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Monday, 7 January 2013

Welcome 2013;


bye bye old year...with a tequila sunrise..
we do not mourn you...






New Year  was greeted with a soft pink sky at 4:52 AM




...04/01/2013...the daily chores resume...



05/01/2013...no change in the scenery...05:11AM
  



06/01/2013  
baked bread for Breakfast...it is 08:53 AM ...waiting to cool..



outside  8:55AM....stepping over the shadow...



08:56..chillies are ready to harvest...quickly before breakfast...

...just wondering what else will change in 2013...what is in store?



©Photos/text Ts

Saturday, 22 December 2012

Sepia Saturday 157; Christmas colours in my garden;


King Parrot, a visitor...



Mussaenda



Poinsettia...



Scots Bonnet chili..

Merry Christmas and a very happy 2013

Sepia Saturday 157;

Please visit 





©Photos My garden;

Thursday, 20 December 2012

Thursday; sun..



Sun

everyday
rises
freely
feeding
light 
warmth
into
 dark

Life 

     
©Photo/text  Ts

Monday, 17 December 2012

Saturday, 15 December 2012

Sepia Saturday 156; A playful Kiss;




2003; my grandaughter Raphaelle Portia; she always wanted to be an actress.

For more hugs and kisses link to




©Photos Ts.

Thursday, 13 December 2012

Thursday; unusual pressies;

The perfect Christmas present for a sailor;
Shoes for a fashionista;




A violet Laser for the geek.



Designer Bandaids for the blister prone..
 Currently sold only on online Japanese lifestyle store Sugoi Life for $7.95.



Buttons to spruce up a t-shirt or a jacket etc.







Polar ice cube maker...aren't they fun?



The fun of  shopping for inexpensive Christmas presents.

Wednesday, 12 December 2012

Wednesday; simply holidays;


Fabrizia  making Anzac biscuits;

School holidays at Somerset International school  began on Monday. School holidays leave time to spend with Grandparents. 


Here is the recipe  from 200 years of Australian cooking; Cosmopolitan spice;

6ounces or 180 g rolled oats
6ounces or 180 g flour
6ounces or 180 g desiccated coconut
6ounces or 180 g brown sugar
1 1/2  teaspoons baking powder
6ounces or 180 g butter melted
3 tablespoons golden syrup

Mix all the ingredients together, shape into small balls, place on a baking sheet lined with baking paper or buttered. Flatten the balls with a fork, bake in a low oven at around 150C or 300F about 15-20 minutes.

They are easy, quick and delicious for a crowd of children.


©Photo Ts

Saturday, 8 December 2012

Sepia Saturday 155; Blue and famous;





In 1873 Levi Strauss and tailor Jacob Davis received a U.S. patent to make the first riveted men's work
pants out of denim: the first blue jeans.



History

Jacob Davis, a Jewish emigrant from Latvia, was a tailor who frequently purchased bolts of cloth made from hemp from Levi Strauss & Co.'s wholesale house. After one of Davis' customers kept purchasing cloth to reinforce torn pants, he had an idea to use copper rivets to reinforce the points of strain, such as on the pocket corners and at the base of the button fly. Davis did not have the required money to purchase a patent, so he wrote to Strauss suggesting that they go into business together. After Levi accepted Jacob's offer, on May 20, 1873, the two men received U.S. Patent 139,121 from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The patented rivet was later incorporated into the company's jean design and advertisements.
Contrary to an advertising campaign suggesting that Levi Strauss sold his first jeans to gold miners during the California Gold Rush (which peaked in 1849), the manufacturing of denim overalls only began in the 1870s. The company then created their first pair of Levis 501 Jeans in the 1890s, a style that went on to become the world's best selling item of clothing.Modern jeans began to appear in the 1920s, but sales were largely confined to the working people of the western United States, such as cowboys, lumberjacks, and railroad workers. 
Levi’s jeans apparently were first introduced to the East during the dude ranch craze of the 1930s, when vacationing Easterners returned home with tales  examples of the hard-wearing pants with rivets. Another boost came in World War II, when blue jeans were declared an essential commodity and were sold only to people engaged in defense work. 
Between the 1950s and 1980s, Levi's jeans became popular among a wide range of youth subcultures, including greasers, mods, rockers, hippies and skinheads. Levi's popular shrink-to-fit 501s were sold in a unique sizing arrangement; the indicated size referred to the size of the jeans prior to shrinking, and the shrinkage was substantial. The company still produces these unshrunk, uniquely sized jeans, and they are still Levi's number one selling product.




"The competition"

Although popular lore (abetted by company marketing) holds that the original design remains unaltered, this is not the case: the company's president got too close to a campfire, and the rivet at the bottom of the crotch conducted the fire's heat too well; the offending rivet, which is depicted in old advertisements, was removed.In 1991, Levi Strauss faced a scandal involving pants made in the Northern Mariana Islands, where some 3% of Levi's jeans sold annually with the Made in the USA label were shown to have been made by Chinese laborers under what the United States Department of Labor called "slavelike" conditions. 
Today, most Levi's jeans are made outside the US, for sub-minimum wages, seven-day work weeks with 12-hour shifts, poor living conditions and other indignities.
The activist group Fuerza Unida (United Force) was formed following the January 1990 closure of a plant in San Antonio, Texas, in which 1,150 seamstresses, some of whom had worked for Levi Strauss for decades, saw their jobs exported to Costa Rica. During the mid- and late-1990s, Fuerza Unida picketed the Levi Strauss headquarters in San Francisco and staged hunger strikes and sit-ins in protest of the company's labor policies.

In June 1996, the company offered to pay its workers an unusual dividend of up to $750 million in six years' time, having halted an employee stock plan at the time of the internal family buyout. However, the company failed to make cash flow targets, and no worker dividends were paid.
In 2002, Levi Strauss began a close business collaboration with Walmart, producing a special line of "Signature" jeans and other clothes for exclusive sale in Walmart stores until 2006.
Excerpts  courtesy Wikipedia




In every country he has visited - from the Philippines to Turkey, India and Brazil - Miller has stopped and counted the first 100 people to walk by, and in each he found that almost half the population wore jeans on any given day.

Jeans are everywhere, he says, with the exception of rural tracts of China and South Asia.


My view, they are practical but ugly. Also a boring piece of clothing as everybody wears them! Clever advertising has done the trick to conform people like Mao did with his blue jackets and pants, which was  thought of  in the capitalistic Western world to be ugly and awful and only communists  would or could wear something like this! 
Levis Jeans are what they were intended for Hard Yakka gear.



Please visit   Sepia Saturday; 155;                             




Friday, 7 December 2012

Friday; blessing;



May your pockets be heavy and your heart be light.
 May good luck pursue you each morning and night. 
    Irish blessing



©Photo Ts


Thursday, 6 December 2012

Tuesday, 4 December 2012

Monday, 3 December 2012

Monday; snap..


Orchid Dancing Ladies; Oncidium;

I bought a new camera, Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5, playing around with it and trying out its different settings. I must be patient to learn about and use its full potential.  It  has an easy, automatic setting as well!!


©Photo Ts/ my garden

Saturday, 1 December 2012

Sepia Saturday 154; Bridges of sighs;

The most famous or infamous Bridge of  Sighs.

The Bridge of Sighs,  Ponte dei Sospiri 
is a bridge located in Venice. The enclosed bridge is made of white limestone and has windows with stone bars. It passes over the Rio di Palazzo and connects the New Prison to the interrogation rooms in the Doge's Palace. It was designed by Antoni Contino(whose uncle Antonio da Ponte had designed the Rialto Bridge and built in 1602.
The view from the Bridge of Sighs was the last view of Venice that convicts saw before their imprisonment. The bridge name, given by Lord Byron in the 19th century, comes from the suggestion that prisoners would sigh at their final view of beautiful Venice through the window before being taken 

 down to their cells. In reality, the days of inquisitions and summary executions were over by the time the bridge was built and the cells under the palace roof were occupied mostly by small-time criminals. In addition, little could be seen from inside the Bridge due to the stone grills covering the windows.
A local legend says that lovers will be granted eternal love and bliss if they kiss on a gondola at sunset under the Bridge Of Sighs.



Hertford Bridge,
 popularly known as the Bridge of Sighs, is a skyway joining two parts of Hertford College over New College Lane in Oxford, England. Its distinctive design makes it a city landmark.

The bridge is often referred to as the Bridge of Sighs because of its supposed similarity to the famous Bridge of Sighs in Venice. However, Hertford Bridge was never intended to be a replica of the Venetian bridge.
There is a false legend saying that many decades ago, a survey of the health of students was taken, and as Hertford College's students were the heaviest, the college closed off the bridge to force them to take the stairs, giving them extra exercise. However, if the bridge is not used, the students actually climb fewer stairs than if they use the bridge.





The Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge
is a covered bridge belonging to St John's College of Cambridge University. It was built in 1831 and crosses the River Cam between the college's Third Court and New Court. The architect was Henry Hutchinson]
It is named after the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, although they have little architecturally in common beyond the fact that they are both covered. 
A common myth states that it was the students who named this bridge "bridge of sighs," as the context of its existing within the college grounds means that the "sighs" are those of pre-exam students. This belief probably has much to do with the function of the bridge—linking two quadrangles of St John's College together in a covered path, as opposed to Kitchen Bridge, which is an open-air bridge. Students are rumoured for their sighs on proceeding from their quarters on the Backs to the tutor's offices in the main college quadrangle.






LÃ¥ngholmsbron 
 is a bridge in central Stockholm, Sweden. Connecting the major island Södermalm to the minor island LÃ¥ngholmen.
The bridge was formerly called Spinnhusbron ("The spinning house Bridge") in reference to the precursor to the LÃ¥ngholmen prison, and, popularly, Suckarnas bro ("The Bridge of Sighs"), also in reference to the prison. 






The Virginia Street Bridge in Reno, Nevada,
known for being the place where newly-divorced women coming from the Washoe County Courthouse would toss their wedding rings into the Truckee River.


Now, build a bridge and walk over to Sepia Saturday 154