
The viewing platform over the river Neckar in Ladenburg. Architectural symmetry.

A pansy. Natural, i.e. not quite perfect symmetry.


Imagine: It’s been spring for a while, quite balmy weather, and all of a sudden one night the temperature drops. You drive to the bakery, everything seems normal except that it is colder than the days before, and then you come across this:

This is an espalier fruit (apple trees) field. The plants, the blooms are covered in ice. On the ground lies frost. But it ends abruptly at the fence and the flowering bushes around are frost free.
Turns out this is an ingenious way to use irrigation. Ice, it turns out, protects the blooms and hence the possibility of them developing into fruit.

Ice covers the twigs, the blooms, the new leaves.

FOWC with Fandango: Irrigation

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Thursday Trios
Ebenezer was stuck in a traffic jam. “I rather suck humbugs than eat spam” read the bumper sticker on the car in front, next to an iconic rainbow sticker. He looked over to Marley and grinned. “Either he’s a Monty Python fan or a bloody fairy!”
Esther once again wants us to count words and include certain words in the story.
For Can You Tell a Story in … 46 words including humbug, bumper, fairy, and spam
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Ragtag Daily Prompt: Huh?
Strawberries – their development from bloom to green fruit forming, starting to colour, and red and ripe. FOWC with Fandango: Development

That’s the PUB team (aka the Pom-poms und Beer team), the support group for friends running marathons and half-marathons. Support is mainly shown by making a lot of noise, drinking beer, offering beer to other spectators or runners if they so desire, and chanting encouriging slogans (like “Go – go! Only 40 more to go!” at the 2km mark). Because it is pretty boring to stand around and watch runners for hours until the handful that you know come past, chants and waves are done for ALL runners that come past. We’ve been told that the encouragement was appreciated by total strangers, too.

And a reminder that in the 1990s there was something called Mad Cow Disease (or BSE). Even today people who lived in the UK during that time are not allowed to give blood in Germany because of this.
My childhood was spent pretty much within the triangle of three different old medieval towers, called “Blauer Hut” (blue hat due to its original slate roof, now long gone), “Roter Turm” (red tower, so called because of the reddish sandstone used) and “Hexenturm” (witches’ tower … Continue reading A confined area