Nature meets suburbia. I like the sound their feet make on the asphalt.
Month: March 2011
110304 Northington Grange
This morning, we went to Northington Grange just north of Alresford. It’s a fine 17th Century house with a monster of a neo-classical shell bolted on to make it look like a temple. It’s a tremendous building to be sat quietly in mid-hampshire.
This gives it the look of some kind of institution or hospital, or a lego building where you don’t have enough of the right bricks, when viewed from either side.
I guess it was trendy, this Greek Revival style, slopped together with Roman Cement. Surely it is very impressive and that is the idea.
If you go round the back, you see some of the original exterior.
It’s a beautiful location, with a lake and open parkland all around. The lake glistened in the late winter sunshine
Your Debut Album
Here’s mine:
The rules:
1. Go to Wikipedia and click Random Article
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2. Go to http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album
3. Go to flickr’s “explore the last seven days” http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
Third picture, no matter what, is your album cover.
Put it all together to make the album cover
110203 Total Immersion
No idea who I’m writing to, but… hello!
Another four o’clock yoga session followed by that oh so nice lie in till time to go to the office. Which is a one minute commute. Finishing off bits and pieces ahead of a week off starting now. My weekends are Fridays and Saturday anyhow. It feels like my first full week off in a very long time. At 10 I went to Southampton airport to pick up Derek who is over from Ojai.
The dialogue this afternoon about what is a religious place, a religious mind, and into ideas and hope getting in the way of what might be called religious. Not religious in any kind of traditional sense, after all that is just ideas repeating themselves through the ages, but a sacredness, a newness.
This evening I took the students swimming. Swimming and yoga go together so well. With the yoga comes more awareness of the body, and more awareness in the water means you can refine the strokes, fine tune your style. I swim in something towards the Total Immersion style, as few strokes as possible per lap and keep the body low in the water, maximising the time when the body is longest. The principle is the same as in yachting, where slim, long boats go faster than wide short ones. So to minimise the width there is a rolling in freestyle so the shoulders aren’t ploughing the water forward, instead the tilt of the body makes an easier glide. There was no sign when swimming of the sickness or weak feeling; I didn’t even think of it.
Signs of spring all around – daffodils opening, green shoots pushing up through the leaves and many young fresh nettles. Perfect for tea.
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Steps stepped 8410
Scrap Book: Cornwall
There’s really no place like it.
110302
YouTube account dead but not quite gone. My counter claims were rejected:
Thank you for your counter-notification. Based on the information you have provided, it appears that you do not have the necessary rights to post the content on YouTube. Therefore, we regretfully cannot honor this counter-notification. It has not been forwarded to the original claimant, and we will not be able to restore your video.
We unfortunately are unable to assist further in this matter.
Proceeded with a too-cheerful “Hi there”
I have replied asking not for restoration of the videos but just short term access to the account so I can download my walking videos, the ones I don’t have here, so they are not lost forever. But I suspect I am replying to an address that doesn’t get read. It’s impossible to contact YouTube directly by email or phone. You have to use online forms.
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Woke up at 0400. My new style is to do a yoga session whenever I wake up, and then rest again if it’s too early. Trouble is, I fell back into deep sleep and by 0830 I was in no mood to get up.
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My brother M’s stag do this weekend. From the clues he’s been given he thinks we are going tank driving. We are not. It’s gearing up to be a memorable weekend.
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A sunny day, with lunch outside. Again, sitting absorbing the rays, waves. From a friend’s facebook comment after watching The Secret Life of Waves: Waves are made of MAGIC. He might be right.
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iPad 2 looking super scrummy.
110301 Marching
March no less.
Feeling so much better, the sick dizzy feeling a mile away and the tight head easing up. Yoga. Yoga. Yoga. It’s the bomb. For real. I recommend the Sivananda sequence. It’s a classical sequence of 12 major asanas together with some pranayama (breathing techniques) and counter postures (gentle postures in the opposite direction to the major stretch one has just done. With relaxation between every posture. It really is a total workout and touches everything. I mean everything.
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More energy at work, but none of the temper. Fixing a list of all the Krishnamurti videos we have (over 600), for the Centre library, grouped by type of event and location. It’s been quite a lot of work to code them all by genre, but soon we’ll have for the first time the entire list sorted correctly, making it easy for guests and customers to find what they want. This will also help us to organise it online when we get the download shop going.
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YouTube wrote back asking me to put a couple of extra paragraphs in my counter notification because the claim was made in the USA:
“I swear, under penalty of perjury, that I have a good faith belief the material was removed due to a mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.”
“I consent to the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court for the district in which my address is located, or if my address is outside of the United States, the judicial district in which YouTube is located, and will accept service of process from the claimant.”
So at least they are looking into it, and for the first time a human wrote the email asking for this. There is hope of getting my account back. Hopefully in time to post the next walking video, as next week I might finish the last two stages of the South Downs Way, from the far eastern edge of Brighton, to Eastbourne.
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Steps stepped: 2580
Oil spill link suspected as 10x normal amount of dead dolphins wash ashore
They may have disappeared the oil but they can’t disappear the effects
The discovery of more than 80 dead dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico is raising fresh concerns about the effect on sea life from last year’s massive BP oil spill.
The dead dolphins began appearing in mid-January along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama in the United States. Although none of the carcasses appeared to show outward signs of oil contamination, all were being examined as possible casualties of the petrochemicals that fouled the sea water and sea bed after BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded last April, killing 11 men and rupturing a wellhead on the sea floor. The resulting “gusher” produced the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry, releasing nearly five billion barrels of crude oil before it was capped in July.
The remains of 77 animals – nearly all bottlenose dolphins – have been discovered on islands, in marshes and on beaches along 200 miles of coastline. This figure is more than 10 times the number normally found washed up around this time of year, which is calving season for some 2,000 to 5,000 dolphins in the region. Another seven dead animals were reported yesterday, although the finds have not yet been confirmed by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
One of the more disturbing aspects of the deaths is that nearly half – 36 animals so far – have been newborn or stillborn dolphin calves. In January 2009 and 2010, there were no reports of stranded calves, and because this is the first calving season since the BP disaster, scientists are concerned that the spill may be a cause.
via Oil spill link suspected as dead dolphins wash ashore – Nature, Environment – The Independent.
Falling Awake 