takes me to a village where only one train an hour passes in either direction, taking turns, on a single track. Geese fly overhead, I work in the train, the journeys give me peace.


In time for november I got the flu' out of my system and today I secretly opened your cards, S3, which arrived two days early. I opened them today in an effort to stretch out my birthday. I so love the glitter, royally applied, and what was the snailwoman about? It was very kind of you to miscalculate my age.

Love from S2

A fish

Love and Patience from S3
I am waiting to get started !
Hopefully we sisters will catch a giant rainbow fish of inspiration and productivity !
and it will guide us to a creative island of flowing creative-nessness
Good luck to us all !
Keep dancing and singing !

visual notes from Europe

The heat wave of an Indian summer in Central Europe...





The phantom of the blue dress strikes again in the streets of Amsterdam. A new fashion is out on the run ! Beware ! Soon the dress worn over head will catch on ! Run !




Twin sisters sitting near a lake , contemplating the ducks in Brussels.




A new school year has been launched ! Lets aim for the moon !




Treasures in windows of Prague...






Czech sweets ....





Can anyone relate to this feeling of cleaning up junk ? I can ....





And last but but not least , a kafkaesque cinema , a great place for a midsummer nap...



To be continued ....

S3

Messages from the homefront

Dear sisters,

I have returned from my annual visit to the land of America, with a new collection of snapshots.











Meanwhile at the homefront:

Justin Bieber has been reduced by Jip, from greatness to barely worthy of a six-year-old girl’s attention, in just four months. Rosie still proudly wears her T-shirt with his likeness, despite her brothers mocking, and declares her love, although her marriage plans to JB have been cancelled. She is realistic, she says. When she is grown, he will be old.

Jip, instead, is learning the lyrics to Californication by the Red Hot Chili peppers and sings the chorus “Hard core soft porn” to heart’s content; this is in preparation for his first guitar lesson next week. He announced he is a fan of rock music in general, when asked by the music teacher what he would like to play.

Californication-singing is the result of my attempt to broaden my son’s musical rock horizons, with a YouTube browsing session. He was stuck at Queen, citing “Bicycle race” and “We are the champions” as favorites. Nothing wrong with Freddie of course, but there are others, too.




School is back in full swing with hockey, swimming, fencing and lice alerts during the week. There is a time sucking quality to it all. One week, woosh gone, second week, woosh, gone. On Monday I am sucked into the school vortex and on Friday afternoon I am spat out again for a brief reprise. Mandarins are back in the stores, next to the pepernoten, which means it is nearly Christmas.

I am back to the writing and the struggle. Should it be this hard?
I am giving myself a deadline to sort it out.

If I haven’t found my way by Christmas, which is really damn close, I shall look for a job once more, involving writing contracts rather than prose.

So, back to the drawing board.

S1

posting the metaphor

"I think it's wonderful. I don't know what you are photographing but the fact that you can see it, is wonderful." said the gardener of the butterfly no larger than the nail of my thumb...earlier this summer.

Dear Sisters,

You don't see much nature where I work. It's mostly trucks and pallet-moving machines and other big and dirty machines of which I am not sure what they are meant to be. The floor thuds every time they pass by on the main road: often.

They move by in a slower procession when a large crane soaring into the sky as high as an apartment building touching the sky moves by at walking pace...you'd expect to see a man with a flag walking in front.
I love those moments, when time, no, I mean the hard business of business, screetches to a slower pace, slowed by the sheer weight and scale of things. It gives the road, otherwise roaring, a dignified gait, indeed, a sense of gravitas and occasion.

And there are also flashing orange lights which match the daily different smells that waft through the harbour, which seem to me to be the nasal equivalent of disco-lights. Some days they smell of biscuit dough. Other days of a bitches' brew of chemical concoctions of a dubious nature, thick like cough syrup, which spell t.o.x.i.c. and artificial in different coloured words every day... Were it all not so sickly my synesthaetic self would be having a constant field day. If it smelled better (or, preferably, not at all) it might add a certain je ne sais quoi to my workaday existence... which instead I brighten up in other ways. The orchids certainly help.

Yesterday, I killed a moth by standing on it. It was fluttering on the polished industrial floor of the showroom where I work. I first saw a blur and wondered at the natural tones in the otherwise sterile environment. What could it be? I approached it. I imagined it might be a bit of a hot moth, and that it was trying to ventilate itself. Auto-fanning for moths if you like. I blew on its wings and it froze. Then I realised that it was trying desperately hard to fly.

No doubt it had ended up there when the half-ton battery was delivered from storage by a fork-lift truck. Such an industrial environment is not a happy place for such a delicate creature to be. The icy blue floors and the red columns and the greenish window frames and the electric green windows all terribly at odds with the bold appearance of this rough creature's nature: quite a big moth.

I decided to give it some help, and take it outside and put it in the bushes where the wind, that sticky harbour air, as described above, might help it take flight..

As I picked up the moth with the paper I saw that its fat body was half crushed, its antennae were part-lame. It fluttered its wings more persistently as it lay on the double folded sheet of paper as I walked the distance to the door, and I felt its soul in my hand through the vibrating paper, which amplified the fluttering motion of the wings like an ominous drumroll. Once out the door it fell off the paper and dropped to the ground. I tried to launch it on the wind, knowing it was all to no avail. The creature couldn't fly. So I did the only thing one could: I covered the moth with the paper and stamped on it.

Afterwards I felt a flash of a white after-image of the moth nearby.
I told a co-worker about what I did to the moth. She said: "It is probably really grateful and will reincarnate as a butterfly."
Who knows. Maybe she's right.

Big kisses to both of you and much love!
S2

A view through a kaleidascope in Prague

I thought our blog needed a litte bit of music and dance so I have included a little song and video for us all to enjoy. You will maybe be suprised to know that I do this exact same dance every day just before dinner time! Lots of love , S3

press this sentence to watch the music !

A little walk around the block in summer time Prague

Love from sister numero tree

Rambling Roses

Dear sisters,
This is my new favourite word Rambling Roses , rambling means rambling |ˈramb(ə)li ng |
adjective
1 (of writing or speech) lengthy and confused or inconsequential.
2 (of a plant) putting out long shoots and growing over walls or other plants; climbing : rambling roses.
• (of a building or path) spreading or winding irregularly in various directions : a big old rambling house.
• (of a person) traveling from place to place; wandering.
DERIVATIVES
ramblingly adverb
ramble |ˈrambəl|
verb [ intrans. ]
1 walk for pleasure, typically without a definite route.
• (of a plant) put out long shoots and grow over walls or other plants.
2 talk or write at length in a confused or inconsequential way : he rambled on about his acting career.
noun
a walk taken for pleasure, esp. in the countryside.
ORIGIN late Middle English (as a verb in sense 2) : probably related to Middle Dutch rammelen, used of animals in the sense ‘wander around in heat,’ also to the noun ram .


Im now back in Prague after a month's break. It's sunny and warm and I think the Indian summer is preparing for september. Here are my rambles of july and august in photographic form.

This is the beautiful Paris Airport greeting me and A. in colour, I think we were just happy to get away from the bowels of Europe, everything seemed beautiful and new. A little holiday really can clear your mind and give you new ideas.







This is what happens when you eat a Glace Macaron in Rouen , mentioned in a previous post by S2. I was there and I found a painting to illustrate the experience. We actually floated from the earth's surface with the sugar rush. Amazing experience. The angel in the middle is the Macarons glacées Angel.






This is my hand in shadow form in Edinburgh light in the staircase of my good friend.






A photo of an old japanese photo of hair being groomed.







And this is a Burger King paper bag transformed back into a tree by a talented artist called Yuken Teruya. I think it is quite a beautiful message.






A photo our mama made when she was in Russia some time ago.
I hope she doesn't mind me posting it on the blog. I think it's a very beautiful picture.



And finally here is a little film I made in Edinburgh. It's called A Summer Breeze
I hope you enjoy it.
I hope you are both well and I love you both very much !
Take care and enjoy the last few days of august.

S3