Author: Anne Fox

Just in case you need a house to rent in Peterborough…

This is a picture of us all in Tina Sanggaard’s house in Nimtofte. Tina is the mother of Mia’s best friend, Johanne.

And while we were posing Tony was otherwise occupied:

Click on a word to find posts about that topic.

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The girls were on a national scout camp last week with 15,000 attending including scouts from Australia, India, Uganda, England, the Czech Republic and England (Dunstable). The picture below shows the girls’ patrol entry for a national championship which they will be competing in at the end of August. They brought their sculptures to this camp where the assembled 15,000 were invited to vote. There was also SMS voting but we won’t know the result until the rest of the competition later this month.

The Danish Prime Minister came to visit and Mia asked him if he wouldn’t mind posing with her and her friends.

The video below gives you a bird’s eye view.

Lots more info in English here.

Apart from organising a trip to Randers hospital for an interview with a cancer doctor, Mia has been busy writing articles for project week at her school. The image is clickable so you can see the real thing. Her article is on the third page of text.

During Mia’s recent school trip to Copenhagen she had her brain scanned as part of a science museum special exhibition.

So which parts of her brain lit up when she was clapping her hands? See the red hotspots in the picture below!

Who would have thought it would take so much energy just to clap your hands?

Watch the airspace re-open on this time lapse film based on radar movements.

Airspace Rebooted from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

Gwen has been experimentiung with slow exposures on the camera while we were out last night in the moonlight celebrating with sparklers.

 

Svalbard – Kingdom of the polar bear

 

 

The three day journey there was worth it. I would do it any day just to get back to the frozen kingdom of Svalbard! The landscape ever changing though in some way always the same. Never two ice floes alike, never the same colour, never, though always the same.

With only three settlement stops before nothing but the wild, it may seem very unsettling but I never felt uncomfortable about the endless sea, ice and land. The large ship gave much comfort; and, of course, it was a thrill to be in the middle of nowhere!

Our first polar bear sighting was in the distance and it was hard to see them; there were two. But not long after we saw many more; most days didn’t go without a polar bear after that.

Walruses were soon also a common sight. Twice we landed close to them, once we saw them from the zodiacs and there were many seen from the ship.

Many birds were seen and we saw a few seals, though most were in the distance.

We were very lucky with the weather. Usually it’s overcast and rainy. But the sun shone and the sea was calm. It rained but even then it was only drizzle. We had one night when people took seasickness pills, but I didn’t think it was so bad. It rocked you quietly to sleep…

We have 3 cherry trees in our garden which have disappointed us year after year. On the few occasions when they have fruited the cherries have split and been quickly exploited by the birds and especially the wasps. But this year conditions have been perfect, starting with an explosion of blossom in the spring and followed by dry enough conditions to allow the fruit to set and not split. So we now have three trees laden with fruit which we cannot access because the trees are so tall. The picture shows some of the cherries which we did manage to pick and we have tried some ingenious methods for reaching at least some of the lower branches. But the birds and the bees will be the main beneficiaries. (I mean the birds and the wasps of course but it doesn’t trip off the keyboard so well).  Tired already of eating them fresh we tried a crobbler today which is a hybrid cobbler/crumble but it is tedious work stoning the cherries so I can’t see us having too many of those.