City View

Even though noting this plan right now is largely an excuse to post one or two more shots of San Francisco, I'm looking forward to doing a two day photography seminar in and around the city at the end of September. Details here. Chris Honeysett has a wonderfully sparse way of looking at things and clearly has a detailed knowledge of San Francisco and how it looks through the lens of a camera.

Meanwhile, this public sculpture is called "Cupid's Span" and sits close to the Bay Bridge, on the Embarcadero. It's part of the overall redevelopment of the entire area following the serendipitous clearing of the ugly freeway that used to blight the area prior to 1989. In addition to the park which contains this sculpture, the main attraction as a result of the regeneration has become the Ferry Building. I'll post a bit more on this later once I get round to doing something with a matching picture, but suffice it to say it's become one of the premier gourmet markets in San Francisco and the centerpiece to an entire waterfront area.

Alien Invaders

A couple of months ago I was woken up in the middle of the night by this very loud "crack" coming from somewhere in the house. It sounded to me like something quite important to the structure somewhere had snapped. Anyway. I went around the place but couldn't see any signs of damage anywhere, so gave up and went back to bed.

This weekend I noticed that one of the main supports for the deck on the outside of the house had split, revealing a large and well-fed family of termites living in it! I think I have finally figured out what the noise was - it was the sound of $2,500 vaporising in an instant, because that's what it will cost to replace this chunk of wood. Bugger. And that's working on the - as yet untested - assumption that the family hasn't moved out from its original home to colonise other bits of wood like, oh I don't know, shall we say the house frame?