A young tennis fan

Monty is becoming a tennis fan...

Monty has taken a shine to the tennis on TV. If he’s on my lap, he watches alertly and his head moves as the ball travels across the screen. However, what he really likes to do is get up really close to the action.

Here he is watching Samantha Stosur and Vania King, but as his Mummy’s Australian, he should have done more to help Samantha Stosur to win! (She didn’t. )

Entry for September 30, 2007

Today I met up with the wind quintet. We hadn’t met since the spring, as the five of us were unable to find a single Sunday morning all summer when we were all available! I think that one or two of us were a little rusty, so we didn’t attempt anything too challenging – although having said that, the first piece we played contains a bassoon solo that goes up to high D, which I nailed. I’m dreading the day when my plastic reed disintegrates: I’ve got another two, but they just don’t play well; and I need to toughen up my lips to switch back to cane.

I sat around and did very little when I got home from the quintet, but there was tennis on EuroSport later in the afternoon and I watched that. It went to three sets, with Ana Ivanovic defeating Daniela Hantuchova. It was quite a close match, and the commentators thought that now Daniela has improved her ranking that she’s getting to play the top players more often in the closing stages of tournaments and that next year she might win some of those close matches.

My laundry remains undone, and I haven’t ordered any more memory cards for my camera. They’re both jobs I’m going to have to do tomorrow: the laundry because I’m running short of shirts; and the memory cards because my switch to shooting RAW+JPEG means that I require higher capacity cards.

My new tax disc needs to go on my car in the morning. It will be 1st October, and my old disc expires tonight.

Entry for June 08, 2007 – Go Molik!

Today was the day that Alicia Molik picked up her second Grand Slam tennis title. To go along with her 2005 Australian Open doubles title, when partnered by Svetlana Kuznetsova, she now has the 2007 French Open doubles title, along with her partner Mara Santangelo.

Molik was twice a finalist in 2004 with Todd Woodbridge in the mixed doubles. Those matches were at Wimbledon and the US Open. It means that Molik has now been a finalist at all four majors.

What is particularly encouraging about this latest win is that Molik was hit by an inner ear infection in 2005 and it affected her balance so badly that she was unable to play again until the middle of 2006, and has yet to recover her singles form.

Go Molik! Get back in that Top Ten, girl!

Entry for June 05, 2007

It was back to work today. Fortunately the roads were reasonably clear and I had a good journey each way. I called in at Asda in Basildon on my way home. It started off as a quick foray for some salad, then sliced meats got added to that. Then bread. Then hash browns. I ended up with a shopping list and went down most of the aisles!

Stephen taped the French Open for me and we’ve just been watching some of the matches. It’s nice to see the two Serbian girls, Jelena Jankovic and Ana Ivanovic, both doing well. I was sorry to see Svetlana Kuznetsova get beaten, though, and I was also hoping that Serena Williams would get the better of Justine Henin. Ah well….

Today’s picture is the greylag goose with the cute fluffy goslings that I photographed at Hall Place on Sunday. There were goose families in various stages of development, but this family was the youngest we saw. I wonder whether it was the parents’ second brood for the season.

Entry for June 04, 2007

I took today off. I arranged it last week when I realised how busy the weekend just gone was going to become. I spent today as I suspected I would want to: just vegging out and pottering around doing very little.

I watched some of Nadal vs Hewitt from the French Open, did a couple of Killer Sudoku puzzles, and messed about with the pictures I took at the weekend without actually getting very far with them. I contempleted whether to have an “aaaahhhh!” picture of a greylag goose with fluffy baby goslings or a Peterbilt truck ornament as today’s picture, but have opted for the truck ornament. Maybe you’ll see the goslings tomorrow.

I’m still studying the results of my digital infrared experiment, and am leaning in the direction of limiting my infrared experiments to my Pentax *ist DS, which produced some encouraging results when used with a Cokin P007 filter. The Pentax K10D needed longer exposures, produced a less marked infrared effect, and delivered a symmetrical pattern of artifacts similar to those seen when lens flare is present. They were mostly in the green and blue channels, and could be discarded, but the infrared effect in the red channel probably wasn’t worth the effort, and I might just as well use the *ist DS, which has a much weaker infrared blocking filter installed and therefore is more sensitive to infrared.

Entry for May 16, 2007

It was Wednesday today, so I home-worked. I breaks the week up if I lose the commute on a Wednesday, and I got lots of peace and quiet at home – most of the time. Stephen did call out some of the scores from the Mauresmo-Stosur match at the Italian Open, and I did take a break to watch the second set tie-break, which Stosur ended up losing. However, she won through in the end, which pleases me, as I had my Australian hat on.

This evening I went to my occasional orchestra evening. A group based on the Marlowe Ensemble, but with some extras like myself added in, meets about once every six weeks to read through some of the Classical and Romantic orchestral repertoire. There is no rehearsal about it as it doesn’t lead to a performance. It’s just a group of people playing through some of the orchestral repertoire for the fun of doing it.

This evening’s playing started with Mozart’s overture “Titus”, which warmed us up nicely to attempt Brahms’ Serenade No.1 in D Major. We took a break in the middle of it, as it was quite taxing stuff. I personally didn’t manage to play all the notes when confronted by tenor clef, five sharps, and a passage with lots of leaps in it which went down to the lower end of the tenor clef. All I could do was count the bars and make sure I knew where to come in when something within my capabilities appeared on the stave in front of me. We finished off with Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony. We were just going to play the first movement, but decided to play the other movement when we got to the end of the first movement. I’m pretty sure the second movement of the “Unfinished” accompanied the Del Monte Man in a TV advertising campaign a few years ago.

…Which leads us neatly to today’s picture, which is of apples so fresh that they’re still on the tree!