Getting close

On the home stretch now. In a touch more than two months we will be leaving Manila. A year and half of dedication to her job by Sophie and the same time of painting/walking/dreaming(with a touch of web development) and goofing off  for me.

Sophie is in full swing of her last production of  the Appeals to donors with her successor in place and with the help of her top flight local team.

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Parties

For our farewell we have planned two events:

Farewell party

Ka Freddie - Oil on canvas - 51 x 61 cm - 2013

• A farewell party for all ICRC staff - Manila Service Center and Manila Delegation - that Sophie is throwing right at the end of her posting, at the bar/club known as Ka Freddie's bar in Quezon City. This will happily coincide with the presence of her Geneva boss who will be coming to sanctify the transition (and will not be averse to the party).  The bar is run by local glory - singer/songwriter Freddie Aguilar  - in Quezon City the largest municipality in Metro-Manila. Freddie himself will play for us with his band and a fun time will be had by all. 

Silent Auction of paintings

• Earlier, at the beginning of November, at our apartment (condominium), we will, in addition,  be organizing a silent auction of the paintings I have  painted since we have been in Manila around 18-20 paintings. The event will be accompanied by a substantial buffet and drink.  In a silent auction, for those who are not familiar with the format, a minimum price is set for items and anyone can make one bid per item which is sealed until all bids have been collected. The highest bid takes the item (the bid itself is not announced, only the name of the person with the highest bid).

For an overview of the paintings offered(there should be one or two more by the time of the auction) click on the image below.

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New Paintings Web Site

On the painting front I have been compelled to design a new web site as a result of the the fading away of my previous web hosting provider.

I do have a past in the IT world but I am not a big web developer. I do know a little web tech and am familiar with some programming languages, but it doesn't flow off the end of my fingers without effort. This meant that I had to find a solution that would offer me some assistance in building my site while keeping a good level of control on functionality and appearance.

I took out a good number of weeks from painting to research and finally chose and implement a solution.

It turned out that I still had to learn, quite a bit more than I hoped,  but it was fun in the end though it took quite a lot of my time and occasionally frazzled my nerves.

So here it is in all its glory. It is fairly much along the same lines as my previous site with a few more bells and whistles like a section illustrating the painting process, a functional message form, some Google map inserts and so on. A large part is dedicated to listing my paintings , of course.

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When we leave Manila at the beginning of December, we will take a month to go to Thailand and Vietnam before returning to Geneva early January 2014. We look forward to being back in Carouge and getting back together with people though shooting back into the height of a Geneva winter after 18 months in the tropics may come with a certain shock (thermal).