Yesterday-evening I returned from a trip to the Somme’s battlefields. Here, during WW1, so many British men and boys died in a rather useless attack that should have been a turning-point in this war. It was a very impressive trip. Not only because you can see the old battle-fronts by the shattered graveyards, but also because you can imagine rather well how the carnage here took place. A simple walk in a wood or on the fields, brought up ammunition and a large Obus. The nice weather (not as ‘heavenly’ as on July, 1st 1916) and the whistling birds nonewithstanding made the atmosphere daunting. Here Lord Kitchener’s Army found it’s doom. Two years in the making, 10 minutes in the destroying. Makes you humble… Look at the undeveloped photo’s at Flickr.

Today we were surprised with rather snowy conditions. The snapshot doesn’t show it, but roads are slippery and the scenery is romantic. During Eastern, we had similar conditions (also see here). But these were ‘days off’. Today everybody had to get to work again. Result: 99 traffic jams with a combined length of over 600 km… After one hour ‘driving’ I decided to turn and work from home. The snapshot is a view from my working room.

The last few days I was ill. Nothing serious, but a rather severe case of sinusitis. While laying in bed, I remade my photoblog SilentShutter. Instead of using MovableType as CMS, I switched to PixelPost. The latter is more focussed on publishing photos. Also the amount of comment-spam I received with MT was that bad that I switched off the option of commenting. But I started SilentShutter (also) in order to receive comment, so this was a bad situation… I tweaked an existing template (changed some things in the CSS-files) and loaded some old and newer photos. It is up and running now and I am happy with it. Some more work need to be done, but this will probably need to wait for another illness