I do not like them, Sam-I-am

Reality is just strange as fiction - even Dr. Seuss' fiction. Who knew there was some truth to the popular Green Eggs and Ham?

From Kathimerini:

A veterinarian in Trikala, central Greece, became the talk of the town yesterday when he put on display two green eggs laid by the hen of a friend. Animal doctor Nikos Pallas said that the eggs were probably green because of something that the hen ate.

Absolutely fabulous

I'm sure a sunset so beautiful is the result of some deadly toxins in the air, but such things still take my breath away.

Eclipsed

I’m probably the only dorkus in this part of the world who stayed up to watch the lunar eclipse (it peaked at 5:01 am our time), but this is the first time in a really long while that I’ve had such spectacular views of the sky from my own place of residence, and I couldn’t resist it. I was hoping to get some halfway decent pictures and video of it, but our camera is not really eclipse quality, so the moon, which was as big as life to my naked eye, looked like a tiny little dot through the camera, and once the eclipse peaked all you could see through the camera was darkness. Of course I had to drag my husband out of bed once I realized the pictures wouldn’t be so good, because honestly, how often in life do circumstances come together so perfectly for you to view such an event? He actually didn’t mind, and came out to the balcony with me quite willingly.

Normally the moon lights up our balcony quite brightly, so much so that the street lights are rather inconsequential, but when I went out a few minutes before the peak of the eclipse the darkness took me a bit by surprise. I had a few minutes of unnecessary panic early on when I wondered if it was indeed ok to look at a lunar eclipse directly (because if it wasn’t surely I would be blind any second), but then I thought to myself, “you can look at the moon, dummy, why can’t you look at a lunar eclipse?” That is just one example of the mindless drama that goes through my head on an hourly basis.

For what it’s worth, I did take a couple of pictures and here is the video I took of different stages of the eclipse. Just don’t expect anything spectacular.

The devil wears mithril

Remind me never to bitch about anything here on the blog again, because it seems as soon as I do, things just get worse. We just had the coldest weekend yet - I don’t think it ever got above freezing. Somehow we managed to miss all the snow the rest of the country endured, which is a miracle, because it seems we always have snow up here when no one else does. But the cold was bad enough, and the one time we ventured out every swear word known to man involuntarily poured out of my mouth as some kind of defense against the sub-freezing wind (it didn't work).

Just as well, though, because it gave us the perfect excuse to stay inside all weekend and finally try Lord of the Rings Online, which we got for Christmas but couldn’t play because dialup and MMORPGs just don’t mix. My husband and I are both quite fond of computer games of all types, but we have a weakness for the role playing variety. We both beta-tested Everquest way back in the day, and continued to play for quite a few years, until World of Warcraft took all its players away. We eventually caved in and played WoW ourselves, but it didn’t last, and so we continued our search for the perfect MMORPG. We beta-tested Everquest 2 and Vanguard, and while both had some strong points, they just didn’t have that lasting quality we were looking for. So we finally decided that, as fans of Tolkien and MMORPGs, we should try out LOTRO.

So far, I think we’re hooked. Now, we’ll never give as much time to a game as we did in our peak EQ days, but LOTRO is fun, easy to play, and has beautiful graphics. I’m not sure how strong the community is, which was one of the best things about EQ, but we’ll see. The quest storyline seems to lead down a Tolkienesque road, and the world is filled with lots of places in Middle Earth we know and love. What more can a geek ask for?

So if I disappear for long periods of time, it is probably because I am in Middle Earth, doing my best to protect the world from the evil Sauron. Or something like that.

Dog's breath

My life in Greece has included what I consider to be mild winters. Not that it was never cold wherever we happened to be living, but it wasn’t usually sub-freezing, witch’s tittie cold. Sure, we had snow, but it never really felt that cold. In fact, I am almost sure that I never encountered temperatures low enough to make my breath visible – until this winter. It doesn’t help that our little mountain village seems to invite frostier temperatures than the city by the sea – even in the four miles between Panorama and our home the thermometer can drop as much as five degrees Celsius, which can sometimes be the difference between cold and losing feeling in your extremities cold – but I think even Thessaloniki proper has been colder than normal, or at least colder than the two previous winters I’ve spent here. We’ve had honest to goodness, stick to everything snow here four times, which surpasses the one or two crappy snowfalls I’ve seen (ok, we did have a really good snow when we lived in Litochoro, but only one), but when we tell city folk we are snowed in, they inform us it is only raining where they are.

I’ve always been one of those people who is too hot (in fact I think my first words involved a complaint about the heat), but here in our new house I find myself constantly freezing (even with our heat set to an over generous 21 degrees Celsius – sorry environment). Every once in awhile even my husband is cold (and he shares my overheated sensibilities), but usually he is sweating while I am still chilled to the bone. It is getting a bit tiresome, because sometimes even a nice blanket and a couple of cats can’t warm me up fast enough, and honestly, for someone with a rheumatoid illness being cold all the time does not help with joint pain one little bit. But the pain isn’t really the issue – the problem is that I have actually become one of those people I used to mock, those perpetually frozen, shawl bound people that constantly complain about the temperature. This behavior must stop, and so for the first time I find myself longing for the summer when I can swelter miserably in an air conditioner-less house, and the breath of the neighborhood dogs no longer bursts forth in strong foggy puffs when they bark.

Finally...we have ADSL!!!

Apparently we've had it for a few days but our ISP never bothered to notify us. Stupid us, I guess we should have been plugging the stupid modem in daily to check, but we were expecting line noise to tip us off (our old ADSL line had horrible noise without a filter).

In celebration, here is a picture of a sunset as taken from our balcony. Our camera isn't anywhere near as good as our old one that was - ahem - lost when my husband went to Wales, but you get the idea.


Now I get to catch up on blogs and download every stupid viral video that has caught my eye over the past four months. I think I'll be busy for awhile.

Suburban life

Not having ADSL is bad enough, but this week we endured five days of (mostly) no running water. By mostly I mean we had it for brief periods, usually overnight, and without much water pressure. Calls to the water company promised a fix on Wednesday, but the water cut off at nine in the morning Thursday and did not come on again until five this afternoon. Unfortunately, our usage of bottled water shot to all time highs (hey, you gotta wash somehow). Since we can’t flush toilet paper and I’m one of those “if it’s yellow, let it mellow” types, I thought maybe we could survive without flushing, but it seems that too much yellow over too long a time leaves a not so mellow smell. Honestly, I don’t think hell smells so bad.

Sure, I sound like a bit of a princess who can’t deal without steady running water for five days. But there are reasons developed countries no longer have widespread cases of certain diseases, and one of those reasons is running water and the resulting improvement in hygiene. It did make me appreciate the water all the more when it came back on, but it also made me realize how hard it must be for people in third world countries who don’t even have an expectation of running water – people who don’t have the luxury of buying bottle water to do their washing up and cleaning. I guess an argument I’ve heard is “they don’t even know what they are missing since they’ve never had running water” but I don’t really think that matters. What matters is the ignominy of living in a 21^st century world where there are plenty of countries that have the means of providing third world countries with the infrastructure to get water to villages that have none, but because it is an expensive and unprofitable venture, it doesn’t happen.

Anyway, it is good to have the water back again. I’ll try not to take it for granted anymore.

Just what Hello Kitty needs

An assault rifle! Usually I'm loathe to load pages with heavy images on it these days, but this one was totally worth the 15 minute wait.

I think the U.S. military should overhaul all their weapons and equipment in a similar manner.

I knew that some day Hello Kitty would rule the world.

Still crazy after all these months

So life continues here without ADSL (for the record, we’ve been waiting four months). Our ISP claims that they have done everything and the ball is in OTE’s court, and for that, we could wait months more. The irony is that if we had chosen an ISDN line we would have had ADSL already, but we kept thinking that since everything was filed already, changing the line to ISDN might have screwed it all up. But ISDN has its own inconveniences (like the ability to only use one phone jack) so I guess it doesn’t matter now.

The good thing about not having ADSL is I can’t use the internet as a means of procrastination. When it was there, always on, always ready, I could say to myself “oh, I just want to look this one thing up…” and then end up spending two or three hours online instead of doing myriad tasks I needed to do. Now I look around futilely for excuses to procrastinate and find none, so things actually get done, which I suppose is a good thing when you’ve moved house and there are a million things to do.

We now have furniture in the living room, all it needs is a nice rug and a coffee table, so our house is slowly coming together. Our next big purchase will be dining room furniture – I’ve seen a few things I like already. The problem is all the boxes that are still in the dining room (ok, I mean, I can still procrastinate, obviously). These boxes contain items that moved to Greece with me that we chose to keep packed and stored up here while we gallivanted around the country for four years. To be completely honest, all these boxes probably could have disappeared and I never would have missed all the crap that is in them, aside from my grandmother’s china. Moving so often has completely cured me of my propensity towards rat packishness, and I keep unpacking boxes thinking “why the hell did I keep that?” Ah well, live and learn.

For fun, my husband and I have been playing a lot of Scrabble lately (English version, he won’t play the Greek version with me because it would take too long). He always beats me, except for once when I got the tiles of my dreams. It is ironic – for someone that loves language, I never could do very well at word scrambles. We also played Stratego – my first time – and I got all pissy when I realized I couldn’t win. I can be a sore loser sometimes.

Despite the lack of high speed internet, life up here on the mountain is pretty damn good. I spend way more time just looking at the view than I probably should, but I’ve never actually lived in a place with a real view before. We can so much of the area around us – the entire bay and all the areas of the Thessaloniki prefecture that surround it. I feel like a giant up here, but I am also greatly humbled by the sheer beauty of it. The Earth has done some good work, I just hope we don’t ruin it.

And so the wait goes on. I must apologize to all my blogging friends for not stopping by, I don’t even bother to log in but maybe once a week, and just to check email. I miss all of you and can’t wait to catch up. Here’s hoping it will be soon.

I'm dreaming of a white New Year's

Here we are toe deep in the new year and we are still without an ADSL connection. Now, I can be a patient person but I don’t have patience in unlimited quantities, and I think my husband is going to drive me insane if we don’t get high speed internet soon (he got Lord of the Rings online for Christmas, big mistake).

Christmas was uneventful but filled with family and good times, as it should be. My in-laws got us living room furniture for Christmas - a couch, loveseat, and two chairs in classic leather style. Finally, a place to sit downstairs! I found a dining room set I liked, so if the hubby likes it too we’ll be well on our way to a fully furnished house (except for the basement rooms and guest bedroom).

New Year’s Day we were greeted with a surprise snowstorm in the evening. Within a couple of hours it snowed at least two inches, maybe more (it looked like two inches on the gate, but seemed a bit deeper than that as we walked through it). Unfortunately, my brother-in-law was planning a name day party, and most of his guests had to turn back well before they reached our mountain compound. At least we live next door, so the party wasn’t a complete bust. Three days later the roads are *almost* fully cleared, but the snow still blankets everything. I guess this is what mountain winters are going to be like.

I hope that everyone had a great holiday season. Here’s to a spectacular 2008 for everyone (and hoping that we get ADSL in 2008!).


Only one picture uploaded this time. I’m not a masochist!

First snow

Friday night we had our first snowfall at the new house. We hunkered down for a Lord of the Rings DVD marathon. It snowed again last night (apparently, this second snowfall was confined to the mountain), but most of it melted during the day.

I suffered with dialup* to upload these pictures of the snow to my Flickr account, so you better enjoy them!

*ADSL update: Our ISP requested the ADSL line from OTE on November 12^th. As we figured, OTE is going to take their sweet time.

Only in baseball

An auctioneer of sporting memorabilia turned up this document from 1898* listing some general rules of conduct for baseball players, especially regarding use of bad words. It had come to the attention of the powers that be that the players had been using some quite unsavory language on the field, and they felt they should put a stop to it.

What is remarkable about this is not so much the document itself, but the examples that are put forth – language that I thought had been refined by late 20^th century man. Who knew that George Carlin’s seven dirty words had been in use for over a century?

It is nice to know that some things never change, especially when it comes to baseball.

*WARNING: the language might be considered extreme to some people, so if you elect to view the documents provided at the link, be prepared

Turkey, goats, and Christmas cheer

Nope, still no ADSL. We had a rare occasion when we were downtown last week so we stopped into OTE to request a phone bill, but they wanted us to fill out of a form and come back a couple days later. Well, that didn’t work for us, because we couldn’t go back a couple days later. Why the hell they can’t just print out a bill and give it to us is beyond me. I’m not sure I even care anymore. There is so much to do around the house these days having ADSL would just give me too many reasons to procrastinate. Besides, when it does come, it will be all the better because we have been so long without it. I’m two months behind on reading most of my favorite blogs and that is the only thing I really miss.

We had a nice Thanksgiving dinner the Sunday after Thanksgiving. We actually found frozen turkeys with pop-up timers at our grocery store, so we were able to go all out with turkey, stuffing, mashed taters and gravy, homemade rolls and pumpkin pie (and yes, we did have some salad too, it wasn’t ALL carbohydrates). I’m no expert at cooking turkeys and while I thought it was terrible and too dry, my husband, my brother-in-law and his wife all seemed to really like it. But then again, I don’t really like turkey that much anyway – it is the results of the turkey (stuffing, gravy) that I like.

We are now preparing for our first Christmas in the new house, and it is nice to finally be able to go through the boxes of Christmas ornaments and decorations we’ve had stored up here for five years. We still won’t have a big tree since we aren’t downstairs except for the kitchen, but we’ll put a little one in our computer/T.V. room upstairs and hope it doesn’t get knocked down by mischievous cats this time.

Speaking of mischief, the Gavle Goat cam is up and running for 2007. Here’s hoping the citizens of Gavle get another fire free year.

Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving has arrived with no turkeys in sight. At least not in Greece. It seems you can't usually get turkeys until closer to Christmas here. Ah well. When we go grocery shopping tomorrow I'll get us as fat a chicken as I can so we can break the pre-Christmas Greek Orthdox fast with a good simulacrum of a Thanksgiving dinner.

There are a lot of things I am grateful for this year, including our lovely new home. But the list includes a fabulous husband and two loving families (although both are far away from us today, with my in-laws on a Caribbean cruise).

I sure do miss my mom's Thanksgiving dinner though - no matter how hard I try, I don't think I'll ever do it as well as she does. I'm hoping I can convince them to come to Greece next Thanksgiving so she can do all the work and my in-laws can taste what a real Thanksgiving dinner tastes like.

I wish everyone feasts of plenty, including food, love, health and happiness.

As the mountains feel the wind

The wind here on the mountain lives and breathes. Some days it wisps carefully through the trees, gentle kisses on the upturned palms, harboring its secret strength. Then there are days when it roars down the mountain, spitting hisses among the flora, throwing diaphanous arms around everything in its reach. It moans through the eaves and whistles through narrow cracks, calling to me in my dreams as a loud, monstrous bellow – a mythical creature never seen but harshly felt, with the strength of a thousand Herakles.

There is a dark and terrible history to this mountain village, and every time the wind blows with such might I hear the cries and prayers of the 149 villagers who were burned alive by Nazis in 1944. It is a haunting feeling, one of sorrow and regret, not only for my own mistakes but those of giants. There is so much grief hidden in this mountain, and even though the wind tries time and again to carry it out to sea, the memories of this place cannot be forgotten.

Woe is ADSL

We still don’t have ADSL, but for once, we can’t blame OTE. It seems our ISP (not OTE) hadn’t even processed our paperwork to request that our line be switched to ADSL because they wanted a phone bill first. Well, we haven’t even had our phone for a month yet, who knows when we will get a frakkin’ bill. When we called them on Monday they indicated they would go ahead and process our request but to please send them a copy of our phone bill as soon as we get it. I’m not holding my breath, because lord knows even after we send them the phone bill, we’ll have to do something else, like sacrifice twelve virgins while chanting the lyrics to Abbey Road backwards and hopping on one leg. Obviously, one of the requirements of getting ADSL in Greece is participation in the Eleusinian Mysteries, but since it was a mystery no one knows what to do. Actually, I’ll bet that was the secret of the Eleusinian ritual – it was actually a mass of people trying to accomplish something relatively simple but they all got stuck to a massive roll of red tape and were sworn to secrecy by the powers that be.

I guess the phrase of the day is wait and see. I seem to recall that patience is a virtue.

The monster without a name

We’ve been here about six weeks now and I’m just now finishing up the process of unpacking all of our 46 boxes of crap. Of course, some crap is getting repackaged, because we don’t yet have places to put everything. But we have plenty of room to store boxes, so I guess it all works out.

The last things I’ve been unpacking have been books, mainly because it seems that half of our boxes were filled with books (to the grumblings of our movers, who just couldn’t fathom that anyone would have so many books), and partially because we haven’t had enough bookshelf space. My husband finished building the last bookshelf over the weekend and while there still isn’t enough space, it is doable (we’ll add lots more bookshelves downstairs once we plan our living/dining area). I can’t stand not to unpack all the books so I am double shelving them, which I hate to do, but what can you do? I can’t not unpack them all.

The good thing about unpacking books is you finally find those books you could never find while they were all mashed together on the shelves. I realize it would probably behoove us to alphabetize by author someday, but I’m a bit too lazy for that. Plus we add too many books to the collection on a regular basis not to make it annoying.

The bad thing about unpacking books is that you create a ginormous pile of books that you want to reread. Now, rereading books in itself isn’t a bad thing, I do it quite often, and there are some books I have read multiple times. But finding a good balance between reading books you’ve already read and reading new books is difficult, mainly because there are a seemingly limitless number of books I want to read and a limit to how much life I have left. And then what if I go blind for some reason? All this makes reading quite a stressful pastime. Sometimes I think I’d be better off without a brain.

While I can celebrate the end of our boxes, there is a monster I dare not think of lurking in the downstairs closet. This monster is composed entirely of boxes, mostly from when I first moved to Greece, that have been sitting up here getting dusty for five years. It is all crap we didn’t want to keep moving around with us, and some additional crap we dumped up here over the years. I don’t know if I have the strength to tackle this beast, but alas, it must be done, because I want our downstairs closet back. Plus I will have the joy of discovering how much of my grandmother’s china has been broken in transit. Again, it is all stuff that will have to remain stored for now, but I’ll rebox it and some things will go in permanent storage while other things will wait until we have more places to put stuff. We’re taking bets on how long it will take me to do all this, since I have a habit of working very slowly. I’m hoping for the end of the year. We’ll see.

Adaptation

We’ve been in our new house a little over a month now, so I’ve had some time to assess the things I like about living here and the things I miss about living in the city.

What I love:

The view. I’ve never lived in a place with such a spectacular view. I’ve visited plenty of places with nice views, but have never been lucky enough to live in such a place until now. I can’t decide which I love more – the day view with the sea glistening and the mountains in the background or the nighttime view with the lights of Thessaloniki glittering around the bay.

The quiet. You really cannot appreciate peace and quiet until you get out of the city. I can actually think up here.

The isolation. Yep, I like being semi-isolated up here, with a couple of exceptions (as in when I get into my whole “hero in the wilderness facing himself” mode and get depressed about the fact that not only am I not a hero but I don’t like what I’m facing). I really don’t mind not seeing people very often. I’ve never denied being a bit of a misanthropist.

The space. It is really nice having enough space for all our crap and having even more space for all the additional crap we will acquire over the years.

The kitchen. Finally – my dream kitchen. I love cooking in my dream kitchen. My husband is once again enjoying home cooked meals.

Not having the litterbox in the bedroom. I think that one is self-explanatory.

What I miss:

Being able to walk everywhere. We can’t really walk anywhere here. I mean, I guess we could, but with my hip it probably wouldn’t be a good idea. It is maybe a kilometer into the village proper and the trip home is very, very uphill. Not to mention it is a two-way road that barely accommodates one-way and for the pedestrian the choices for getting out of the way would be smacked up against a rock wall or leaping to your death into a vast precipice. No thanks.

Takeout. Ok, so we have a gyros/souvlaki place that is pretty good and a couple of pizza places (tried one – no good), but we had variety in the city. I could be lazy in the city. At least I have my good kitchen!

Neighbors to spy on. Yea, I like being alone, but I love spying on people and making little stories up about their lives.

ADSL. Someday we’ll have it again, if our ISP will quit requesting different documents proving what our phone number is. Like anyone would sign up someone else’s number for ADSL and pay for it.

Flushing toilet paper. I really hope there are plans in the future to get this part of the mountain hooked up to city sewage.

So far, so good. I am enjoying life up here, and it is nice having a home of our own. The things I miss will drift away eventually, kinda like the things I miss about living in the U.S. The great thing about being human is that we can adapt. Usually.

Never take anything for granted. Especially net access.

The internet situation here at the new house is dire. We’ve discovered that it may be a very long time before we get ADSL because while the technology is available in our area (whatever in the hell that means) they don’t have gates for it (so much for the OTE campaign “ADSL for everyone!”). I could live with dialup (we couldn’t even get ISDN on Kos when we lived there for a year) if we could get connection speeds over 24kbps. Well, sometimes we can get up to 48kbps if we are lucky and have the patience to redial ten million times. Now, generally speaking I can live without the internet, except it is my primary source of communication with friends and family back home and in various places around the world, and it is my main resource for news. Not to mention I can’t really catch up on my favorite blogs because my patience wears out after just a few minutes online.

To make things even worse we paid for six months of ADSL we aren’t even getting when we renewed our account. So basically, OTE better install the damn gates and anything else they need to do to get me ADSL as soon as possible before I go completely insane. This isn’t the frakkin’ third world here people. And last I heard, some third world countries are getting ADSL, so this is simply pathetic.

Yes, this seems like a silly thing to bitch about in a world filled with real problems, but I just had to get it off my chest. I do feel a little better now. Now get me my ADSL!

Mountain living 101

Living in the country high up on a mountain is a whole new educational experience for me. Sure, we lived in a village on Mt. Olympus for a year, but we didn’t live in the boondocks high above the village like we do here. Things are definitely different here, and it is amazing how different the weather is here as compared to the center of Thessaloniki, which is maybe 10 miles away. Sure, maybe it is just a few degrees, but the air feels different. It is definitely cleaner, aside from the poo molecules floating in the air.

One thing I’ve learned is that you can’t ever have a good appreciation for dense fog until you have lived in the thick of it for days on end. Sure, I’ve been in situations where the fog was so heavy you could barely see in front of your car, and on Olympus we had moments when we were totally ensconced in fog, but never for more than a few hours. When you can’t really see past your balcony you start to feel a little uncomfortable, especially when it lasts for two days. But after awhile it seems kinda cool, like you are the only people floating on a cloud way up in the sky. The creepiest thing is when a dog or cow walks out from the fog, like a ghost from the ether. I compare it to the corn field in Field of Dreams.

Also, it seems I never really knew wind before. At first we had your typical mountain wind, resounding with a low whistle through the trees high on the mountain as it blew towards us, which is, of course, one of the best natural sounds ever. But a week or so ago we experienced our first storm winds, which were insanely powerful. Anything not tied down was subject to being blown around, and that includes people and animals. While our doors and windows are well insulated and cause no draughts, apparently the fittings around the rolla are not. That high pitched screeching really got on my nerves after awhile, and it bothered the cats immensely. I won’t even mention the mess created by the gaping hole for the stove hood pipe in the kitchen. Needless to say, my husband patched it up that day.

Obviously, I’m going to have to get used to all these weather aberrations, but so far, so good. We’ll see how well I do with the first big snowstorm of the season, which I am not looking forward to, unless we don’t have to drive anywhere. Then we can be snowed in.