Halfway down the Danube

Georgia, or not

I'm in Tbilisi, Georgia.

It's a scouting expedition, funded by a large consulting company, that could lead to a job here.  Or... not.  There will probably be a bid, I'll probably be part of it, then it's out of our hands.  We won't know until well past New Year's.

My second evening here, I was talking to Claudia on Skype, and doing the usual first-time-in-country stuff: the airport was very good, the traffic is crazy, the people seem nice, it's another one of those alphabets.  And she said to me, "Careful.  Don't get too emotionally invested."

So true. 

I keep wanting to write a post about Georgia.  It's an interesting country, and there's plenty to say, even on just four days' acquaintance.  But part of my brain seems to be interpreting that as... investment.

What I can say: the climate is warmer than Yerevan's.  The food, so far, seems better.  The people are more expressive.  The alphabet looks like Elvish.  The spoken language is impenetrable.

Maybe I'll have more to say in a bit.

The baby burns her hand

On our wood-burning stove.

This was probably inevitable.  The stove has a door with a big glass window, so you can see the flames... laughing, dancing, beckoning.  The baby is still quite young (14 months this week) and not smart about fire.  The stove stood cold and empty for six months, while she learned to sit up, roll over, and then crawl; now, when the weather has turned cold and we've started using it again, she's very quick and active. 

So, probably inevitable.  And it could have been much worse.  After the stove has been burning for a few hours, the surface of the glass gets alarmingly hot -- like, surface of a hot stove hot.  In this case, the fire was new, so it wasn't that bad.  And she only managed to get one hand on it.

That said... It was pretty unpleasant.  She screamed and screamed.  Her hand sprouted half a dozen large white blisters, including a truly enormous one across her palm.  She clawed off the first couple of bandages.  Eventually we mummy-wrapped her entire hand into a mitten of gauze and bandages.  A day later it's grimy, but still intact.  I suppose we'll have to change and dress it again later today.

She's been, all things considered, pretty good about it.  Calmed down after a while.  A day later, she till whimpers now and then, but is mostly back to her normal self.

She can't put any weight on that hand when she crawls, though.  But she's still not interested in walking.  So she crawls on three limbs, like a crippled dog, holding her bandaged hand out before her.

Long-time readers of this blog will know that we're no stranger to childhood injuries.  Alan was almost exactly this age when he took a header down the front steps of our house in Belgrade. 

Still.

We are living on Planet Onion

I mean...

"U.S. President wins Nobel Peace Prize for not being George Bush; Grateful world thanks Obama for relative intelligence and sanity."

We're on page 9 of Our Dumb Century, volume 2.

A walk in the woods

Went for a walk in the woods this weekend.

I went with our neighbor Franz.  Franz is native to the region, so he's a trove of information.  This patch of woods, it used to be meadow! Here's the spring where the wild boar come to wallow.  These mushrooms, they are sehr giftig, very much poison.

Right.  About the mushrooms.

It's mushroom season here in central Germany.  They're everywhere.  There are at least four different kinds growing just in our back yard.  They appear out of nowhere, sometimes singly and sometimes in clumps or fairy rings.  The woods... the woods were just full of them.

Understand that I'm basically an urban, suburban kind of guy.  I spent some time in small-town Maine as a kid, but it didn't really take.  My psychological center of gravity is somewhere between the upper East Side of Manhattan and Fairfield County, Connecticut.  Food comes from supermarkets, wrapped in plastic.  Food safety consists of checking the sell-by date.

Eating fresh-picked mushrooms -- I mean, picked from the dirt, by non-experts -- creeps me out.  I mean, it seriously creeps me way the hell out.  Mushrooms can kill you in about eighteen different ways, all of them horrible.  There are mushroom toxins that cause violent convulsions, followed by death.  There are mushroom toxins that cause massive internal bleeding, followed by death.  There are mushroom toxins where you're totally fine for 24 hours, and then the toxin dissolves your liver into slime.  Followed by, you guessed it, death.

Superhero cartoons

We love us some superhero cartoons.

Best ever: the Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, of course, especially the middle two seasons.  Classics to be revisited again and again.  The animation, the voice acting, the characterization, the plots -- just perfect.

Runner up: the 1990s Batman, of course.  Both were in the same universe and used many of the same animators and voice actors, but the "Timiverse" Batman had its own distinctive, gloomy aesthetic.  Edged out only because the wide-screen Justice League was just so darn fun.

Honorable mention: Teen Titans Go.  Pitched to a slightly younger audience, but that's fine.  Got a bit repetitive over time, since the five personalities never evolved or changed much.  On the other hand, some eps -- especially in the last two seasons -- were really astonishingly good.  Still gets plenty of DVD time here in the house.

(The discerning, comics-aware critic will have noticed these are all DC cartoons.  That's because the Marvel cartoons have just not been as good.  Don't know why, but there it is.)

The trees in our back yard

September was plums. 

Holy God, was this a year for plums.  We have eight old plum trees in the back yard, but last year they didn't do much of anything.  So it came as a surprise when they burst into... what's the word for an excess of fruit?  Lots.  Lots of fruit.  Plums all over the grass, attracting wasps.  Claudia made plum jam and plum cake and plum chutney, and the baby crawled around the yard picking them up and eating them.  I picked buckets full.  We offered them to friends and neighbors, but everyone else was having a plum year too.

Ripe plums are blue with a blush.  Violet means not quite ripe.  The tastiest are ones that have just fallen off the tree, picked up off the grass before the bugs get to them.

For some reason this inspired me to count the trees in our back yard.  There are twenty three -- nineteen adult trees, a sapling and a seedling.

Angie and Guido

Sounds like an old Billy Joel song, doesn't it.  But no, it's just election night here in Germany.

So Germany's Grand Coalition is over.  The next government will be one of the Conservatives (led by Angela Merkel) and the Liberals (led by Guido Westerwelle). 

If you're not German, here's how it works: traditionally there were two big parties, the Conservatives and the Social Democrats, and two little ones, the Liberals and the Greens.  The Social Democrats would take the Greens as junior partners in government, while the Conservatives would team up with the Liberals.  (In Germany, "Liberals" are sort of the free market business-friendly party.  Their positive image is "hard-driving technocrats".  Their negative image is "smug, greedy nerds".)  

But in the last couple of elections a fifth party, the "Left", has thrown the old system out of whack.  After the last election, the only way to form a government was for the two big parties, Conservatives and Social Democrats, to form a "grand coalition" of the center-left and center-right. 

To everyone's surprise, this worked tolerably well.  But apparently Germany's voters were tired of it, because they've given the Conservatives and Liberals just enough votes to form a coalition of their own.

It's been a very quiet, restrained campaign.  Frankly, I hardly noticed it.  Claudia put on some nice clothes and walked downtown -- okay, "downtown" in Fladungen is three blocks away -- and the whole thing took five minutes.

Otherwise, a gorgeous autumn day.  Dinner at the in-laws, some outside time with the kids.  Early bedtime. 

Aaand back again

We're back.  Flew from New York to Frankfurt, picked up our car, drove two hours to Fladungen, then went straight to Claudia's cousin's wedding. 

Which was actually okay.  We were pretty beat, but the boys could run around with other kids, and constant handling made the baby happy but very tired.  So we were able to get everyone in bed by 11 (which is just 5 pm EST) and start the weary process of de-jet lagging four small children.

So where did we go?

See you in September

Going off on the big family vacation: New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, DC.

Three weeks and change.  Not, alas, a very long gap by the recent standards of this blog.  Someone once said that you know a blog is starting to die when the blogger starts trying to explain why he's not posting much.  So I won't do that.  But the blog, though very slow and patchy these days, is not dead.

Back in the middle of September. 

Happy Saturn Equinox Day!

It's Saturn Equinox Day today.

Hey, it only comes once every 15 years.  Here are some pictures and, if you like those, here are some more

We celebrated by, um... hanging around.  Alan built a really impressive helicopter out of Legos.  David did a reading lesson on the computer.  We did a lot of swinging in the hammock. I finished telling them a particularly long and convoluted Monkey story.  (Monkey vs. Red Boy.  It's about three chapteres of the Journey to the West.)  Claudia went shopping.  A summer vacation day.

Oh, and I finished my work.  I'm officially done with agricultural inputs in Senegal; pharmaceutical supply chains in Uganda; and regression analysis of factors in successful Business Startup projects around the world.  The good part is, I don't have any of that stuff hanging over my head any more: all done!  And I should get paid for it.  (Soon, I hope.) 

Less good is that now I have to start beating the bushes for work again.  Such is the freelance life.

Summer vacation, Friday morning

The baby ate a bee.

It’s vacation time here, so mornings are pretty relaxed.  We allow about an hour of TV in the morning and another hour in the evening.  (Okay, sometimes it’s more.  But those are our goals.)  The morning hour is usually pretty early, often before breakfast… the boys consider watching Teen Titans or Pokemon a higher priority than eating.  Possibly this is a little too relaxed?  But it’s summer vacation… 

In our defense, without the lash of school, everyone wakes up at different times.   So it’s simpler to wait until everyone is up, and do breakfast then. As a pre-breakfast stop-gap, to keep blood sugar from crashing and kids from getting cranky, I’ll offer some small healthy snack.  Apple slices are popular, or at least acceptable.  (We bought an apple corer from IKEA a year ago.  It cores the apple and splits it into half a dozen convenient, child-friendly slices.  Best four euros we ever spent.) 

So anyway: pre-breakfast.  The boys were watching Robin, Cyborg and Starfire fight the Hive.  Claudia was sitting on the couch.  I was at the kitchen table reading e-mail and checking my news and blogs.  (I guess this is the modern equivalent of having the newspaper up in front of me.)  The baby had had her bottle – that’s a priority – and was rolling around on the floor. 

What happened: one of the boys dropped part of an apple slice.  A bee just happened to wander in and land on it: mm! sweet!  Meanwhile, the baby had the same thought; after all any piece of food that lands on the floor legitimately belongs to her…

Claudia saw it, though a moment too late to stop it. 

The baby screamed… and then SCREAMED and SCREAMED and SCREAMED.  A bee sting on your tongue is no fun for anyone, but if you’re not quite a year old it must be a particularly horrible surprise.  Poor thing!

They die after they sting, you know?  In fact, they die almost instantly – the dead bee was on her onesie, all curled up and pathetic.  “Get it off her!” yelled Claudia.  “It’s dead,” I said stupidly.  “GET  IT OFF HER!”

We ran for the tweezers, then Claudia held her while I probed.  (I can’t recommend this.  Squirmy, slimy, swollen, and every touch causes more screaming.)  Eventually we got it out: little black stinger, with poison sack and bee guts still attached.   We gave her a little Motrin.  The screaming eventually subsided to sobs.  We watched her closely for a reaction to the sting, but she was fine.  Half an hour later she was taking her morning nap.

Friday links

For the first time in a while, yeah.

The intersection of two sets.  If you recognize most of these (I did), take a drink.

There's a team in Austria that's been running the famous two-slit experiment for a while, but with ever bigger and bigger particles -- like, molecules.  It's tricky for a couple of reasons.  One is, the bigger the particle, the shorter its "wavelength" -- so you need ever narrower slits to get diffraction.  Another problem is, a molecule, unlike a single atom, can emit thermal photons.  If it emits those photons en route to the detector, that will give away its location and cause the wave function to collapse.  So it's very finicky work.

Unfortunately, firing a living organism through an interference grid is unlikely to ever happen.  That's because the wavelengths required get ridiculously shorter: to get diffraction of a bacterium would require a slit so narrow its width would be down around the Planck length.  Oh, well.

Awful library books.  Most of these seem to be just old, but a few are indeed awful.

South Sudan again

By an odd coincidence, this popped up in the news last week:

An international tribunal redefined the borders of a disputed oil-rich region between north and south Sudan on Wednesday. The ruling seeks to defuse a thorny issue in the 2005 peace agreement ending one of Africa’s longest civil wars by splitting the contested zone between the two sides.

In its ruling the tribunal, seated at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, overruled a decision by an international commission that Sudan’s government rejected four years ago.

The new ruling includes important concessions for both sides, giving the government in the north control of the region’s richest oil fields, but consolidating control of the remaining region under the Ngok Dinka, an ethnic group loyal to southern Sudan and likely to vote to join it in a coming referendum.

Both sides in the conflict...  said Wednesday that they would accept the ruling.

Okay, so.  Previously, a conflict in South Sudan was very, very likely in 2011.  That's because the folks who negotiated a peace settlement foolishly agreed to hold a separate vote for Abiye Province, which is mostly inhabited by the pro-Southern Ngok Dinka but which includes the region's richest oil fields.  The North was not going to let this go without a fight.

The new settlement divides the province so that most of the oil is on one side, and most of the Ngok Dinka are on the other.  It's an imperfect division, but it might be enough to prevent a war.

Nobody has been paying much attention to South Sudan.  Hell, I had only the vaguest idea of the place before I went next door to Uganda.  So it seemed all too plausible that it might be allowed to drift into another war.  Now, maybe not -- 2011 will still be very tricky, but it's no longer a certain date with violence and chaos.  The dog might not bark.  That's encouraging.

Uganda: 2011 and all that

Everybody here is worried about 2011.  Two reasons.

One, the next round of elections.  Uganda's president/dictator, Yoweri Museveni, has been in power nonstop since 1986.  He last won re-election in 2006; he's up for re-election in early 2011. 

Nobody thinks for a moment that this election will be free or fair.  The last one involved the arrest of the main opposition leader for treason and rape.  And Museveni has only become more authoritarian and assholic since then.  (And also Uganda has discovered oil, which is a powerful incentive to stay in office.) 

On the other hand, young Ugandans -- and most Ugandans are young -- are pretty sick of Museveni.  So when-not-if he steals the election, it's unlikely to go over well.

That by itself would be worrisome but, hell, obnoxious government steal elections all the time.  But then there's also Sudan. 

In Uganda

Really a placeholder post.

I'm in Kampala, Uganda.  It's another two-week assignment.  The trip down was pretty uneventful -- saw the Nile out the airplane window, which was interesting.  Bought a really horrible sandwich in Cairo airport, couldn't finish it.  Overnight flight from Cairo: five hours to cover what took Speke and Burton months of pain.  Oh, this century of ours.

The hotel is nice.  Had Indian food tonight.  Work starts tomorrow. 

More perhaps in a bit.