Winds and Breezes

I don’t know if it’s me, or not. I suspect it might just be me.

It’s Friday. I was at work on Monday, and that’s been it for the week. I needed a break and had scheduled this week off. I was supposed to get through quite a lot of stuff that I don’t have time to do from one end of the week to another… … … but I didn’t get to do very much of it.

Initially I was supposed to go surfing in somewhere sunny this week but abandoned it as it was too much hassle to organise plus it would have destroyed my target of clearing my credit card by the end of May (that’ll be next week… ) and anyway, I had stuff to do; I wanted a few days of doing Nothing. And being left, more or less alone, and not being hassled.

Two and a half weeks go, however, I had an accident and that spiked my plans to do nothing. If nothing else, it factored in an unscheduled trip to Cork to take it back to its home garage and I wound up losing two of the four days off to that trip. Yesterday I had a kitesurfing lesson, and I slept it out in the morning too. So another day gone. I would have had a kitesurfing lesson today had the weather cooperated, but it didn’t so instead, I got to sit looking morosely at a computer searching for inspiration for a project. That doesn’t matter so much although the project is going nowhere.

At various times, both of my flatmates passed remarks that grated on my nerves ever so slightly. One of them, on hearing that I wasn’t going to work, and that I had spent the afternoon, told me I had a great life. His tone of voice was ever so slightly resentful and tinged with envy. I don’t need that attitude on my holidays given that a) I work hard b) I worked hard to get to where I could work hard to achieve this and anyway even though I’m not in some exotic country, I am ON my holidays.

When I got back from the car collecting shenanigans, the other one met me in the hall and in response to “Hello” offered me “I’m in a rotten mood” as a response. Today, she asked if I’d had a nice break and relaxation. I pointed out that I hadn’t actually had time to relax since I wasn’t at work. She pointed out that I wasn’t at work and of course it was a break. I really must learn to lie. Or, if you’re going to ask a question, don’t contradict the person who’s just answered you if you don’t like the answer.

To be honest, I don’t feel like I had much of a break. There were too many things I had to do that I didn’t schedule doing and that I didn’t want to do. Accident related nonsense. If you like, the only real couple of hours I had that weren’t really coloured by any of 1000 things I should be doing were the three hours I was kitesurfing yesterday.

The net result is that after almost one week off, I’m probably more stressed than I was on Monday. There’s something seriously wrong with that scenario

If I knew 4 years ago what I know how, it’s entirely possible that my whole online life, instead of being the chaotic mess that it is, would be somewhat more organised and efficient. But when I started writing a blog four years back, on blogger, I didn’t expect to morph into a photoblogger, turn into a sports photographer, or, indeed, any sort of a serious photographer.

Winds and Breezes was my first “own” domain. It’s been through Drupal hell, and had major hosting issues which saw the site move to Blacknight fairly pronto. I still have outstanding issues with the previous hosts who appear to have vanished. It’s been a soap box for any amount of stuff over the time. Unfortunately, in that time, I’ve also built Dancing Shades of Light, the photoblog, KiteLense.net, the kite photoblog, TreasaLynch.com, the marketing site, NowILiveHere.com which has gone precisely nowhere because I just don’t have time to run it. Despite some people actually taking the time to get involved. I have a presence on RiseCreative, Flickr, Pix.ie. I am building a site on ClicPic at the moment, although that will, ultimately, at some point in the future, when I have time to finish building it, replace TreasaLynch.com, if I ever get the PayPal integration sorted. I am on FaceBook and Bebo although I can’t remember the last time I looked at Bebo. Any time I look at FaceBook it’s in frustration that I ever signed up in the first place. It’s all rather tyrannical, and tedious in some respects. Social networking has worked on Flickr for me; it works better on internet fora in general than it does on social networking sites.

If I had known 4 years ago what I know now, I might have planned it a bit better. I think I need to start consolidating stuff, and uniting websites. Work on treasalynch.com is under way. I am going to shut down nowilivehere.com for the time being. Flickr has over 6000 photographs on it and two things need to be done 1) photos need to be cleaned out of it and 2) what’s left needs to be sorted.

I am considering wiping KiteLense.net and starting anew with that site. It actually has some decent links around the place so even if I clear out the DB, I will almost certainly leave the structure of the site intact; just start with new content.

I am also considering wiping Dancing Shades of Light, or a lot of it anyway. I like a lot of the photographs that are up there, I just don’t like what I’m writing there so much. It’s a bit nerdish.

Windsandbreezes.org, for the time being, I am leaving intact. I have a soft spot for the site. Currently Dancing Shades of Light is pulling in more traffic, usually through image searches. However, because I just don’t have time, and because the world is not the most interesting place at the moment - much of what I’ve written lately has been rather negative - it is entirely likely that updates will be extremely erratic. I’m sorry for the negativity by the way. Maybe I’m just very tired and close to burn out and in need of a holiday and that is coming soon.

As for Bebo, I won’t be there, and as for FaceBook, I really am starting to think that it’s a completely irrelevant site in the grand scheme of things.

Otherwise, you’ll still find me on Flickr here, and my general user name for most of the fora I frequent is Calina.  You’ll find me on boards.ie/thepropertypin.com/photography-on-the.net/surfphotographersforum just to name but four.

I was out this evening. Ages ago I promised a friend I would come and talk to her Beaver pack about my time in France to facilitate them in getting their yellow badge. I’m not up to speed on the different badges you get with Beavers, but this is linked to “other countries” and amongst the things they have to do to get the badge is talk to someone who’s lived in the country that they are learning about. That was me because they did some barrel scraping.

Not because I’m particularly bad at this kind of stuff but because people tend not to volunteer to do stuff like this. So my friend was stunned when I said “fine, no problem”.

The weather was beautiful so after I had answered the last question about the colour buses were painted in France, I went and drove to Skerries to take photographs. Skerries is in pre-summer mode. The only boat in the harbour of any note was a catmaran which limited my photography options a bit.

But I had a go anyway.

There has not been a lot of photographs around here lately for which I apologise. best burger hartford ct test

I was in Celtic Note yesterday. I remember when Celtic Note was a brilliant specialist music shop. Now, however, it’s not a brilliant specialist music shop. I was in there for something specific which they had sold out of. And I even bought a CD. But I was overwhelmed by just how appalling the range of music on sale in there was. For somewhere that originally used to have a very decent range of folk music, it does very badly in comparison to even the folk section of a supermarket in Brittany in France.

I have a better selection of music in my bedroom.

I mosied on to HMV to see if by chance they had what I was looking for (they did not) and was horrified by the travesty which is their Irish and their classical section. HMV Grafton Street used to be the very best music shop in the country. It might still be but frankly that’s not saying very much.

I can understand why more and more of my hard earned cash is going to iTunes. It’s got everything I could want, and I get it immediately.

This was going to be a rant about how tyrannical the vast amount of info on the net was, but firstly I’m going to whinge about Play.com. They have decided that if you don’t live in the UK they will charge you the euro prices for whatever it is you want to buy.

Now, that would be fine except sterling has plummeted against the euro lately so theoretically the cost of stuff bought from Play should be coming down. It is not.

Bah.

More Bah.

I only wanted the 3 series box set of Coast which is going to cost nearly 70E now so frankly I’ll go over to Borders in Blanch and buy the series individually for 21.99 instead.

Win for a real life bookstore unless they don’t have them any more in which case…

Bah

Bah.

I happened across a pile of rubbish on the Guardian’s website today which was so rubbish it made Max Gogarty’s piece look good and it was still more rubbish than that. It was written by Ruth Fowler, a name I’d happened across on Bad Science but had more or less ignored on the assumption that she was a once off. I was wrong, and naive and for that I will whip myself roundly. When she arrived on the Bad Science radar, she was yammering on about yoga and how fake it was in the West, grosso modo. I didn’t bother reading it because I don’t do yoga and I don’t have any existential issues with it in terms of it being Real, or whatever. I did two yoga courses at some stage when I was rather stressed out. I’ve tried t’ai chi as well and frankly I found windsurfing, surfing and kitesurfing much better on all fronts. However, that’s irrelevant. Today she was judging people by appearances, and one particular aspect of appearances. I’d love to know where the Guardian manages to find the shit writers they have blogging for them. Their Polish blogger wrote a monumentally shit article about stereotype jobs against her today as well.

But back with Ruth Fowler. She doesn’t like fat people apparently. Obviously, she’s entitled to her opinion, but then I’m equally entitled to voice mine about her piece which was that while there is a lot of scope for recognising that it is not good that the average weight of the nation is going up, her piece was rubbish. Rubbish. And it does nothing to address the problems which is that a) people are all different so that some people put on weight more than others and b) some people have illnesses that exacerbates weight issues and c) people are much more than their appearance. I ploughed through the comments and have realised that there are people who will forgive her anything because they want to have sex with her, there are people who will forgive her anything because she reflects their own shallow prejudices and there are people who understand that the real world diverges from the ideal world by some distance. Fortunately there are rather more of them than of groups 1 and 2. But not quite enough more in my opinion.

I had a look at her profile and then at her bio on her personal website and am wondering why anyone thinks she’s even remotely interesting, or interesting enough to write books about being a visaless stripper in New York. She lived in Nepal for a while. Big whoosh deal. Her writing in the Guardian’s website is so sufficiently bad that she hasn’t displayed any talent at all yet so I can’t imagine her book about her fascinating life is going to be worth very much.

It does, however, beg the question as to what is interesting? I mean I couldn’t care less that she lived in Nepal or that she undressed for a living in New York. I really don’t care. I do care that the rest of the world thinks it’s interesting and that she appears to be narcisstic enough to believe that she’s interesting. And yet, here I am writing a blog piece on her. Argghhh. Conflicting interests. I really want to highlight why she’s such a monumental waste of space and here I am adding to the space.

My head is about to explode trying to resolve that.

There’s a character in one of the Terry Pratchett books called Lady Lilith who talks about the distance you can go to make yourself interesting. It’s all in the way you describe it. In other words, the number of people who can call you out on the story you are spinning gets all the smaller the more you go at it.

I think this is what she’s trying to do. It’s just…I don’t think she does it very well.

For the past while - I can’t remember why I chose it - my tagline has been The World Is Really Not Enough for a Space Tourist. I chose it after I got sick of all the angling queries google was sending my way because my tagline used to be “It’s a fishing rod, not a chain”.

I put them on a par with “What is the stars”, asked by the Paycock in Juno and the Paycock which the Department of Education inflicted on me when I was 17 years old. Arrgghh. I didn’t like it then and from what I remember of it, I wouldn’t like it too much.

Sometimes, the world is too much. I have decided to spend my next holiday in Ireland for several reasons. One, the Ryanair website wouldn’t give me any sort of a reasonable fare to Fuerteventura in May when I eventually got a fare out of the site (I seemed to get quite a few errors back). Aer Lingus don’t fly there at this time of the year, and I couldn’t find a flight only charter on the Budget site and Topflight wasn’t loading for me. Ebookers were sending me lovely 300 and 500E fares with Air France and Iberia and they involved spectacular numbers of changes. Also, the package operators were screwing me on a single supplement. Secondly, I might have to go to Fuerteventura in July anyway to a kite competition so will be going through all this again later. Or soon, if I can sort out those dates now as opposed to the middle of June. Thirdly, it occurs to me that if I don’t go on a sun’n’surf holiday costing around 1100E depending on the flights which I was having some time sourcing, the likelihood was that my credit card bill would be fully clear at that stage and you know I like that feeling. I’ve done it before. Now I really want to turn the screw and front load it before I start spending serious money again.

So I’ve decided to stay in Ireland and already I can think of 10,000 things I want to do. I will look into either surfing in Cork or kitesurfing in Dublin depending on the weather. I’d like to go to Belfast. I’d like to go to the Giant’s Causeway. I’d like to drive the west coast, or some of it. South Kerry is very attractive too. A part of me would like to sit down and do some of the design work I just don’t do because my life isn’t really conducive to it. Another part of me would like to take over my dad’s garage for a week and do the mosaic work I didn’t have time to do this winter. Or do tapestry. Or play the piano. But above all else, not feel I’m losing out by not going somewhere and maybe get some sleep too; that would be good. I’m tired and when I go on holidays I tend to pile on the pressure in terms of places to go things to see and do and worry about whether I’m missing anything. It’s very bloody stressful and really I don’t need it right now. Also, I have to bear in mind that I want to go kitesurfing in Brazil later in the year.

When you look at it like that, a week of going nowhere is actually vaguely attractive.

I made this decision at some stage this afternoon after another abortive attempt to arrange the holiday, this time in France, in Hossegor, if only because flights to Biarritz were somewhat easier to come by than flights to Fuerteventura.

Anyway.

I was in Easons this evening, because bookshops can and often are my downfall. I escaped intact, fortunately. But that was after I spent a monumental amount of time perusing a few Lonely Planet books, not travel guides but what I might just christen envygenerators. One of them was a year of adventures, another was something like Places to See Before you Die and Walks to do Before You Die. I leafed through the Places to See one and the Year of Adventures and then realised that in a way, they were interesting in that I liked the idea behind them, but - and here was the problem - I didn’t necessarily agree with all, or even many of them.

I’ve toyed, on and off, with the unpaid leave idea over the past few years. One of the key points against it is that it’s not necessarily easy to come by where I work, plus, it costs money. But deep down, if I had the funds to do it, it’s something I would seriously consider. I’m just not sure where I’d go. When I was really stressing out over the holiday a few weeks ago I was thinking about all the things/places I wanted to see, do, whatever. As I searched through the options, interesting things popped up, that I might never have thought about. So while I was in the bookshop today I was thinking about that, plus, the Lonely Planet’s books about stuff you shouldn’t miss out on. It wrecked my head a little because one thing which stands out to me is that the opportunity to do all this stuff is so much More now than it was 100 years ago.

Take the Antarctic. I’d love to see it. I’m not in tune with the amount of money required, unfortunately because I have to be realistic about the things that do cost me money. But comparatively recently, it wasn’t a place you necessarily expected to come home alive from. Take China. My mother remembers the prayers for the conversion of China at Mass. I suppose they still sort of need to be converted from that particular point of view, but the key part was that it was effectively closed off. Now you can do three day tours of the place. 18 year old kids do gap years and travel the world and occasionally even see stuff. (I’ve read Don’t Tell Mum, okay?)

In addition to the Lonely Planet books that I mention, I’m pretty certain that the BBC have published similar books and I also believe the travel sections of various newspapers variously have lists of unmissable items. The world is full of them, however.

What has space got over Planet Earth?

Anyway, although this is not an exhaustive list, and it is not prioritised in any way, here is an overview of some of the places I wouldn’t mind going, some of the things I wouldn’t mind doing, specialist holidays where applicable. I don’t expect to get them all in, and a lot of them for practical reasons will never happen. But I won’t be tempted to buy a book about them either. Anyone is welcome to suggest other stuff in the comments.

1. Photographic tour of the Antarctic. I came across this in looking for stuff to do in May. It costs money I don’t have
2. New Zealand - kitesurfing and photography.
3. Lofoten Islands
4. Drive the coast of France from north to south visiting as many lighthouses as I can.
5. Landmark Properties in Ireland have a couple of lighthouses set up as selfcatering. I would like to stay in one or two of them.
6. Grand Canyon
7. Yosemite National Park
8. Yellowstone National Park
9. Colorado
10. Kitesurfing in Brazil, some islands four hours west of Perth that I’ve forgotten the name of
11. Surfing in Mauritius, Hawaii (but not really big)
12. Photography in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland
13. Monaco Grand Prix before the sport becomes even more utterly meaningless.
14. Top of the Eiffel Tower (again)
15. Gorges du Verdon in Provence (again)
16. Avignon, again
17. Barcelona
18. Kitesurfing in Tarifa because you have to
19. Naples and Pompeii.
20. Skiing in the Alps.
21. Neuschwanstein.
22. Vancouver
23. Macchu Piccu
24. Nazco lines
25. Cashel
26. Newgrange
27. Gibralter
28. Great Wall of China
29. Terracotta Army
30. Piano tuition in a remote part of France
31. Nazca lines
32. Mosaic holiday somewhere anywhere it’s not raining.
33. surfing in Fuerteventura
34. Surfing in Cork and Kerry
35. Photographic trip west Cork and south Kerry.
36. Glenveagh National Park, Donegal
37. Seven days in Munich
38. Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
39. Tampere, Finland
40. Fjords, Norway.
41. Legoland
42. Photography course, south of France
43. Surf photography course, Hawaii
44. Celtic Connections Music Festival, Glasgow
45. Tonder Folk Festival, Denmark
46. Train journey from Cologne to Luxembourg (I think - it’s years since I did it).
47. Greek Islands
48. Taj Mahal
49. Western Australia (surfing and kitesurfing)
50. Polynesia.
51. Alaska (per Matt)

Warning: vaguely surferchick post coming up.

In fact, you might want to skip. I was back learning to kitesurf on Sutton. Sutton is nice. It is where I first got on a board for more than 3milliseconds and when it’s quiet, despite certain disadvantages, it’s a nice place to have lessons. It’s currently a scene of carnage in terms of broken shells.

I know this because I don’t, if I can possibly avoid it, wear bootees. I hate trying to put them on, and I hate trying to take them off even more. I’m not afraid of the cold per se and I’ve a very decent wetsuit.

But my feet are not currently suffering from the cold. They just look like they have been through a cheese grater instead. It’s not that they hurt too much or at all, they just look like someone wanted to torture me in some small way.

I don’t know. I’m not sure how much protection bootees would be against the vicious nature of the broken shell population on Sutton Beach. I mean, some horrible nasty thing got into the wetsuit and bit me at some stage during the session and I never noticed it at the time. It doesn’t hurt either, it just looks sort of nasty. However, for aesthetic reasons, if bootees prevented some of the more artistic efforts, I’d be tempted to go there…very tempted.

One of my secret pleasures in life is the little bundle of joy that is xkcd. I’ve a feeling it might be an acquired taste but enough people around me have acquired it for me to be reasonably sure that you don’t have to be clinically insane to get it. Or else we all are.

Anyway on 1 April, xkcd and something called questionablecontent did some sort of fandangery that if you went to xkcd you got redirected to questionablecontent.net which is another comic strip which I had never heard of. It got me right between the eyes. Since then, instead of blogging, or posting meaningless drivel on any of the four internet fora I frequent, I read the whole way from the start, and that’s more than 1000 comic strips.  It took the guts of six hours which is basically all the free time I had since I found the site, outside of work and sleep and driving to work and a trip to the camera club last night.

I found it hilarious. It’s like a soap opera on speed in cartoon format. I am totally hooked on this more than anything since Calvin and Hobbes.

The Politics.ie saga continues to generate some discussion. For any people who are unaware of that particular kerfuffle, there is some disagreement between Politics.ie and a firm of solicitors in Dublin which has resulted in politics.ie moving host from Ireland to the US at the weekend and oh God miles of words on the subject on politics.ie itself, a bundle of other blog entries which with all due respect I am not going to link to.

I have problems with this. I have problems with the attention being devoted to it and since I’m adding to it, that’s hypocritical of course. But the big problem I have is this: I honestly think that - regardless of what many of its contributors may think - politics.ie is largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. But if you spend any time at all reading it - for however long you might last - what comes across is that it is a community that is full of its own self importance and doesn’t do anything much other than the equivalent of beer cooler chat.

But of course, nothing has to be rational per se. Some of the debate is now hilarious.

How does this impact me? Well…it doesn’t affect me at all if - and only if - I don’t actually libel anyone on this site. But many contributors to politics.ie think they are fighting the good fight on freedom of speech and not being gagged.

The problem is this: your right to the freedom of speech is limited by your responsibility not to uhem abuse it. In other words, you can say what you like provided you can stand over it.

A lot of people don’t seem to understand this, sometimes I feel.

I don’t know what is going to happen with politics.ie. Unlike a few commentators I have, in fact, seen the thread in question and what interested me most was not so much that there was a comment that potentially could not be stood over, it was the reaction to warnings that there was a potential problem which amounted to accusations of bias and efforts to gag.

I don’t know about you, but that’s hardly fighting the good fight on freedom of expression either.