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| So simple, yet so amazing. |
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| My little Santa-village |
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| Santa and his reindeer on the move |
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| Our living room |
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| Peek-a-boo! |
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| My favourite view... |
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| ...and my favourite room! |
'You must know at least one ghost story, stepfather, everyone knows one...'
Ah, yes, yes, indeed. All the time I had been listening to their ghoulish, lurid inventions, and their howling and groans, the one thought that had been in my mind, and the only thing I could have said was, 'No, no, you have none of you any idea. This is all nonsense, fantasy, it is not like this. Nothing so blood-curdling and becreepered and crude - not so...so laughable. The truth is quite other, and altogether more terrible.'
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| My wise Christmas owl |
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| Yummy! |
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| The first snow gives a hint of what is soon to come. |
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Eventually Crawly said, "Didn't you have a flaming sword?"
"Er," said the angel. A guilty expression passed across his face, and then came back and camped there.
"You did, didn't you?" said Crawly. "It flamed like anything."
"Er, well--"
"It looked very impressive, I thought."
"Yes, but, well--"
"Lost it, have you?"
"Oh no! No, not exactly lost, more--"
"Well?"
Aziraphale looked wretched. "If you must know," he said, a trifle testily, "I gave it away."
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More teasers:
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| So cute! |
" "When the porcelain bowls of scalding butter tea steamed in their hands, Haji Ali spoke. "If you want to thrive in Baltistan, you must respect our ways," Haji Ali said, blowing on his bowl. "The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die," he said, laying his hand warmly on Mortenson's own. "Doctor Greg, you must make time to share three cups of tea. We may be uneducated. But we are not stupid. We have lived and survived here for a long time."
"That day, Haji Ali taught me the most important lesson I've ever learned in my life," Mortenson says. "We Americans think you have to accomplish everything quickly. We're the country of thirty-minute power lunches and two-minute football drills. Our leaders thought their 'shock and awe' campaign could end the war in Iraq before it even started. Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects. He taught me that I had more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to teach them." "
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| At the hotel... |
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| At the beach... |
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| Egypt 6 years ago - how time flies! |
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| A busy bee! |
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| Picture taken by Glazastik Finch |
" So anyway - I wanted to know everything about 'em, growing up. Asked everybody in my village what they knew about dragons. Nobody knew much. Used to watch the dragons dive in the river for fish. Found out the sorts of things they like to eat when they can't get fish, found out what they physic themselves with when they're ill, that sort of thing.
And then, one time, I followed one back to the cliffs where it nested and climbed up there to have a look, and that was when I found its hoard. All this gold! Nobody in my village had any, you can be sure. I reached in and grabbed this goblet with rubies on it - got my arm bitten pretty badly too - and carried it home. "
" The dragon sniffled, but it lifted its head again to regard him in some wonder. Surprisingly severe, it said, "You are a witness to the rarest sight in the world - a dragon in tears - and all you can say is don't do that? I don't get you people at all." But it did stop crying; it even made a sound like rustling ashes, which Guerra thought might be a chuckle. It said, "Or did I embarrass you, Mike-O?"
" At that, he gave off a burst of furious heat and exhaled a stream of green fire. She dodged him and ran toward the crevice.
One huge forepaw came down directly in front of her. When she wheeled, his other paw came down, fencing her in.
"You can't leave!"
She put her hands over her ears, the roar shaking her whole body. The ground trembled under her. He was lying down, curled around her. She lowered her hands. He was calm again, but his great scaled bulk surrounded her. Only a few feet away, the enormous eye shut and opened again. "Tell me a story." "
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| Picture taken by Laura Johansen |
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| The first book in "The Children of the Lamp"-series |
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| "Swamplandia!" |
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| "Girl Reading" |
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| "The Dragon Book" |
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| My new app in action - flipping through the books! |
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| Only thing missing is my cat! |
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| Drawings of spiders. Found in an antique store in Prague. I love the details! |
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| A bird and a flower. Prints from the 1800's sometime. Found in an antiquarian in Oslo. Not sure when the colour came to. |
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| A picture of a dragonfly I have had for a while. This is where the idea came from. |
" 'And this is all for a magazine article? '
'Yeah. I do it pretty intensively. For a month I'll live and breathe, say, Samuel Butler. Then I'll find some link from him to take me to the next piece. The column is called Free Association. I started with the Big Bang about three years ago.'Burlem laughs. 'And what did that lead to?'
'The properties of hydrogen, the speed of light, relativity, quantum mechanics, probability theory, Schrödinger's cat, the wavefunction, light, the luminiferous ether - which is my personal favourite - experiment, paradox...'
'So you're a scientist? You understand all that stuff?'
I laughed. 'God, no. Not at all. I wish I did. I probably should'nt have started with the Big Bang, but when you do, that's what you get. At some point I went from artificial intelligence to Butler, and now here I am with Lumas. While I'm working on him I'll probably decide on what link I'm going to follow through next so I can order all the books. I might do something about the history of photography, actually, following through from "The Daguerreotype". Or I might follow it through to the fourth dimension, and that Zollner book, although that takes me back to science again.' "
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| "The end of Mr. Y" by Scarlett Thomas |
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| Miler Lagos' Book Igloo |
" I felt like I had sucked the air out of a giant balloon, like my brain wasn't getting enough oxygen.
Clouds were more interesting, the lunchroom less disgusting, music sounded better, the same old jokes were funnier, and Jackson went from being a clump of grayish-green industrial buildings to a map of times and places where I might run into her.
I found myself smiling for no reason, keeping my earphones in and replaying our conversations in my head, just so I could listen to them again.
I had seen this kind of thing before. I had just never felt it. "
" Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. "
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| So colourful! Cannot wait to read them! |
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| Sadly, I could only find one of these in English |
