Prevessin Moens

My hosts, Claire Darbaud's family, live in Prevessin Moens. The area used to be two small farm towns, and one of the farmhouses and its barn are right behind the apartments where we are. A good deal of the farm land was sold for housing developments and apartments, which all seem to be about four stories high with balconies and decks. In this fourth-floor apartment, every room has a door to the outside. It reminds me of Hawaii, in that. As much outside living space as inside, nearly, and they can leave the doors open. In fact, the doors have no handle from the outside, so if you're out the door can't be pulled closed from there. And if someone closes it from the inside, you'll be stuck out there.

The apartment's decks are offset a bit so that lower floors have sunny parts and parts open to the sky, not just one above the other all the way down. Or maybe the top floor has the best ones, and the 2nd and 3rd aren't right below those.

Not far is a church, and the mayor's office next to it was probably once the residence of the priest, because they match.

I will bring photos of the graveyard later; we're leaving to see Yvoire. The graves in the cemetery are not older than the 19th century, but Claire says people buy a concession, and it expires. Many graves have smaller engraved commemorative stones on top of the slab on stands.

There aren't weekly services in the church, but it was open. I should've used flash, but tried not to. There were stone parts that seemed very old, and part of the floor under the altar area was wooden, and some was stone, there was a pattern to it, an arch of wood. I don't know how to describe it and the photo didn't work well.

There was one Jewish grave and one Bahai, one seemed "born again"-ish, and the others seemed Catholic. So it wasn't a churchyard so much as a city graveyard.

Tomorrow we're going by boat to a medieval town called Yvoire. We'll go into Switzerland to get the boat, but Yvoire is in France again. http://www.yvoiretourism.com/chapitre7_en.html

Changing of the Guard in Windsor

Before the ox roast, and also on Monday (that was one big busy day!), we saw the Changing of the Guard ceremony at outside Windsor. We followed them back to the barracks. I had seen the marching in when I was here in 2009, but not the rest of it.

The piccolo players have bugles hanging behind them. That was cool. I don't know if you'll be able to see them.

Outgoing, with music:

A few blocks away at the barracks there was a real guard, guarding the other guards. This guy looked cool. Only when a man with two young children, one in a stroller, went over to speak to him, the young guard with the real gun was NOT careful not to point it at the children. Yikes, guy! (I didn't take a photo of that.)

And I think the ceremonial guards had real guns too. Julie thought maybe not. Adam speculated that perhaps the bugles could fire bullets. Adam and I figured the musicians were protecting the guards and the guards were protecting the musicians. We ended up in another part of Windsor, then, and walked back through residential streets. Many homes were decorated with flags, and one had some cloth flags edged in double-fold bias tape, so I figure they were from the 50's or 60's. Maybe they were from the Silver Jubilee in 1977, though; could be.

All the others I saw were plastic. Still pretty, but these were historic, early-to-mid 20th century. :-)

Various other decorations on homes, streets, and in store windows:

That fourth one is asking for people to make and donate homemade cakes, and there will be prizes by age categories.

Look at my hair!

Alex Candelaria took this photo of me at the picnic following the Life is Good conference at which I spoke in May 2012. Getting that date in here for future-looking-back purposes.

My hair looks really grey! In a good way. :-)
That's me in the middle in a brown hoodie looking at my camera.



The week before that photo, we were playing the sorting game, in Massachusetts at the ALL-in-May Symposium.  Same game we played in Albuquerque in December, which I had made up so that name-impaired people (such as myself) could still participate successfully in a mixer/intro game.  I was asked what it's called.  I think.... "the sorting game."

Anyway, we were sorted into two groups by a couple of young girls, and we were to figure out what their sort criteria had been.  Someone said "light hair and dark hair!"  But I said, "No, I have dark hair."

Then it turned out that it WAS hair color, and I had been sorted into the light hair group.  Huh!   Really, it's about time.  My 59th birthday is this summer.  I've been wishing since my 20's that my hair would start to go grey.  My dad's started turning when he was in his 20's and I always thought that would be fun, and salt-and-pepper braids, buns and hair-twists were beautiful, all stripey.  Would be beautiful on a young woman.  

Well if that's one of my big disappointments in life, not going grey sooner, I've had a pretty cushy life.

Windsor Ox Roast

Yesterday Julie, Adam, Addi and I went to an Ox Roast in honor of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. But more than that, the Queen's ox (from the royal farm at Windsor). And it wasn't the first ox roast at that site. There was an obelisk there commemorating other times. So they'll probably chisel in a note about this one. Or whatever "chiselling" is called when it's done with electric tools. Engraved/inscribed/added.

The ox had been cooked since 2:00 a.m. in a portable gas-powered oven owned by a catering company, and then rolled out down an insufficient-looking little ramp before noon. VERY interesting to see (though we did miss the rolling-out ceremony/moment, and I would have liked to have seen the inside of the trailer/oven).

The meat was served up on buns, and there was a table with horseradish sauce, mustard, ketchup, or barbecue sauce. That was it, but it was enough. Eating ox together was ceremonious, like a champagne toast or a wedding cake, I guess. :-)

Some explanation from another person's words:

The Rotary Club of Windsor St George and the Windsor and Eton Town Partnership would like to invite you and your family to come to the our special Ox Roast event to be held in Bachelors Acre, Windsor. There will be children’s activities, stalls, beer and Pimms tent and host of activities throughout the day and of course the centre piece a Roasted Ox.

The history
An Ox Roast is a very rare thing. This is not the more common hog roast.
Windsor had an Ox Roast on 25 Oct 1809 to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of George III and again in 1887 to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria. Our own Rotary club helped organise an Ox Roast in 2002 for the Queen's Golden Jubilee and now we are repeating it on Monday 4 June 2012 for the Diamond Jubilee. See http://bit.ly/oxroast2002

Please invite your facebook friends to this event http://on.fb.me/JAECLU Sandra says: Don't invite them now; it's over. You could still look at the facebook page, though. It's where I got the image of the 1809 roast.

Profits from this event will go to the Prince Philip Trust Fund which helps so many good causes. The objects of this registered charity are:

• The provision, in the interests of social welfare, of facilities for the recreation and leisure time occupation of the inhabitants of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead (the area of benefit) with the object of improving their conditions of life.
• The advancement of the education of young people in the area of benefit, in particular, but not exclusively, in the field of voluntary service.
• The advancement of public education in the arts, literature and science in the area of benefit.
• To or for such other charitable purposes, in the area of benefit, as the Trustees shall decide.

There was a trivia contest for children, but it wasn't easy. Part 1 was simple, and it was to go around hte site and collect words on a list, from pictures and clues. But then the first letters of all those were to be rearranged into two words associated with a historic ox roast. The clue (they said) was on the obelisk. But someone said the answer was there, not just a clue. It was hard to find two words with a total of twelve letters, with those letters in it. "Plum pudding," it turned out, fit. In 1809 they had plum pudding. I don't think there was anything served this year that's worth engraving in stone, besides the ox. Sorry we missed out on plum pudding, but it would've involved spoons and maybe bowls, so I understand them going with paper plates and napkins.

There were singers, and a balloon sculptor, happy kids playing, a light rain for a little bit, but mostly clear.

Down below are some sights and sounds. I didn't take a photo of the food, but if you catch someone with a bun and a couple of slices of meat, that was the ox. It tasted great. BUT.. first I wanted to say that there are images of two previous ox roasts (of the four I've seen mentioned; there might have been more), and in each there was a revolving spit. And there's an advantage to that. As they cut some meat off, the next bit can brown, and the inside will be as cooked as the outside. But baking it in a trailer means it's not burned or dried out. 1809 and 2002:

Some little girls dancing, and then the happily expressive choir director.

Beacon lit in Staines

There is a project to light at least 2012 beacons today (Monday) for the Diamond Jubilee celebration, in the UK and Commonwealth countries. We just got back from a Scout-organized beacon ceremony in Staines, at the field where Adam does archery. It's a cricket field, too, and has practice cages. There were quite a few people there, mostly Scouts and their families.

Here was the unlit beacon--a metal cage mounted on a pole.

There was a prayer, delivered from the ladder-podium,  I might be able to find the text of it on one of the beacon sites.

Just now on BBC1 they said the Queen lit the last of 4220 beacons.  The aim was 2012; they quite overshot it.  No problem.

Philadelphia and the last turkey sandwich

I was at the wrong gate. I'm lucky to be in Philadelphia at all.

I'm glad to be here, because I discovered I was at the wrong gate when the crowd cleared and didn't replenish itself.

There's a gate change here, too, but I plan to triple check when the time is near.

I got hungry on the flight, so I got out thinking "All I want is a simple $8 turkey sandwich," and I only had to walk about a quarter of a mile to find one. Success!! If I get a sandwich in England, it should be a chip butty, or have cucumbers or fish or something.

So out the window 50 miles as the plane flies from Philadelphia, I saw pretty, stripey farms cut out of the forest. There were trails cut for power lines. In New Mexico, farms are irrigated out of the desert (if they're not right by the river, anyway), but here they seem all carved from surrounding woods.

From the plane I saw a deep, deep... pool? Greenish water. An old quarry, maybe, with trees all grown in on the terraced parts. Maybe just a mine, but it had been disused and growing trees for a long time.

I'm trying to charge up all my "electronic devices" before getting on the long flight. My phone is dead (for no good reason), but the outlet is full and It's about to be unused for many weeks, so I think I'll just let that go.

Phoenix to Philadelphia

To go from an "A" town to another "A" town (Albuquerque to Ashford), I need to spend the day in "P" towns: Phoenix and Philadelphia. For another $1500 (or much more), I could've gone more directly, but I'm in the cheap seats. Time travel is fun, though. I left Albuquerque around 6:00 a.m. and got to Phoenix at 6:00 a.m. Nice. Seems a waste of time-not-passing, to have gone so far in the wrong direction. Ours is not to wonder why, ours is just to sit and fly, I guess. And to abuse Tennyson quotes in a medium he couldn't have imagined. So at 7:00 Albuquerque time (tonight, I mean; p.m.) I'll leave the U.S. bound for Heathrow Airport. Keith was nice to take me to the airport at 4:20. a.m.

This isn't what I should be doing, but I don't want to do what I should be doing. That would be trying to figure out the forms I need to fill out online to confirm what I said in February, that I would speak at the HSC conference. I was assured then that a contract would be sent soon. I finally heard from them again a couple of weeks ago, just before I was leaving for Massachusetts and Oregon/Washington. And I need to find the two receipts for what I paid for flights (the original and the replacements after the dates were changed) for the Florida conference.

I'm really looking forward to both of those events, and I hope a bunch of you (people reading this, if you're in the US and can afford to go) will be there! I'm going to have fun! I'm going to be a charming and inspirational speaker! But today I'm going to avoid "doing the paperwork" (paperless though it will be).

I'm at US Airways Gate A-25 just in case anyone wise in the geographical ways of Phoenix Sky Harbor wants to picture me. I'm across from a cooler of sandwiches and drinks with those typical-to-southern-Arizona strips of heavy plastic, overlapping, that people reach through to get their food, so that the cold doesn't get sucked out by the (even air-conditioned) heat.

When the plane came in, and it was six in the morning, we were warned that it was really hot outside, and were asked to close the window shades in the whole plane so it wouldn't get too hot while sitting.

I would take a photo of myself, but people get testy about having strangers take their photos in places likethis. I saw a family clearly headed to a wedding--the 20-yr-old-looking girl had a green dress in a big plastic bag. Bride's maid business. But she and the other young woman in the party of eight were wearing fleece pajama pants and t-shirts and looked tired. They wouldn't have wanted their photos taken. The two moms with three kids trying to get to a Mexican town I have never heard of, who had missed a flight, would not have wanted their pictures taken. And it's crowded now, at 10:30 in the morning.

I'm trying to look at it as my last day in the U.S. for seven weeks and some. Familiar clothes, drinks, food. Little kids whose accents I can understand (even the Spanish-speaking kids squealing and running, not knowing their poor moms were stressing out--good for the moms to let them play in peace). Familiar desert-camouflage fatigues.

There were two little kids singing loudly and with feeling

I like to eat, eat, eat
Apples and bananas

but they didn't seem to know any more than the first two lines of the song. I was tempted to sing on through it with different vowels and the full tune, but nah... And I thought that song might not even work outside of north America, because the internal rhyme would fail.

My two days at home were spent packing some things to mail and 63 books to ship in five boxes to three different Amazon distribution warehouses; in doing laundry and re-packing (Keith helped). Thursday Marty and I went to get him a new phone and we went to lunch and that was nice. Friday Holly and I went shopping for a dress for her to wear to a wedding, and found one the salesman and I really liked (at a kind of rastafarian import kiosk at the mall) and one she really liked at Anthropologie. Holly noted the different sales strategies: The rasta guy assured her she would be the only girl in Albuquerque with that dress. The attendant in the fancy dressing room at Anthropologie told her the dress was selling very well.