The German Problem

Well, we are done with the students for the summer. My last two days will be mostly clerical and organizational work in the library. We got back every student checkout except one, which I think is pretty darn impressive.

I got off work at noon yesterday and came straight home. I thought I'd do the laundry, clean a bit and take a nap, but instead our neighbor Chris dropped by and stayed a while. I washed clothes while we talked, but I had to forego the rest.

At work we've been having a debate about what to do with our two shelves of German language books. The school no longer offers a German program except through independent study with a tutor, and they are rarely if ever checked out -- so a few days ago we decided to discard the books to make room for others. (They're mostly sad, decrepit '80s paperback copies of Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll, as well as a German version of "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," called "Die Möwe Jonathan.")

Well, no sooner did I remove the books from the system than a student told me he's taking German independently next year -- and I also realized that we have a handful of other books in languages we don't offer, like Danish, Swedish and Italian. How can we justify dumping the German and keeping those? So I decided in the middle of the night last night (when I think about these things) to put one or two German books back on the shelf. Maybe Jonathan will live to fly another day.

We display a lot of student artwork in the library, including a series of animal heads. Some of that artwork will be removed this summer, so I took a photo of this rabbit -- which I particularly like -- just in case he disappears!

(Top photo: Maida Vale, on Tuesday.)

Smoke Alarm

Last night Dave and I were sound asleep when, at 1:30 a.m., the hard-wired smoke alarm directly above our bed began to chirp. Not as in "Fire!" but as in, "My battery is weak." Annoying, single beeps every few minutes.

First up was Olga, who did not like that sound at all. Dave and I groaned and eventually mustered the strength to stand up and address the problem. Even though the smoke alarm is wired into our electrical system, for some reason it also requires a battery -- I suppose as a back-up. Fortunately I had a 9-volt battery in my bedside transistor radio (which I never listen to) so I thought putting it into the smoke alarm would be easy enough.

Problem is, we couldn't get the thing open! We tried and tried. Finally, after several minutes precariously standing on the mattress, fumbling and cursing, we found a little latch on the side that -- according to the impossibly small type on the darkest side of the smoke alarm, the side away from the bedroom light fixture -- must be tripped with a screwdriver. Dave dug a screwdriver out of the hall closet and we opened the smoke alarm and popped in the battery and the chirping stopped. Olga, who had fled the room, cautiously came back to bed.

Good grief. The things we do for household safety.

Fortunately, today will be a short day at school -- we only work until noon. I have no plans for the rest of the day. Even though the weather promises to be amazing I may just come home, do laundry, relax and take a post-smoke-alarm nap.

Last night Dave and I were talking about a set of brown towels someone gave us for Christmas, and I jokingly said to him, "But how can you tell if a brown towel is clean?" He didn't get the reference. Do you remember that commercial? Once again, I'm amazed at what can be found on YouTube.

(Photo: Maida Vale, yesterday evening.)

A Topsy-Turvy Day

My friend Pam has come and gone. She was up at 4:30 this morning and off for the airport, bound for a business meeting in Sweden. As it turned out, we did have time to catch up yesterday -- I showed her around the school where Dave and I work, and then she joined me and my coworkers for a pub outing celebrating the end of the school year. That was interesting -- Pam from my Peace Corps past, who I've known 20 years, sitting down with my fellow librarians, whom I've only known a year or so. She could tell them stories. Fortunately she didn't.

At one point the librarians asked about drug use in the Peace Corps. This seems to be a common question, especially since Pam and I were assigned to Morocco. I think everyone imagines we were sitting around smoking hash. Nothing could be further from the truth -- there were volunteers who did that, but Pam and I were both serious about our Peace Corps jobs and I for one was far too cautious to do anything that would run afoul of local authorities. I'd seen "Midnight Express." (And yes, that was Turkey, but still...)

We did tell my coworkers about our jobs and our sites, and I spoke a little Tashelhait Berber, which always proves entertaining, though in the past I have been accused of making it up. It's a real language, I swear.

All in all, yesterday was a strange, disjointed day. All my routines were blown apart. I had to go to work a few hours early, because we closed the library early. Besides Pam being in town, Olga was having more gastric issues (that dog!) and real estate agents were traipsing through the apartment.

Plus I still have this pesky cold, though it is mild -- really nothing more than a stuffy nose and a raw throat. It might even be allergies, but it feels more like illness.

I hope today proves a bit more settled.

(Photos: A man and a dog in Hyde Park, on Sunday, and a nearby super-cautious rabbit. We saw lots of rabbits, mostly behind a fence. Olga didn't seem to want to chase them like she does squirrels, but maybe she just knew she couldn't get to them.)

Punk Barney

Another photo from the archives. This big stuffed Barney used to sit outside a shoe repair shop on St. Mark's Place in the East Village in New York. I passed it every weekend back in 2007 or so, walking home from the Zen center. I wonder if it's still there -- Punk Barney, with one eye?

The tickle in my throat has indeed morphed into an illness. Nothing major, just an annoying cold that leaves me feeling drained. Of course Olga insisted on going to the park yesterday anyhow, so I dragged my sorry self along and wound up having a pretty good morning. The weather was so beautiful it was impossible to feel bad.

I tried to resume my photo scanning yesterday, but the scanner quality gradually deteriorated and I'm not sure why. To test it out I rescanned a photo I had scanned earlier, and the two scans looked noticeably different -- the second one was much darker and lacked definition. I didn't change the scanner settings, so I can only imagine that I tired out the machine! That's OK -- I finished everything up until I went to Morocco in 1992, so that's a good chunk of my photo collection, including all the prints that were deteriorated and needed restoration. I'll be able to get rid of about five photo albums!

It turned out to be a very social day, despite my cold. I Skyped with Mom in Florida and my friend David in New Jersey yesterday (that's socializing, isn't it?) and my friend Pam arrived from Boston for a quick visit. She's staying two nights in our guest room (probably our last guest in this apartment!) and hopefully we'll get to spend a bit of time together this evening after work.

Surreal Images from the Archives

I have finally vowed to scan all my old photos and get rid of my photo albums. What is the point of hauling around books full of wrinkled, discolored prints when images can be kept digitally? The colors won't degrade, and they can be organized and stored online, safe from fire and other household mishaps. I don't see a downside, really -- as long as you also keep an electronic backup, which I intend to do.

While scanning yesterday, I came across these images.

The one above was taken either by me or my father on one of our yard photography expeditions. That's one of those dreadful air potato vines that are the scourge of Florida back yards.

Here's my brother underwater in a swimming pool at a resort on Longboat Key in the early 1980s.

In 1983, as I've mentioned before, my Dad, stepmother, brother and I drove cross-country after visiting my father's family in California. We made a quick trip through Las Vegas. We stopped at the MGM Grand Hotel for lunch, and to this day that's my only experience of Sin City. Well, that and a few hasty snapshots taken from the car window.

In the mid-'70s my mom's parents came to visit, shortly after she and my dad divorced. I remember sneaking up behind them to take this picture as they sat together in the back yard. I was eight or nine years old, and I was into "sneaky photography." As I recall, they did this almost every day of their visit -- pulled two chairs together and just sat. I've always liked this photo.

And here I am playing around with the camera in my first apartment, at Tropical Gardens in north Tampa -- where $250 a month in 1985 got my roommate and me a sweltering one-bedroom with virtually no insulation and some really interesting neighbors. I'm not sure what I was trying to do here -- take a selfie in the mirror, I suppose? That plant on the right is still alive, now in the ground outside my mom's house. Come to think of it, that hanging plant is at her house, too.

We Bring the World into Our Shower

My god, I am tired. What a week! I don't know why it's been so draining, though I have a tickle at the back of my throat and I think an incipient illness may be part of my lack of energy. (Could also be allergies. There's a lot of stuff floating around in the air now.)

Major triumphs yesterday on the overdue books front! We collected from several recalcitrant students with multiple checkouts. Next week will wrap things up, so hopefully whatever's still out there will come back.

Do you want the completely surreal experience (to me, anyway) of seeing our home in a real estate listing? When I wrote several days ago about cleaning the apartment in preparation for the photographer, and specifically mentioned the shower, one of my blog pals commented that the photographers probably would not photograph the shower. Well, let me just point out that there is indeed a photo of the shower online. When you let a photographer into your house, you have to be prepared for any possibility, right?!

(Photo: Seen on my walk home from work yesterday, on Edgware Road.)

A Big Wall, and Bergdahl

A couple of weeks ago I passed this wall on my walk to work, and I loved the way it virtually glowed in the morning sun, in all its big sandy-brown blankness. I also liked the little rusty street sign that reads Abercorn Place (which is a great name for a street).

Of course, that day I didn't have my camera, and it seemed every morning since has been gray and rainy. Until yesterday, when the sun finally came out. I set out to work armed with my camera and got my shot.

In the news: I've been dismayed by the clamor over the prisoner swap that led to the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan. To me it seems like a clear win-win situation. It solves the problem of how to handle several of the prisoners in Guantanamo, who were lingering in a legal never-never land with no clear path to resolution, and it brings home Bergdahl. Whether he was in fact a deserter has not yet been proved, nor has the allegation that his desertion led directly to the deaths of other American soldiers. Furthermore, I'm not sure it matters. He was an American prisoner and the policy is to bring prisoners home.

It's funny that none of the people who have now branded Bergdahl a deserter did so while he was still in captivity. I never saw any account of fellow soldiers arguing that he wasn't worth rescuing. It seems clear that they spoke up only after President Obama's Republican opponents, hell-bent on preventing him from having any victory, cranked up their oily PR machine. The whole thing smacks of politics.

It's a shame that Bergdahl's hometown can no longer celebrate his return. I'm not sure I can think of another situation where a returning POW has been so publicly (and prematurely) vilified. It will be a while before we really know what led to Bergdahl's capture, but on a purely human level I can certainly understand why a frustrated or homesick soldier might go AWOL. It may not be right, but I understand.

It's also a shame that the critics of Bergdahl's rescue -- including those who mourn the deaths of other soldiers in Afghanistan -- can't turn their anger on those truly responsible, the American politicians who sent those soldiers there in the first place.