Ik heb wel vaker de neiging te dromen. Heldendromen.
De werkelijkheid blijkt altijd gekker.
En minder heldhaftig.

At the end of the day I sometimes write small poems with my camera. You have to put up with more than two hours of mosquito swarms, but I was prepared this time (I wore protective gloves in August! It doesn't get any crazier!).

Lobia Masala or Black Eyed Peas Curry is a popular dish in North India (and Pakistan), and very easy to make in a pressure cooker or instant pot (see boxed text below) . It is made in an onion-tomato gravy, with ginger, garlic and a tasty combination of spices.

Since I am the happy owner of an instant pot, I make many more Indian dahls, legume stews, soups and endless more (freezer friendly) meals. The ingenious device has a timer, so you can decide when your food should be ready. After a long walk in the woods, when you come home from an assignment, after chopping firewood or working in the garden for a few hours?

A very ordinary Saturday morning that couldn't be more beautiful. Rain was predicted again for the afternoon so I harvested ingredients for tonight's dinner (recipe below) in time and picked fresh flowers. Absolute beauty in the backyard.

Behind the scenes, I'm working updating my photo archive. Collections will be added all the time. So please bear with me, it will all become much more organized soon.

While adult kestrels are majestic hunters, it is equally intriguing to explore the growth and development of young kestrels as they transition from hatchlings to skilled hunters. I was very lucky to be around with my camera when the young kestrels left the nest. I spent an entire afternoon hiding under the goat hutch on legs, enjoying the first independent flights, their languorous gaze upwards in search of the parents, clumsy movements on fence posts and in trees.

When I returned to the Indian city of Varanasi more than a year later, you laughed loudly at the crazy child you now saw in the photo. Free, cheerful, uninhibited. That disappeared six years later. You were willing to pose to please me, but were ashamed of your younger self.

If we all start driving electrically, what will we do with the current number of cars? I read the world now has more than 1.4 billion cars. What are we going to do with them? Recycle? And what does that cost in terms of energy and pollution? And do we have any idea how we will deal with that growing number of depreciated solar panels and car batteries we are now deploying en masse around the world?