Little human being...

and such a wonderful one !

Harvest night

Yesterday, well actually tonight at 1:30 there was an incredibly noisy hubbub right in front of my window.
Which seemed a bit weird, considering that all there is is a field. And some trees. And another field. Oh, and a little road. And another field.
Turns out that they were harvesting the crops in the middle of the night with threes farm machines. They had reaped the wheat during the day and left the straw to dry. In the night it was made into bales, stacked and partly taken away.
It looked like a choreography...

Jam making

1. By far the most diffcult part of the process: find yourself a nice spot to pick ripe blackberries/dewberries.* Wear old clothes, bramble hedges can be pretty nasty and the juice tends to leave stains.
* In case you´re confused: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubus

2. Pick the berries. The one shown above isn´t yet ripe enough, they should be all-black and come of the stem very easily.

3. Wash the berries. I put them in the freezer until I´ve got enough for a large pot.
Put them into a pot, if you like with a bit of water.

4. heat and mash

5. If you don´t like having the seeds stuck in your teeth, strain through a colander6. Add jam sugar. I like it "fruity", so I prefer the one for two parts of fruit with one part of sugar

7. bring to boil according to the instruction on the jam sugar package

8. Actually, this step should be No. 1: make sure you´ve got enough glasses. I reuse old glasses with "Twist-off" lids and have never had any problems. Boil glasses and lids in hot water.

9. Fill the jam into the glasses - finito.
There´s an endless supply of jam recipes and instructions on the net.

Zoo Nordhorn

a bit of colour: Wildcat

As my camera is broken (once again) I thought I´d look though some of my old pics. The seal called "Lilly" was three days old when I took the photo.

A particularly cheeky budgie ...

...at the aviary in Nordhorn zoo, for Ingrid.

Just some pics

which have accumulated on my computerView from my study, yesterday evening.
For documentary purposes only :).

Young magot, Natur Zoo Rheine - a rather small but imo very good zoo close by.
And no, not a maggot but a magot or barbary macacque (Macaca sylvanus).

The grass is always greener on the other side

“The photographer's palette [is] a thousand shades of gray.”
H. E. Clark

Münsterland, close to where I grew up. And yes, it´s completely different from the Emsland! :)

Googlemaniac

Yup, I´m afraid thats me. And I´ve found a new toy called "google patents" where you can look up : patents. What a surprise.
As enclosure design is one of my "pet passions" (isn´t that an amusing pun...insert irony here) I like to look at cage patents and you can actually find things like a hamster elevator there!

Oh, by the way: Yes I´m back from Costa Rica (16th of April til 3oth of June).