Halfway down the Danube

The Tower of the Ape

Fladungen has an Ape Tower.

Okay, strictly speaking it's the "Maulaffenturm", the Tower of the Mouth-Ape.  And that's really a pun, because in German "Maulaffen" means "gawker".  And up on the side of the tower, sitting on a rain spout, there's a little gargoyle.  It's vaguely simian, with long arms and a mouth hanging open in indignation or glee.  It's hard to be sure, because 600 years of rain and wind have worn on him.  He's sort of an ape-ish shaped lump.  But his mouth is definitely open.

So, Gawker Tower, or Ape Tower.  Either way.

-- Wait, you ask.  Why does Fladungen have a tower at all, with an ape or without?  Isn't it a rather modest farming town of just 1,500 people or so.

Indeed.  But therein lies a story.

Sondheim

Went to get the car's tires changed today.

It should start snowing any day now, so it's time to put on the snow tires.  There's a little place a couple of towns over that will change your tires and, for just a few euros, store your summer tires until next year.

I say "little place" and, really, this is the sort of small garage that you don't find in cities and suburbs much any more.  It's a filling station with a single garage next to it, and a big pile of tires around the side.  There was just one guy there when I came, doing everything -- taking money for gas, answering the phone, and putting our car on the lift to change the tires.  So it took a little while.

So I went for a walk around the town of Sondheim.

Sick, sick, sick

Claudia has been flat on her back the last couple of days -- sore throat, aches and pains, general misery.  (But no fever.  Claude doesn't get fevers.  It's very strange.)

Yesterday afternoon Alan turned up with the same thing -- very sore throat, general misery, fever.  Also vomiting, probably brought on by coughing too much.  (If you don't have a little kid in your life: little kids can do this.  Unfortunately.)  We moved him into our bed for the night, and I slept in his.  Alan and David share a bunk bed, so I climbed up into the top bunk, read a few pages about premodern Central Asia, and fell asleep.

Come the morning, David came creeping downstairs, face pale: "Mommy!  There's a big something in Alan's bed!"

Anyway.  David turned up with the same cough, so he and Alan are home from school today.  Tea, chicken, soup, cartoons.  When you have a lot of kids, this just happens sometimes.

Back from Dakar

Didn't get to see so much this time.  Short visit -- flew in late Saturday night, flew out Wednesday -- and three very full working days.  So, not much time for sightseeing.

That said, there were a few interesting points.

-- The Senegalese government is still somewhat sensitive about criticism.  I didn't think the report we were presenting was particularly critical, but we still got a lot of pushback.  Some of it was justified, some of it was of the "why was my agency not consulted about this" sort, but some seemed just... political.  Talking to the cameras, type of thing; how dare the outsiders say that Ministry X lacks competence and has transparency problems.  I'd encountered this sort of thing before (every development consultant has) but I was surprised to see how much there was of it.

Possibly relevant (or possibly not): Senegalese President Wade has been publicly contemplating another term of office.  He's quite old, and this would require (sigh) amending the Senegalese Constitution; many observers think Wade is really setting up a run for his son.  Either way, not really a positive development -- especially since Senegal has, by African standards, a pretty good democracy, with a free-ish press and an active opposition.

Dakar, with butterflies

In my stomach.

Had to give a 40-minute presentation to a large room full of government officials (including a couple of Ministers) and high-end investors.  Rehearsed it the night before in my room and it was okay, but with some problems... some clunky transitions, too many "uhhs" and "ums", that sort of thing.  But not bad.  More like, run through it again in the morning and it will be fine.

Here's the thing: I don't get nervous in front of crowds.  I like doing presentations.  I present (I am told) as relaxed and affable, but in control of my facts.  I radiate (again, I am told) breezy confidence.  And I like talking to groups.  My major vices are (as you'd expect) a tendency to ramble and to run overtime, and years of practice and a modest level of self-discipline have mostly corrected these.  I'm not afraid of Ministers, and I'm certainly not afraid of PowerPoint.  I give good soundtrack.  And I don't worry about it.

But come the morning, I found myself inexplicably twitchy.  I felt unprepared, and not... competent.  And about ten minutes before the presentation, I caught myself pacing in the hall muttering to myself, and I suddenly realized the hell, I am really nervous here.

And realizing that I was nervous -- for the first time since, ohh, my first jury trial?  Which was in 1992 or thereabouts? -- abruptly made me much more nervous, to the point of breathing heavily and sweating.

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.