Nature, red in tooth and claw

So, it's spring here in England. The apple trees have bloomed and gone to leaf.
The lambs are out and frolicking.
And, of course, the local vixen has probably had her litter of pups. (The above photo is entitled, "Why I love my camera.") This means she takes chances to get food that she wouldn't otherwise, so once again, we're short one chicken. And again, this is due to the fact that the girls got sloppy closing the gate, leaving it open for only one day -- all it took for the fox to come and take Blondtilla. This also means that Ginger has watched as another of her roommates became dinner. We've renamed her the UnEatable Ginger Brown. On one hand, this is been beneficial as we were planning on giving the chickens away next week, and Blondtilla was going to be hard to shift as she stopped laying to molt (replace her feathers) and then went broody. She was really only good to eat. It might as well have been the fox since we certainly weren't going to eat her. Ginger is an excellent layer, having never slowed down, even in the winter. And since she's fox-proof, everybody should want her.

Lena believes that Ginger survived because Lena has been teaching her to fight. Lena calls her Ginga the Ninja. A ninja chicken is about the funniest thing I can imagine.
The egret returned to our garden to eat our koi from the pond. However, the fish are terribly smart (and they also are ninjas). So it's only frogs for the magnificent egret. (He's sitting on our back hedge in this photo).

Since the very first month that we arrived here in the UK, Lena has been planning her wedding to sweet Oliver. Oliver has been totally on-board with this, and they are dear friends, playing together almost everyday at school. We had him over to play today, and it was sweet to see them together.



When Ollie's mom came to get him, Lena gave him a little kiss on the cheek, embarrassing neither of them. It makes me sad to think that they may never see each other again. It seems cruel to move away, but then that's the nature of this job. It's what brought us here. It's what will take us away.

I hold it true, whate'er befall;

I feel it, when I sorrow most;

'Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

Tin Years

May 16th marked our 10 year anniversary which is the tin/aluminum celebration. This sounds miserable compared to a Golden Anniversary, but it sure beats paper. So in honor of this anniversary, we hired a tin can (i.e. bought the tickets) and winged our way to the City of Lights and Lovers - Paris. Ariel and I had each been to Paris, but never together. It seemed like the thing to do.

Unlike ten years ago when we were poor and basically had the low standards of poor people, we booked a suite at the Hotel Chambiges Elysées for our weekend away and made reservations at a fabulous restaurant on the Champs Elysées called Copenhague. The room was fantastic and sumptuous (with taffeta-upholstered walls, high ceilings, and oak paneling/mouldings accenting the room) while the food was blow-your-mind delicious. A colleague at the Paris Embassy had recommended the restaurant for a special night out, but when I read that it was all Danish food, I was a bit worried. It was all Danish, interpretted by the premier French chef Georges Landriot, and we were blown away. Ariel had fois gras twice, and each time was different and wonderful. I had reindeer that was so tender and so flavourful, it melted in the mouth. It was a memorable meal.

The ceiling of Les Galeries Lafayette

True to our eclectic personalities, the only things that I planned were of a macabre theme, and so first we went to the Père-Lachaise cemetery -- basically a really groovy Gothic necropolis.

Coincidentally, Ariel's watch died while we were there. (We did not bury it.)
While I had been to Père-Lachaise before, neither of us had ever been to Paris' catacombs, and in my amazing planning (which included taking no books of either the travel or language variety), I only wrote down which Metro stop we were to disembark from. We wandered around and finally went back to check the neighborhood map at the Metro station to find that the entrance was directly across from the Metro station -- we had passed it repeatedly.
We walked about 500 metres through the old quarry corridors until we arrived at the ossuary where we traversed another half kilometer surrounded by bones stack 6 feet high and 10-15 feet deep.

Sacré-Coeur Basilica at Montmartre

At the top of the Eiffel Tower, having weathered a dreadful storm in the queue, we saw, not a rainbow, but a raincircle. From our vantage point, the rainbow made a complete circle. We took the stairs down.

All photos taken by me, except for the ones taken by Ariel. Special thanks to Kira for taking our kids.

Unspeakable Things

A few months ago I was doing some research on the Mayas, and reading an article about their amazing genealogical records, I came upon this image. And when I first saw it, I thought, "I know exactly how he feels." Yes, that man's family history is doing unspeakable things to him, so badly he's had to go to the local Medicine Woman and get a salve. I don't care for family history. My grandmother and my mother-in-law both are quite keen on it, but I don't get it. My interest in my family goes only so far to the people I know or their immediate relations. But I don't care to know if I'm distantly related to the president (gosh, I hope not!) or anything like that. I don't care for name-dropping of the living or of the dead. Until last week.

Last week, it was my birthday, so I received the obligatory birthday phone calls all day long, often from members of my family from whom I don't hear very often, like my mother. So my mother mentioned proudly that my grandmother (the family history hobbyist) had discovered that we are direct descendants of Geoffry Chaucer. There was talk of divine birthright and the such, and I have to admit that there was a welling up of familial pride in my heart. I was tickled pink, and when I was off the phone, my grandmother sent me a guest pass to Ancestry.com so I could see for myself. Sure enough, there was a direct line of parent to child all the way down to me.

This in turn stirred up in me a longing for my oft-derided ancestral name-dropping, so I set about to learn of these famous people to maximize my bragging, starting with ol' Papa Geoff. G. Chaucer begat Thomas Chaucer who begat Alice Chaucer (m. 1430 to William de la Pole) who begat Jane de la Pole who be-- wait. Here's the problem. Because all of these people are famous, especially William de la Pole, there is a lot known and written about them. Like how William fought in the Hundred Years War, and on June 12th 1429 he surrendered to Joan of Arc at the Battle of Jargeau, and how 9 months later was born his daughter Jane -- to the nun he slept with the night before he surrendered. Only 8 months later did he then marry Alice Chaucer with whom he had only one child of note -- John. Which would mean that Geoffry Chaucer is my 21st great step-grandfather. Which basically counts for naught.

As I work my way down the line, the known history gets fuzzier and fuzzier as each person gets more and more mundane, so there may be other breaks in the line (but that won't be recorded by Henry VI's war historians), so I may not even be related to William de la Pole.

There are lots of contemporary descendants of Jane de la Pole who have found themselves no longer the distant progeny of the great bawdy poet from London (he never lived in Canterbury). And like them, I too feel like genealogy has violated me in some unspeakable way.

And now, I'm going to go get some salve cake.

The Sinister Infidel

Normally, I write about my own adventures, and only mention Ariel when he tags along. This is mostly because Ariel goes to boring and/or miserable places for the most part, and when he does go somewhere cool, he spends every waking moment in the Embassy or eating at groovy restaurants (which he tells me about over the phone at the precise moment when I've had Cheetoes (unfulfillingly) for lunch). But he never goes and sees/does anything cool.

Until this (next-to) last trip. The trip itself was to an rather uneventful location: Amman, Jordan. Ariel's been there once before, and true to form, he never plays the tourist (i.e. he doesn't bring me back anything nice). But he did have an adventure. In the airport Sunday night, he was carrying a big bag of heaviness with his thumb hooked under the strap, and the bag slipped off, pulling his thumb in the wrong direction backwards. He heard a melodious ripping sound that came not from the bag but from inside his hand. So the following day, he did what you do when you've ripped off your thumb and can no longer bend it -- he went to work. As the hand turned black through the day, his coworkers advised him to see the doctor. Not the embassy medical unit -- no, he went to the Arab Medical Centre -- yep, a Jordanian hospital.

Now, I have to admit that as far as Middle Eastern Countries go, Jordan is our #1 Arabic-speaking ally and is fairly Western, but let's be honest here -- when you think of a hospital in the Middle East, you ironically don't picture Mount Sinai.

This was how the conversation went over the phone (edited for brevity and humor):
Ariel: "The guys from the office took me to a Jordanian hospital."
Me: "Did they remove your thumb?"
Ariel (ignoring me -- the secret of our marriage): "They took an x-ray to see if I broke any bones."
Me: "Then did they remove your thumb?"
Ariel: "It turns out I ripped 2 of the 4 ligaments that hold your thumb in place, but didn't break anything."
Me: "So they removed your thumb?"
Ariel: "The doctor said I had what they call 'Goalkeeper's Thumb'-- it's a football injury."
Me (disappointed): "Football? So they didn't remove your thumb."

As you can see, Ariel came home with his x-rays in a groovy envelope marked with Arabic -- making it official. But no thumb in a jar (which I'm certain they would have confiscated in customs -- which would have made an even cooler story).

The bad news is, that as a result, Ariel learned to swallow pills. Yes, my grown-up husband couldn't swallow pills without gagging and spitting them back out. This is why it's by the grace of God alone my husband does not have malaria -- because he can't swallow his anti-malarial medication. But now, he learned on this trip (a sure sign that there was no Internet in the hotel room -- he must have been really bored). The reason this is bad when, yes, this is technically good news is that now I have nothing even meager of his to balance out my own craziness. When faced with potential mockery of my terrible phobia of human beings, I used to be able to retort, "Yeah, sure I'm deathly afraid to talk on the phone to the pizza delivery boy, but, um, you can't even swallow pills! So yeah!" Now, I got nothin'.

Just for fun, I added the word "kafir" in Arabic on the x-ray for a bit of authenticity. Yes, I have a list of weird neuroses, but can you write "Infidel" in Arabic? I didn't think so.