Blacklight Candelabra: My dad lives on an oilfield

At last, at the age of 100 years in September, he will become rich, his surroundings are swimming on oil according to the latest information. My dad lives in an extra care home, average age of the 41 inhabitants from 80-90 so it looks like they will all be celebrating. The oil actually exists beneath Gatwick Airport in the county of Surrey in England. My dad lives in Dagenham in the county of Essex, but this only being a mere matter of kilometres away, what could possibly go wrong.

Actually a lot could go wrong. To remove so much oil you naturally have to employ all modern technical help. There used to be oil wells drilling in the ground, we all remember The Ewing Family who lived in a little American town called Dallas, they earned millions with their oil, but even their oil wells were not next door. Those pumps looked so picturesque with their regular up and down movements, pumping away. Of course it was a matter of time, and time costs money. My dad might not live in Gatwick, but who cares. Why should the scots get all the oil when England also has its faire share.

There is one little problem, someone might get an idea of removing the oil with fracking. We all know what that is, or do we? No problem, it just needs 1-8 million gallons of water to complete a fracking job. Not only water, but a few hazardous chemicals are added to the water to make it more interesting and to give a better result I suppose. I am no expert. So dad’s oil adventure is now becoming expensive. Perhaps he will not become as rich as I thought he would, but there is more.

This liquid mixture of chemicals is forced into the rock basis in the area where the rich rewards are to be found. The high pressure causes the rock to crack and simsabim, the natural gas flows through the cracks in the rock into a well. What could be better? A lot really. Possibly the area around this rock fracking could become contaminated with methane gas and chemicals possibly leading to contamination of the water supplies.

Let’s not get too pessimistic. They have found oil where dad lives, one of the most densely populated areas of England, all flowing towards Greater London. Dear old London will become rich, they will be a second Dallas and dad will become a millionaire, although there might be a few problems but you can always drink beer or wine when the water is suddenly blue or red or otherwise.  But who cares, everyone is fracking today, it is modern, it is the way to get rich quick.

Luckily dad only reads the sports results in the newspaper and the television programme. If I spoke to him about fracking he would probably tell me off for swearing. I think my dreams of becoming a millionaire’s daughter are dwindling as the golden sun sinks slowly on the fracking fields of oil.

Blacklight Candelabra: Subconcious Dreamscapes

Create a post that includes your image as well as the explanation of what you’ve discovered about that image.

First of all I discovered, actually already knew, that I have absolutely no talent for drawing, painting, sculpturing or any such related pastime. Luckily I know how to organise a new programme on a computer that does it all for me. Unfortunately even then my artistic talents are exposed. So what is the result?

I believe it is an example of naive painting, back to the roots showing the bones and inner radiance of my gift, perhaps an illustrated version of the Dada movement. It is highly coloured, I love colours.There is a sun on the top left shining over my world. The sky is blue at least most of it, and we see two green trees (yes they are trees) and two round shapes bordered in red with a violet filling. They are my dada symbolic forms of flowers and I wanted to try out the 50 shades of colours available in the paint programme which I downloaded on my Apple and Microsoft, computers.

There is a black line separating sky and ground, just to get some organisation in the drawing. There is a brown path leading to over the hill. In Switzerland everything goes up and down and the viewer is left to his own idea of what is over the hill. Perhaps if you stand on the top you see a whole new world, towns and villages. On the other hand, probably a field of cows. I live in Switzerland where the cow population almost outnumbers the human population. The green lines surrounding the brown path are symbols of grass. The blobs of brown in between show that the grass did not grow everywhere. There might be a hidden meaning in this field, but I have not yet found it.

There are two figures on the left at the front of this work of art. One resembles a human and the other a quadruped. It is naturally easy to see that this is me and my feline, almost. My felines are a blue tabby and a normal tabby. Unfortunately an exact replica of these two cats was not possible due to the difficulties of handling the pen in the drawing programme, and so I settled for a plain outline of one black feline.

This is your life Mrs. Angloswiss, more or less. 

The Blacklight Candelabra: Re-Incarnation

This week, you can write about yourself, someone else, or a fictional character.  Whomever you choose, that person is going to die twice in your post for this week’s challenge.

Part 1

“It’s cold” thought Tran the hunter “and I’m hungry” and so he plodded upwards over stones ignoring the vultures circling over his head.

“They can go away, they are not going to get a meal from me.” He flapped his arms as they drew nearer and then he saw it, slowly pacing along over the ridge. A nice fat juicy goat, one of the big goats and he aimed with his slingshot.

“Ug” jumping up and down, straight between the eyes. He was shouting his words of happiness, at last food. He walked closer, it was not moving, an instant death. “Lucky goat and lucky me”. He thought of the many kills he had made where it was not a kill, but a slow following of the victim, stalking his prey until it eventually fell with glazed eyes and lack of breath, dead. If I was lucky. it died in a place where he could truss it up and carry it over his shoulders. If he had misfortune the animal would stumble into a crevice, or the worse case die on a high ridge.

He got to work, skinned the animal first of all. “At last something warm to wear in the ice days” he thought. He pounced on the meat and tore a few mouthfuls off the bones. This was luxury, his first kill after two days. 

Then he heard a faint rustle and they appeared, probably smelling the scent of warm blood in the air, their sabre teeth reflecting in the sunlight. They were not fussy if it was man or goat, they had cubs to feed and kill was their motto.

Part 2

Wilhelm was happy, his house was finished at last. His brothers had helped him to fell the trees in the forest. The had built a solid wooden chalet to accommodate Wilhelm and his family at last. The first night in the house was disturbing, but Wilhelm blamed it on too much ale, too much to eat and everything that belonged to a family feast to commemorate a new house. He twisted and turned in his bed, Heidi was sleeping. He descended the stairs to the living room and heard noise coming from the cellar. This could not be. The dogs were in the kennel outside and the cats sleeping in front of the fireplace. He ventured into the cellar, where the woodpiles were ready for the Winter.

He saw a figure, at least a head poking through the floor, although somewhat misty in outline.

“What are you.”

A weak sigh answered. “I am the same as you.”

“That cannot be, although your hair has the same red colour as mine. Are you human?”

“I am human, see my body” and the figure rose from the floor and Wilhelm now saw it in its full size.

“You have a name?”

“My people called me Tran”

“Your people?”

“This is our land, we hunted it until it was empty and spread to the heights.”

“You mean the Tafelspitz, our mountain.”

“We call it the pointed demon, where the mountain spirits live.”

Wilhelm pinched himself, was he dreaming. He had no fear of this transparent ghostly shape. He saw visions of sabre toothed tigers pouncing, tearing flesh from bones and leaving just a skeleton with a crop of red hair on what was a skull.

He awoke in the morning with a feeling we would call “déjà vue”.

Part 3

“What is the problem, why has the work stopped?”

“I think we have found something boss. Looks like a skeleton.”

“We do not have time for skeletons.”

“But it is deep down.”

“Of course it is deep down. We are building a tunnel through the alps, not a cable car to reach the top. OK, men, take a break. I will have to call the experts.” although Fridolin had a strange feeling. The skeleton had a shock of red hair on the head. Some things disappear through the ages, but hair remains. He remembered seeing many old skeletons in the bone houses, and they still had traces of hair.

The archaeologists arrived and took over, although Fridolin often took a quick glance over their shoulders.

“Found anything?” he asked.

“We have found plenty, but this one is from the pre ice age. He must have wanted to be found, laying on the exact path of the tunnel. Has a nice crop of red hair on his head, something like yours.”

Fridolin felt a shiver go through his body. There were some things better not said, but just remaining as a thought.  Why did he feel linked to this morbid discovery. That night he left his bed in the neighbouring sleeping quarters for the building troop and took the lift down to the tunnel where the bones of the past had been found. 

He saw them. Two men, one clad in a crude leather cover, one dressed in the hunting clothes of the middle ages, but both with red hair. 

“We are one, but three” the two men said together. 

And Fridolin knew the truth. He was the third man.

“A few months later Fridolin returned to his family for a well earned holiday. He was glad to see his wife again. His little red headed boy ran to greet him.

WordPress The Blacklight Candelabra: The Dewey System

Create three 3-digit numbers using your selections from the first step.

Next, visit this Dewey Decimal System website and find the subjects that match your three digit numbers. 

My number is 671 - Metalworking and metal products.

The infamous Blacklight Candelabra means it well with me together with the Dewey Decimal System. I choose three random numbers and I arrive in the world of metal. I worked in the world of metal for thirty years as an export clerk. I was not up to my arms in metal shavings as shown in the photo. The photo shows the remains of the metal working process, the metal that was no-longer needed. there was a bar of metal, a rod or a block at the beginning which no-one could use. It had to be shaped and so it was shaped with various end mills.

Ok, you are confused. My employer manufactured the end mills in various shapes and sizes according to the work to be done. Metal is not just metal, it comes in various flavours. The basic flavour would carry rust if got wet, so it was refined with other ingredients. For the sake of simplification we called it HSS meaning high speed steel. In the beginning metal was created, but refined, had additions to make it stronger, perhaps more pliable, to suit the operation the end mill would perform.

And so the end mill was made to shape the metal to form the mould that a company needed. Take a look in the bathroom and what do you see. Perhaps a towel hanger, a tap, even a shower head. These things do not appear with the wave of a magic wand, they are formed from metal and so again to the beginning. The rod or bar or lump is cut, but with what. With a suitable milling tool inserted in a machine, a special machine. The excitement then begins forming the raw form. There is much noise the metal screaming as the mill ploughs through the surface. I am burning cries the metal and so it is simultaneously cooled with a liquid addition. Water, yes, but mixed with oil. I never did find out why, but probably to do with the friction caused on the surface and the oil made it nice and slippery and there was no traffic jam in the machine.

Various end mills are employed according to the shape of what you wanted to make. A metal mould might be created for pouring the liquid metal into it in the shape of your bathroom appliances, or even a kitchen machine. Like a cake, various ingredients must be added to the end mill to achieve the perfect result. You get to the part where we talk about tungsten carbide, or perhaps the cobalt content may be raised from 5% to 10% in the end mill. No this is too technical, I am to explain the world of metal. 

Not all mills can be called end, they are the straight rigid ones. The ones with a shank and the fancy bit at the end for milling. Some are round and flat, some are cone shaped, but they all do the work, eaten metal to make a form.

There is also something called a tap and dye not to be omitted in the world of metal. You buy a screw and want it to fit. Have you ever thought how many threads there are to be screwed (in a metallurgical way of course). There are thousands and so the taps and dress are made in thousands of forms. The difference between the two: a tap is long and bores into the metal making an internal thread such as a nut,  and the dye carves the thread around the metal forming a screw. 

If you fall and break your arm the magical metal titanium will be screwed into the broken bones to keep it together. Oh I remember the wonderful photos of my left arm taken at the hospital showing the interior decorations of 15 screws  and a metal plate keeping it all together. This was six years ago and my arm is still in one piece, thanks to titanium.

Of course there are casualties in the metal working business and you can see the remains of the work in the photo. These twiddly shiny decorative metal remains are not buried and put to rest forever, nor do they pollute the surroundings. The are renewed, rehashed, redone and brought to a new life by melting them down and reuse. Do not ask me how, I was only an office worker sending the end mills to other countries where they were applied to make steel forms, bathroom taps. I remember an agricultural organisation in Holland that used the end mills for shaping the hooves of cows.

I took many photos, the men in the department wondering what an office worker was doing hopping around their department in all sorts of positions trying to get the correct setting for her camera. Am I boring you? Probably, but this was my life for many years. I still have memories of the waft of oil and metal in my nose and the scraping noises of metal against metal, or the saw with its rhythmic back and forth sawing the bars and rods to the suitable size. Oh happy days.

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The Blacklight Candelabra: What Kind of Idea Are You?

What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damn fool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.

Seriously, what am I? I am a chameleon, I change colour to suit the surroundings, like the traffic light perhaps, but inside even the chameleon remains the same. It is the same heart, lungs, brain that pulsates, it is only the outside decoration that changes.

You leave a country at the age of twenty, an age where you think everything you have believed, lived for,  up to now is the right way. Blame it on youth, blame it on what the others do, fit in with your chameleon way of life and then suddenly in another place, almost another world, there are other species of life. Their background colours are different, even their language and of course let us not forget the food. What do you do? If you cannot beat them you either leave or join them and that is perhaps where the judgement, the inner self has to be revisited.

Either  rediscover myself or I give up and there the personality is involves. Mr. Rushdie I never read your book, I was too busy shaping the personality of my two children and two step children at the time, but I will read it one day. You cannot shape personalities of step children, half of it has already been accomplished, but you can give them a little guidance to put them on the way, if it works. Your own children are something different, but they are not your replicas, not your carbon copies. They have a brain and a mind of their own and when one is autistic, then you cannot change it, your best possibility is form it, if you can.

What is all this talk of compromising, doing deals? Wouldn’t it be nice, as they say, but life does not work like that. If you want to fight the good fight of life, of survival and you do not have the means to dictate, then your company or whatever will dictate, and you fit in being a chameleon, as you do not want to lose your work and your monthly salary. Sounds very materialistic, but so is life. Not everyone is a Lenin, and forbid a Stalin and or a Mahatma Ghandi. Je ne suis pas Charlie and I don’t want to be. 

One day you are tossed on the used pile. You are free to do what you want to do. Now is perhaps the time to break out, to demolish the borders set by your surroundings and your way of life. But wait, you feel tired, it does not work like that, unless of course, people listen to your words, cling to every idealistic path you take, but you have not yet written your book telling everyone the wise ways, because you are perhaps too lazy, or do not wish to cause a revolution in the quiet little village where you live. Perhaps you do not wish to become a public figure, a target for the public relations of today’s world. 

Today I want to be me. I am lucky to be in a position to be me. My religion is me which is tolerance.  I lived two years with a muslim family. I had no problem eating Pakistani food for two years and I had no problem with their way of life or religion. It was different perhaps to mine, but they had no problems with me. We had a mutual understanding of each others way of life and could even joke about it. I have lived 48 years in Switzerland, speak daily Swiss German and my way of life could be called Swiss. You can say I am the chameleon, but the chameleon is now internal as well as external. 

People change over the years and I know I have changed. I understand the Swiss. Whether they understand me is something else and I know my english attachments look upon me as somewhat exotic, but I can live with it.

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WordPress The Blacklight Candelabra: Creation and Destruction

For the inaugural writing prompt, I am challenging you to discuss the interrelatedness of creation and destruction.

Once upon a time there was a garden, it was nice, but only nice. There was a pampas grass in the garden. It began as a small pampas grass with a few stalks and no panicles with seeds. That was only once at the beginning of the time. Over the years the pampas grew and decided to produce its feathery panicles and everyone was happy. The owner of the garden was happy and even some of the neighbours clapped, although after ten years the clapping subsided and the owner wondered where it would lead to. In the middle of the plant there was nothing, the leaves and panicles had retired to the edges. Only the cat enjoyed the middle of the plant as she could hide from the world.

Despite cat delights and admiration of the size of the plant, which seem to have hidden intentions of taking over the garden, it was decided it must go. Not only the pampas but the complete garden would be renovated, destroyed to make room for something sensible and above all easier to take care of. The owners of the garden were no longer as young and active as they were, they belonged to the senior citizen tribe and caring for a pampas was becoming a burden to these golden oldies. 

The fate of the pampas was sealed and the gardener was called, the death bringer of all unwanted vegetation. After ten years of growth in the garden it was destroyed within thirty minutes. The roots were ripped from their pitch and an empty patch of earth remained. Gardeners are quick and waste no time with destruction, knowing that the replacement would be better, not only better, but would be a source of financial profit.

And so it came to pass that the pampas died. No tears were shed and within a day the complete garden had been emptied of its soil and the work was completed. A new lawn appeared, laid on the new soil as a green carpet. The garden was perfect, what could be better? Somewhere the garden owner had a strange feeling that she had forgotten to inform the gardener of an important aspect of the garden in connection with the original place where the pampas grass stood, but she forgot due to the happiness and contentment of having a new garden resembling a creation of Capability Brown.

The owner was congratulated by the neighbours, her garden was praised as one of the best in the neighbourhood and she was happy until the evening of the second day. It was then that she remembered what she perhaps should have told the gardener. She was eating the evening meal on the porch and admiring the new lawn when she saw movement on the flower bed. It was as if the complete flower bed was moving. She remembered this particular flower bed was immediately behind the pitch belonging to the departed pampas grass. Was this some sort of hidden revenge from an undead pampas. Memories of a book “The Day of the Triffids” by John Wyndham returned of an extra terrestrial plant that invaded the world and took over.

She approached the moving landscape and discovered approximately one hundred, or was it one thousand, ants. They were creeping crawling and some even dared to fly. They had wings, and then she remembered. There were two suspicious mounds beneath the pampas grass and now she knew what they were. Perhaps she should have told the gardener. Of course, she was watching the survivors of the two ant nests that had found their place beneath the pampas. The ants were happy, living an undisturbed life with their forever pregnant queen, following their ant customs. They were so long undisturbed that even some had time to grow wings.

Immediate action was required. The pampas was destroyed, but the ants lived on, although they were homeless. Quickly water was boiled and poured onto the poor little defenceless ants. In the meanwhile they had spread to other places in the garden, seeking revenge. More water was boiled and eventually a few surviving ants dragged their bodies through the remains of their murdered comrades.

The next day ant bait tins, five pieces, were distributed in the garden and three liter of the cheapest mineral water with gas was poured in suspicious places as this was the final killer which would vanquish all remaining ants from the garden.

And then there was peace in the newly created garden. The ants were destroyed, with a few other innocent bystander insects that had nothing to do with the ant invasion: one of the disadvantages of human attacks. The pampas had been vanquished for ever. Three remaining pampas leaves were discovered a week later. Was there a scream heard when they were ripped out of the garden?