Where I put thoughts to text

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Knowember 2026

posted on:

The urge to type Knowvember is huge, though. LOL Anyway, Robert Birming came up with this fun and short getting-to-know-one-another questionnaire. Here are my answers.

A photo

a green coral (Zoanthus?) sitting on pebbles in front of rocks and plants. The tips of its tentacles are purple. Or dark pink. Pinkle? In the middle is an opening that looks like a mouth with a tongue. If it were human one could think they were gagging or making a 'blergh' motion/ sound.
Blergh!

There are photos of me on this site somewhere, if you want to see how I looked a few years ago. For this I decided to show you this little fellow. I visited the zoo in August and my favourite part, besides the giraffes and penguins, was the aquarium building. I especially loved the small tanks. The light was just great and there was so much to look at.

I took this photo with my phone. Then I used the phone app Afterlight 2 to crop the image and add two filters. (I don't remember which ones though, sorry.) I used to play with that and other apps a lot back when Instagram was still independent. Good ol' times. (I wanted to link to the app, but the version I have is no longer the one they offer. Here's their website anyway: Afterlight.co.)

Name or nickname

I've been going by theresmiling online for many years now. I wrote about where I got the name from on my about page.

My "real" name is Elena, which I always like to think my parents got from the Spanish Infanta. But I don't think that story is actually true. However, the correct pronounciation is indeed closer to Spanish than Italian or Russian. My parents say that if I had been a boy, they would have called me Tobias.

Where in the world I blog from

A laptop in a small city in southern Germany. You can find the city's name in an earlier blog post. We're small, unremarkable, but I still like it. We do have a Guinnes World Record though, and two very important inventors first met here, which lead to a decades long work relationship and friendship, and a revolutionary invention.

What my blog is mostly about

Everything and nothing. I'm just a normal person without a lot of expertise in anything, but a lot of thoughts and opinions on many things. Sorry.

Back in August I started to do Weeknotes, so this blog is full of those now.

But this site is not only a blog. There's more.

~*~

Hey look, I actually managed to put some new info into my replies. Yay me! But now it's your turn, if you haven't participated already. In the meantime I'll go and have a look at all the replies that Robert collects on his page.

- Elena.

Leave a comment in the Fediverse
or write me an e-mail: hello [-at-] theresmiling [dot] eu