So maybe you noticed that in my last post, all the pictures were super-saturated green? Yes, I just got a new camera. And I have learned that all-important lesson: no matter how much you spend on a camera, it's not ready to take pictures straight out of the box.
This is a love story but also a story of obscene egotism. That's the way I like my stories. Sometimes I like them with a healthy dose of amnesia and evil twins, but not in this one. Anyhow, about a year ago, we had this little get together at church where we had to share something we had created with our own two hands. Many people brought scrapbooks, some brought quilts or needlework, but I brought my photobooks. I suppose that photobooks are about the same as scrapbooks except that there are no scraps in them. They are linen-wrapped, hardbound, (vanity-) published photo albums. They have captions and maybe a consistent background color/texture, but they aren't like scrapbooks (which frankly make my skin crawl). One lady, sweet Diana Riley (aged 73), was very taken by them and became convinced that I was an amazing photographer based on these photos. Let me tell you a secret: only about 1 of every 50 pictures I take ever make it to be printed.
A few months ago, I received a phone call from Diana that began, "Jenny, I was wondering if you would do me a favour since you are such a wonderful photographer..."
The camera takes up to 8 shots per second. That may not mean anything to you, but when you're taking a picture of a baby, that means you are bound to get a good shot every once in a while. All in all, I took about 300 pictures of Rosie over two days, and got about 20 great shots of her, a new and improved ratio. Did I mention the Continuous Auto-Focus? It tracks a moving child, and calculates the correct range. What about the ISO going all the way up to 3200? with built in noise reduction?! I was in love. But my new love belonged to another. And one day, Ariel came home and announced that the camera was being packed up and sent to Warsaw. Then began the begging. Ariel at first relented to the pleas to buy a Digital SLR, but he wanted me to get a lesser model. But it was too late. I had experienced the sweet nectar of the top-of-the-line, and everything else tasted like ashes in my mouth. So I made a deal with the devil. (His handle isn't EvilGM for nothing.) He agreed that I could get my beloved camera if I gave up buying books. When he first voiced the deal, I nearly refused. Could I give up my beloved books for a camera? Could I ignore the siren-song of Amazon's "Recommended Especially for You, JennyB" list each time I went to the site to check on the order status or to buy a lens filter or spare battery? So far, the temptation has been great, but the rewards are already paying off. And I fixed the saturation problem.
Wednesday, 11 June 2008
A love story
Saturday, 7 June 2008
Horse Country
In England, if you wake up on a Saturday to any amount of sunshine, you pile the kids in the car and go somewhere. Anywhere. We didn't take the helicoptor ride, so we only had this distorted shot (unlike below), but Saturday we went to White Horse Hill, near Uffington.
The drive was magnificent (even if we did get turned around a few times), and it was a lovely day out. We climbed right up to the top, and had some lunch at the ruins of Uffington Castle, an Iron Age fortification. The White Horse is significant for two reasons: it's the only English chalk figure that scientists accept as being prehistoric (about 3000 years old), and as you can see from my top shot, it's basically indiscernible except from the air. So why was prehistoric man creating huge images that could only be seen from above? Who knows, who cares. We enjoyed it.
And we're enjoying spring.
Burning Up the Middle East
With a break from standard operating procedure, EvilGM (currently typing) will be filling in an entry after a recent trip to the Middle East.
I have been to Jordan several times in the past, but I’ve never had the opportunity to visit much of the country. This time around I took two days to do a little site seeing. I spent the weekend at the Kempinski Hotel overlooking the Dead Sea (البَحْر المَيّت or al-Bahr al-Mayyit in Arabic). From what the locals told me it is 20km across and about 70km long. In case you forgot it also sits about 420m (1,378 ft) below sea level, which merits the status of the naturally lowest place on the surface of the Earth . You could clearly see the West Bank on the other side in the day, but nighttime lights made it easier still.
Mimicking the locals, I went over to an urn containing a very dark mud, which is used to coat the body before going into the Dead Sea. Although you can pay people to do this for you at the spa, I did my best for free on shore. After slathering the stuff on you sit out and bake in the sun for a while until the mud is not so moist anymore. My initial reaction was one of mild disgust, but when a local Jordanian urged me to “try it,” I gave in. Some people pay thousands of dollars for the privilege, and since most of my cost was paid for me, why not? (Kind of like the time I tried deep fried lamb brains on a previous trip to Jordan. One sampling was enough. I can explain it in gory detail if you’re ever so inclined to hear…)
It took about 10 minutes for the mud to bake in place. I was blacker than I had ever been in my life. The mud is a burnt gray/brown/black mix, even more so once the moisture goes. I walked into the Dead Sea, albeit with some difficulty. I had heard tales about being able to float in the water without any effort, but the experience was still surprising. As I walked into the water I found that it took great effort to remain on my feet. Once I passed my belly button I could no longer stand up and allowed gravity and the waters to carry me safely to my back. Rubbing off the mud took a little while, and the results gave me markedly smoother skin, even on my elbows, which for most guys (real men don’t use lotion) is one of the roughest spots on me.
I tried to “stand up” in the water and was unable to do so for more than brief moments. The salt just pushes you around like so much flotsam. It was somewhat unnerving that although I could force my body to do what I wanted, the environment simply refused to go along. After regrettably getting a touch of water in my nose (it burned for quite a while) I waffled over to the shore and rinsed off. The place is so ridiculously salty (9x the ocean) that you can smell it and see it everywhere. I also found out that Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority are contemplating excavating a canal to connect the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean or Red Sea so that they can replenish the rapidly lowering sea. It is currently depleting at a rate of just under 1m per annum. For the interested you can check out the following link for the Two Seas Canal.
Another piece of interest is Mount Sodom (جبل السدوم or Jabal Usdum in Arabic), which is right at the base of the sea. Per local legend, it is the resting place of Lot’s wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt for returning to Sodom despite God’s warning to flee. The entire mountain is made almost entirely of halite (rock salt) and is a scant 5x3 miles. The little pillar/spire is called Lot’s Wife by locals.
One of the must see attractions in Jordan, and a World Heritage Site, is Petra (البتراء or Al-Butrā in Arabic). Many people have seen a small part of it when they watched the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Petra is mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls as Rekem and was spoken of by Eusebius, Jerome, Pliny the Elder, Josephus, etc. as a trade hub for a Semitic caravaneer group. You don’t need to know the history to explore and appreciate its beauty. I bought the services of a hotel driver and off we went. Even though it took 3 hrs to reach the site, it was still very much worth it.
After some initially boring structures, you run into the natural, narrow clefts in the rock leading to the main sites inside. The rock clefts run for a good ¼ - ½ mile. Coming out of the fissure you quickly run into the structure used in many movies, as seen below.
The beauty of Petra is that virtually all of the structures are carved right out of the rock as a single piece. It is evident that some pieces were added to the outsides here and there, but most of the various locations at the site were carved from a solid rock face. The natural beauty of the stone, coupled with the obvious skill of the craftsmen, has embodied magnificence in a palpable form rarely seen in this plastic age. If you ever have the chance, I urge you to visit.
One final note on Petra was that you can see the majority of the sections worth seeing in roughly 4 hours. At 1330 the group I was with decided to go and visit the location known as “The Monastery” or Jabal Al-Deir (#24). The map we had been given was fairly accurate so we didn’t fear the seemingly 600m trip from #22 to #24. You should always fear what you don’t know.
Just like in the movies that have the grizzled veteran do “one last job” I should have known that nothing ever works as planned. The map should have mentioned that the drawings for this final section were not to scale (everything else had been!) If they had drawn the map to scale, it might have looked something like this:
Our very own Bataan Death March got longer every time we stopped someone to ask how much farther it was. “We gave up and just turned around,” was our first group's response. Eventually we got, “Oh, just another 20 minutes.” Five minutes later, “Oh, just another 20 minutes.” Another 5 minutes goes by, “I’d guess about another 25 minutes or so.” Eventually we got down to 15 minutes, then 10, then 5, then sweet, sweet victory. (It’s always worse when you can’t see the finish line.) 600m turned into 45 minutes uphill in the sun. I drank 1.5 liters of water on the trip up. I noticed the price of water increased the further up the hill you went. Eventually I gave in. They could have charged a lot more than 2 JD (~$3) for the half-liter of water and I would have gladly paid it. At the top I rested in a tent, bought a Fanta and two Snickers bars and they have never tasted so fine. This little excursion added another 2 hours onto our day and helped me get toasted to a blistering red veneer on both arms, hands, and my neck, SPF 45 and two applications be damned. I suppose 6 hrs in the Arabian sun would be enough to do anyone in. A week a later and I’m still red…
Tuesday, 27 May 2008
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.
Sunday, 18 May 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, 11 May 2008
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.
Thursday, 8 May 2008
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.
