12 of 12, June 2014

I am about to break with tradition.

When I first started doing 12 of 12, it was nearly five years ago*, when I couldn’t assume that my vast audience of readers would have huge bandwidths. As a result I had lots of low bandwidth words on the blog page, from which you could click off to see the collection of 12 thumbnails and then choose which of the photos you’d like to see in full. I built some html templates in Dreamweaver so that I could set up these external pages relatively quickly, but they still took a while to produce each month. My other reason for jumping away from the blog was that I could point certain people at just the collection of 12 of 12 photos, instead of directing them to my whole blog (except anyone half-savvy about websites could have found my blog easily enough from the 12 of 12 pages anyway).

I think it is now fair to expect people to have bigger bandwidths, and to cope with maybe 2MB of stuff on one page. I always shrink the photos from the originals, so that they’re only a maximum of 150KB or so each, so there is, perhaps, no reason not to just put all the 12 of 12 photos directly into my blog. So I’m going to. If there’s anyone still reading this blog (yes, I know there are one or two of you still out there, who are either not bored yet or who ARE bored, but are too polite to leave!), then feel free to let me know if you think this is a bad idea or make any other comments about the change. I think it is going to save me time — which is a good thing — because there are quite a few steps I won’t have to do.

So, here is this month’s collection of 12 photos taken on the 12th. I decided to photograph 11 of the “trinkets”/bits of memorabilia that adorn some of the shelves in my house. There are more than the odd one or two stuffed toys in the downstairs entrance area, but only a few of these are going to be detailed below. In some cases I can remember where/from whom the items originated, but, unfortunately, not always. However, even if I can’t remember the details, most of them were gifts from friends and family, and so in a real sense the whole collection represents all those valued people.

In amongst my stuffed toys are three particularly special non-penguins: my very first teddy bear, a rabbit of similar vintage, and the calico bear that was annotated with messages from family when I moved to Melbourne over 15 years ago.

I have a large number of penguins in my collection. I like penguins (real, and trinketish, although it is not the case that I am obsessed about collecting every single half-decent penguin trinket that I see). Many of them are stuffed toys which live in the downstairs rookery, but I have a few more artistic ones adorning the bookshelves in the lounge: some made of pewter, some of blown glass, and a set of 10 (only three shown here) simple but effective wooden ones given to me by the older of my brothers.

There are also some rather quirky things in the collection. There is a straw boater from the 1992 intervarsity choral festival where university choristers gathered in Hobart and, in a fortnight or so, prepared and performed the Monteverdi Vespers (the social side of the festival had a Brideshead Revisited theme, hence the boaters). The carved ostrich egg was crafted by my younger brother, and the number plate comes from the car I owned when I lived in Newfoundland back in 1998 (the car had two number plates, but by 1998 it was legal to have only one, and so I souvenired the spare when I sold the car).

Two of the more recent additions date from my recent significant birthday: the first one of those Willow Tree ornaments showing three generations of women working together, given to me by my counsellors and secretary in the Relief Society presidency (Chernoa, Nikki and Prue), and the other a lovely vase with striking blue crystalline glazing from my parents.

There are at least another 12 distinctive items (without even making inroads into the downstairs rookery); perhaps I’ll repeat this theme another time. In the meantime, those of you who have been keeping count will know that I am only up to 11 photos for the day. On the way home tonight there was a lovely moon halo, and the little camera had a go at capturing it for photo number 12.

* I missed celebrating the fifth birthday of the blog on the 24th of May due to the complete chaos of my life. I had a reminder set up to do it, but things have just been soooo crazy that I didn’t have time to do it, let alone do it justice. I could go back and surreptitiously add something (WordPress allows such temporal manipulations), but that somehow feels like cheating … and, besides, I still don’t have time. So, consider this a belated and rather half-hearted blogiversary celebration.