We went out for a hike up the local hill yesterday, regardless of the 35°C temperatures; we were just so incredibly done with being locked up under AC for three days in a row. Altitude helped somewhat, but it was still hot.
Dry grass and brush in golden sunlight is my favourite motive recently, and I wonder if there’s some symbolic meaning to it, or is it just aesthetics. The practical part of my mind is concerned with the fire hazard aspect of it, since it’s peak fire season and the island is covered in dry kindling.
Speaking of which, I watched footage from the Spokane, WA wildfire in America, which spread to the residential area and burned down 600-700 structures, and that’s data from yesterday morning, and the fire is completely uncontained. The worst part is seeing the houses burned down to ash, and green trees still standing around them, which means those wooden houses are by far more combustible than the vegetation, which is indeed an engineering anti-achievement, and the only other time I’ve seen anything like that was in the Los Angeles fire. Pro tip: in Europe, we stopped building houses from wood after everything burned down multiple times and we figured it’s a bad idea. We didn’t do it because we ran out of wood, but because we ran out of wooden houses.
Also, I heartily recommend just copy-pasting Croatian firefighting solutions instead of re-inventing the wheel. We made all the mistakes, corrected them, and now we have it down to science, and we are so much better at it than the Americans it’s not even funny, and we’re a small country of 4 million people. But I digress.
Biljana’s RF 100mm f/2.8 L macro just arrived:
That’s the first time that we had to replace an optically perfect lens (Sigma 105mm f/2.8 EX DG HSM) because of electronic issues – focus hunting, aperture opening randomly, IS glitching or not working at all… It’s a shame, really, but it’s just a matter of having to accept reality that it’s malfunctioning, instead of countering it with “but it made such great pictures”. I think it’s better to say that we got excellent use from it considering the faulty electronics, and we also got it very cheaply used, so it gave us very good use for the money. But trying to push it further would mean that Biljana would leave the macro lens at home because she wouldn’t want to deal with the glitchy behaviour. So, now she has a lens that should be optically identical, except for focusing even closer, and everything that was broken on the Sigma should now work fine. The last two times we took pictures of hermit crabs I was getting much better yield with the Sony 90mm G macro, simply because she had to wrestle with the broken autofocus on a moving target in the macro range. The fact that she managed to get some good shots regardless is a testament to her skill and tenacity, despite the lens.
Taken despite broken electronics.
I’m thinking what the lesson is. Perhaps it’s that you sometimes just have to solve problems with money, instead of trying to wrestle with broken gear and trying to push through the pain. It’s not worth it.
Apparently, it reached 38 degrees Celsius in my town today. I have a fairly large courtyard, enclosed on all sides by various surfaces. I went outside to douse myself with water pumped up by an electric pump from six meters underground. I assume the water is around 8 degrees Celsius—the only thing that provides any real relief from the heat.
Of course, besides the oleanders, aronia bushes, and all the other plants that need watering, with everything becoming completely dry every single day, there is also a plastic flowerpot saucer that I fill with water for insects and birds. It was dry, so I filled it up.
After several minutes of showering and cooling myself down, all that water ended up on the concrete in the courtyard, right in the middle of the scorching heat. I picked up a towel and began rubbing my hair dry when I noticed a feral pigeon perched high up on the TV antenna of the rectangular house on the other side. It was watching me intently, waiting for me to leave so it could fly down to the water.
I continued drying myself, walked another two or three meters, and looked at the pigeon again, but by then I was too close to the house and could no longer see the antenna. I kept drying myself and glancing around, waiting for the pigeon to fly over to one of the buildings in the part of the courtyard from which it could see whether I was still outside.
But it was nowhere to be seen—and neither, for that matter, was any water, except for the water here around me.
I continued drying myself, and the pigeon still did not appear. Then, by chance, I turned toward the neighboring house and saw a blackbird, a sparrow, and another smaller bird perched in an ancient, distinctive, and magnificent beech tree—all of them perfectly still, waiting and watching.
The pigeon must be able to see them, because they are all perched very high up. In fact, I know what can be seen from the roof.
Clearly, it does not need to check directly whether I am still in the courtyard. : )))