Turn off your lights! Earth Hour 2009 is coming!

On Saturday, 28 March 2009, at 20h30, lights will be turned off throughout the world for an hour.
The big switch-off is part of the annual Earth Hour campaign of the Worldwide Fund for Nature/World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The campaign was initiated in Australia a mere two years ago, when 2.2 million people in Sydney switched [...]

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Astronomy talk: “Black Holes made simple”

Tonight, we attended a public lecture by Prof Malcolm Longair (a very eminent British astronomer and cosmologist) (he even has his own Wikipedia entry) at the MTN Sciencentre at Canal Walk. It was the first time I’d been inside the Sciencentre, although we’d probably walked past it dozens of times.
It was fantastic that the talk, [...]

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A red sky morning

The powerful south-easter is blowing smoke from a big fire in the mountains near Somerset West across the City.
So this is what the sun looked like this morning.

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Free-range, cage-free humane chicken farming? Perhaps not…

In June last year, I wrote about an organisation in Colorado, USA, called the Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary.
I’d received their compelling Letter from a Vegan World via a South African group of Vegans calling themselves Elated, an acronym for “Enhancing the Lives of Animals Through Ethical Decisions”.
I hadn’t visted their blog (Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary) for a [...]

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A Cape White-eye takes a bath

After Flandrum Hill posted a cute little story of Canadian chickadees, I remembered that I had recently taken some photos of a little Cape White-eye taking a bath in the little birdbath in our front garden.
As you can see, they are small green-yellow birds with a startling white circle around their eyes. They are very [...]

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Postal woes….

“Thank you for your patience,
currently all our agents are busy.”
Repeat that mantra about 100 times, and you can imagine that I am perilously close to exploding.
And WHY, you may well ask, am I wasting my time with this?
Because of UCT’s idiotic bureaucracy.
Scenario:
A non-UCT individual needs to be reimbursed from one of our funds.
In order [...]

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Pictures of the Australian fires

For some frightening images of the bushfires near Melbourne, have a look at this link. According to another article, “millions of animals have died, including koalas, kangaroos and wombats” in the Australian bush fires.
Those courageous firefighters have my greatest respect and admiration. The devastation and often quite gruesome things they’ve seen would make my stomach [...]

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A Valentine’s Day Photo-shoot at Oude Molen

Fairly early on the morning of Valentine’s Day, the students who had attended the adult education Digital Photography Course at the Pinelands High School arrived at the Millstone Farmstall in Oude Molen Eco Village (my favourite place) for our final group session: a photo shoot out in nature!
Once we had assembled, our excellent teacher and [...]

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The moon over Cape Town

Before the third session of the Digital Photography Course, we had to complete this project:
“Using different shooting modes that your camera offers, capture and print a set of 5 photos for inclusion in a glossy publication called ‘The Real Cape Town’ – through the eyes of Capetonians”.
Before you get excited, the “publication”, incidentally, was fictional. [...]

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Remembering the fallow deer of Rhodes Memorial

One of my favourite bloggers from an exquisitely beautiful neck of the woods (literally, I think) in Canada recently put up a post about the deeply calming effects of observing deer grazing.
And that reminded me about when I was still little and first came to Cape Town to live here with my mom. It would [...]

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