April surprise

Jörn and Lukas drove to the skip at Makenzy Beach this afternoon to dispose of an old broken armchair we had. (Is "skip" understandable in American English? If not, well, it's a huge metal container that can be carried on a truck and is used for garbage of all sorts, and there are actually four of these things there, Jörn just informed me. Oh, I think they might be called dumpsters? Something like that, anyway...) Not many people call our home phone, so when the phone rang, I wasn't surprised that it was Jörn, and since Jörn and Lukas were there at a huge rubbish heap (garbage pile...), I wasn't surprised in any case that they were calling, and wondered what they wanted to bring home THIS time. I was at least glad that they were asking, for a change.

They brought home a kitten.

She was on a pile of stuff, underneath what might have been the rack from an oven. Another man there saw the kitten first and moved the rack and picked the kitten up, and asked Jörn and Lukas if they wanted a kitten. Jörn at least didn't say no, and he's the one who called me to ask what I thought. Okay, so maybe I wasn't thrilled, but I HAVE been toying with the idea of getting a cat for awhile, and there was no way I could tell them to just leave the kitten there!

I don't know how old she is, of course, but I'm guessing three or four weeks. Her eyes are well open and she's quite alert, and she can walk fairly well, although she wobbles a bit. She's totally not afraid of people or of loud noises (and all the people in this house are generators of loud noises), and is cuddly and friendly, so I don't think she could possibly be a feral cat, but she's also definitely too young to be voluntarily away from her mother, and wasn't close enough to any buildings to have possibly walked there herself. It seems impossible to believe that somebody just dumped her there, but I don't know how else she could have gotten there.

While I was on the phone with a friend asking for advice, Jörn and Lukas tried to give her some water from a saucer. Lukas said she lapped some, but Jörn didn't see it, and she certainly didn't seem to know how to lap milk later on.

Joan said she should probably have kitten formula, but of course, today is a public holiday (Cyprus Independence Day), so everything is closed. I Googled "homemade kitten formula" and found an amazing number of recipes, most of which called for all sorts of things that I didn't have in the house and couldn't buy with closed shops and wouldn't know if I could buy even with open shops. However, one recipe was doable: 1 cup of milk, 2 egg yolks, and 1 teaspoon of salad oil. We even had milk, which we don't usually have, because I was going to make hot chocolate for breakfast yesterday, but didn't end up doing so, which is another topic and was going to be what I was going to post, but the kitten is more interesting. To me, anyway.

So I mixed this up (actually only half, since that was already a lot more than the kitten could possibly eat), and attempted to feed it to the kitten. I didn't have an eye dropper, exactly, but the syringe-ish sort of thing that comes with children's Nurofen (which we don't have any of, and that was going to be the topic of another blogpost, but kittens are still more interesting) sort of worked. It doesn't have a tapered tip, though, and the kitten was having a hard time dealing with the wide, flat tip, from which she couldn't suck. While I was doing this, one friend responded to me on gmail chat and another to me on Facebook, saying that condensed milk (or evaporated milk, and now I don't remember which one is which language--Germans call it coffee milk, and what it IS is evaporated milk: no sugar or anything else added, just water taken out) would work for a couple of days. We even have some, but oh well, I'd already mixed up this other formula. Despite some of my children trying to convince me to express some of MY milk, but I informed them that there was no reason to think that human milk would be any more appropriate for a baby cat than cow milk would be, and nope, that wasn't happening.

No photos of feeding the kitten, since Jörn had taken the camera with him when he took Helen to Antidote (drama class, and that would be another cool blogpost topic!), but here's a nice one of a happy kitty with about 15 milliliters of formula in her tummy.

Lukas, by the way, is still claiming that this is HIS kitten, but I'm not happy with that. No matter whose we call it, she's going to be mainly my responsibility, and I'd rather just take care of her than remind Lukas a million times to do so.

When Katie cuddled her, she went right to sleep, but just as I was about to take a photo, some little sister came running in and shouted, which made the kitten slightly wiggle and open her eyes just as I took the photo.

She went right back to sleep, though.

She also very much liked sleeping on Marie.

And here she's sleeping on Marie's lap, covering her eyes.

Last photo for today, and not a great one: we put her in a box, with a towel underneath and and old t-shirt, and a black cat cuddly toy, of which the kitten approves. She sniffed all over, then curled up half under the toy cat.

 

And the biggest miracle: we all agreed on a name without too much trouble! Nobody except Lukas liked a single one of Lukas's suggestions (Buckbeak is the only one I remember, but the others weren't any better), nobody except Marie liked Marie's suggestion (Minerva), nobody including myself liked any of mine, not that I remember what they were, until I suggested Makenzy, after the place where she was found. We thought about M.B. for Makenzy Beach, thinking about the fact that my mother has a dog named K.B. after King's Beach, but we stuck with just plain Makenzy. We might change the spelling, though--not even the various signs around town and on maps and in ads agree on the spelling.

 

So we have a cat. And now I'm going to have to go warm up some formula and try to feed her before I go to bed. Our friend Sue sent over a kitten feeding bottle, which works a little better than what I was using, but most successful is letting her suck the milk off of my fingers. I hope I don't have to do that in the night...I'm not at all good at actually standing up and being coherent before I'm ready to get up. Watch this space...

My day described by the contents of my pocket

It's been pretty cold lately, "cold" meaning that yesterday and the day before there was a very thin layer of ice on the puddles early in the morning and people had to scrape ice off of their windshields. At an official elevation of two meters above the Mediterranean Sea, that's cold...and we don't have heating and the house is very badly (or probably not at all) insulated. It even snowed in quite a few parts of Cyprus yesterday, but with totally clear skies over Larnaka, there wasn't a chance here. I've lost the thermometer, but last year in January I did measure the temperature inside the house at 10 degrees Celcius, 50 degrees Fahrenheit. That's not at all too cold to be outside and active, but it's pretty cold to be sitting around in the house.

So...this means that we're wearing lots of layers. (Well, some of us are...some of the children are STILL usually barefoot...) And it means that I have my thick hooded sweatshirt on most of the time. (It really needs to be washed, but I can't bear to do without it for the several days it would need to dry...) And this sweatshirt has a pocket on the front. And I empty the pocket every night before putting Elisabeth to bed, because otherwise, everything will fall out when I lie down. And last night it was a rather large pile of stuff and it occurred to me that it pretty much showed my day.

My cell phone: this wasn't actually still with the pile of stuff this morning, because before I went to bed I put it on the piano in the living room, because this morning I planned to walk with Sue, and whichever of us gets up texts the other one to say we're up, and I don't want it to wake me up if I happen to be asleep. And it doesn't even normally live in my pocket, but was there because I took it with me when I picked up Marie and Jacob from their boat cleaning job a little after 6:00 yesterday evening, so that Marie wouldn't be any later than she already was for band practice and to bring Jacob home so he could finish putting together his magazine, The Onymous, before going to Youth Group at 7:00.

Two combs: I'd been combing the hair of some child or other with one of them when the doorbell rang, so put it in my pocket. At the door was a little girl, definitely not older than nine or ten, collecting sponserships for a walk she was doing with her school. I didn't understand everything, so I don't know what they're actually raising money for, but when a child is brave enough to go up to a stranger's door and try to sell something, I will virtually always contribute. The other comb Elisabeth had been using to comb my hair, and at some point, I couldn't take it anymore and confiscated the comb.

Five folded up drawings on various sizes of paper: all gifts from Elisabeth, some of which she gave me by saying, "Which hand?" while holding only one hand behind her back, and some of which she gave me after asking me to close my eyes and then putting them into my hands.

Eyeglass repair kit: Jörn needed me to change the batteries on a little machine he uses for accessing our German bank account (he holds it up to the computer screen--I have NO idea how this thing works and I actually find it kind of eery!), and the only screwdriver small enough was the one with my eyeglass repair kit.

Seven writing utensils: I was using the permanent marker while doing laundry (adding dots to articles of clothing that had moved from Katie to Helen and from Helen to Elisabeth), and also used it to put Xs on the chart we started this week to try to reduce the yelling in this house. That's a whole 'nother story...but it IS encouraging that ALL of us had fewer Xs the second day than the first. The pink whiteboard marker was for marking off Katie's and Lukas's schoolwork on the laminated lists that are hanging up. Two black ball point pens are mine, which I'd rather keep in the pocket on my Bible but people keep taking, so they've been living in my pocket lately. One Jacob gave me, and one I bought myself. I mostly use them to write down what books the children have read or to write the date on math pages, as I've been very bad at keeping my journal lately and do virtually all other writing on the computer, but when I do want to write something, black ball point is my preference. And I wrote January 14th on every math page yesterday, then when on the phone with Jörn later, asked him if he noticed the date, since we moved to Cyprus on January 14th four years ago. He thought that was interesting, then said, "Wait a minute--today isn't the 14th!" We took awhile discussing it, then finally agreed that it was the 12th, and would have been my grandma's 95th birthday and tried to remember if my brother-in-law's birthday is also the 12th, or just sometime close. I got off the phone and told Marie about the conversation and how silly I'd been, to which she responded that we (Jörn and I) were BOTH silly, as it was the 11th. Oh. Moving along...one blue ball point pen was Jörn's and he took it back last night, and another blue ball point pen is probably Jacob's, but I haven't asked him. The broken pencil with Elisabeth's name on it got broken because it was on the trampoline while they were jumping, and she wants me to glue it.

A nail file: I really have no idea how that got into my pocket, but since it was there, I filed my nails while waiting for Marie and Jacob to finish at the boat.

A sewing tape meaure: Our small trampoline had been out of action for several months because one of the six legs was missing, but Lukas found the leg in the bushes (?!?!) a couple of days ago, so I put it back on the trampoline and returned the trampoline to the living room. Well, actually, I put it out on the front porch at some point yesterday because of all of the fighting over it. But before that happened, I measured it because I want to make a new cover for around the edge. I think I probably do have enough denim to make a rectangle 290 centimeters by 28 centimeters, but whether I actually get around to cutting up all of the old jeans and sewing them together is another question.

A bracelet: actually, this wasn't in my pocket anymore when I emptied the pocket, but it had been earlier in the day and was with the pile of stuff this morning when I decided to write this oh-so-fascinating post. I made it a couple of months ago, with beads to represent each of my children.

A ten-gram container of lanolin: I used to HATE it when my mother put lanolin on any complaint we might have, but I have since had to admit that it's pretty cool stuff. I've been trying to remember to put it on some sore spots on the back of Helen's head, so have been carrying it around to do that.

A red pencil sharpener with "Mommy" written on it in three places: pencil sharpeners disappear around here, and both of the last two Christmases, I gave one EACH to Jörn, Marie, Jacob, and myself.

An eraser: they disappear too, and also get replenished at Christmas. This one doesn't happen to have a name on it, so that automatically makes it mine.

Two bookmarkers: one of them was given to me by my parents many, many years ago, and was in my pocket because I finished reading the book it had been in, but I can't remember what book. The other is one that was in a package of stuff that we received a couple of days ago from an eight-year-old friend in Germany sent to us, and Elisabeth had been folding it so I took it away from her and put it in my pocket.

And finally...one sheep: I put away the Christmas stuff a few days ago, including all the parts I could find of all the nativity scenes. This particular sheep, plastic and about a centimeter long, is from the set that I let the children play with in the doll house. Elisabeth was looking for her shoes under the couch and shouted "A-reka--a sheep!" and pulled it out. She's been calling out "a-reka" (eureka, obviously) when finding things quite a lot in the last several days--I have no idea where she learned that, but have been enjoying it!

Why avoid energizing joy?!

Last year my friend Sue told me about something a friend of hers had posted on Facebook at the beginning of the year. I copied it into a "sticky note" on my computer desktop (sticky notes are really cool--they look like Post-it Notes all over my computer screen, which means that I see them first thing when I turn on the computer) and have read it over and over again all year. A few weeks ago I finally asked if I could use the quotation in a blogpost, and she said sure, and that she didn't originate it anyway, so I don't need to attribute it to her. If someone knows the origin of the quotation, feel free to tell me. Anyway, here it is:

Before rushing head-long into 2012, ask yourself these questions:

what energised me most in 2011?;

what brought me most joy?;

 what did I avoid doing despite knowing I needed to do it?"

 

When I read this the first time, I thought of it as three separate questions, none of them too difficult to answer. However, in conversation with Sue, we discussed the possibility of answers that would answer all three in one go. That sounded impossible to me at first. Why on earth would I AVOID doing something that not only did I know I needed to do, but which energized (sorry, although the quotation is British I remain American ;-P ) me and brought me joy?!? Interestingly, when thinking about this in the last couple of weeks, I could only remember having mentioned writing and playing the piano, both of are pretty weak. For one thing, I couldn't (still can't) claim that either one "needed" to be done, but considering that I'm energized and joyful after doing so, and therefore in a considerably better mood than before, they are definitely beneficial activities both for myself and my family.

However, I then looked back to find out what else I'd said...and discovered that at first, I couldn't think of anything that had brought me joy at all (2011 was NOT a good year, for many reasons), much less anything that answered all three questions. Finally I came up with was "walking," never a mention of writing or playing the piano! Walking/exercising is certainly a more obviously logical answer, I think, and even though it took me until the middle of May to really get started with that, I couldn't be more pleased with how it's been going. About ten kilometers today to start the new year, definitely energizing me and bringing me joy, but no longer being avoided! At the beginning of last year I did walk a few times with Sue on a Saturday, but I wasn't ever motivated to go by myself. Now I'm walking or jogging every day, Sue going with me three days a week.

I did come up with one more thing in that conversation: spending one-on-one quality time with my children. Almost every time it happens, with any one of the six, it's wonderful. Taking just one of them grocery shopping, or just one of them being home with me, or just one coming along in the car during a short errand, or one coming with me on my morning walk--it's just plain cool. But it doesn't happen automatically all that often, and I don't make anywhere near enough effort to MAKE it happen. I have plenty of reasons (like, to start with, five other children...), but really, if something is important enough, time can be found. My husband has been taking each one of the older five children out once every two weeks for one-on-one time, and they all look forward to that special Papa-time very much, plus he does often take one or two along during other errands and shopping. (Note: my husband does the VAST majority of the grocery shopping, so that isn't actually much of an opportunity for me to take one child...) So this is something that could be worked on, for sure.

So then after that I came up with "writing" and "playing the piano", and did do something about both of those during most of the year. Piano playing petered out in the summer because it just isn't fun to play the piano when sweat is dripping down my whole body and even my finger-tips are slippery, and I've only picked it up again a bit in the last month or so. I'd say I've almost gotten back to the level I had when I was around 11 or 12, and I'm kind of okay with that.

As for writing...that wasn't something I had said to anyone at all except my journal, so I was very surprised when Sue invited me to the writers' group that she was a part of (and now leads, incidentally). It seemed an impossible thought to be able to go, not on a convenient day for me with the children and my husband's work schedule, but I was certainly intrigued. And then yet another acquaintance, not someone I knew well at all, asked me totally out of the blue if I'd be interested in the writers' group. Sue and I have exchanged e-mails for years and I borrow books all the time and she reads this blog, so it maybe wasn't totally unreasonable for to have figured out some of my "secrets", but this other lady didn't know any of that and I still actually have no idea at all why she invited me. And then Sue's husband, Richard, offered to occupy (code for "babysit") Lukas, the one child I can't leave at home without an adult, so I could go the writers' group...and I started going to that in February and haven't missed a single gathering. I'm really not sure how much my enjoyment of it has to do with writing and how much just with the fact that it's an outing with only adults, something that still makes me giddy with excitement!

Summary of this ramble: before rushing head-long into 2013, I have carefully considered what in 2012 brought me the most joy AND energized me AND I avoided doing, at least before 2012. My conclusions are that I'm doing well with walking, not too badly with writing and playing the piano (both activities being entirely and selfishly for ME, so don't expect any books or concerts--I'm not very good, just love doing them), and definitely need to make more of an effort to spend one-on-one time with each of the children.


Meeting goals that I didn't even know I had

 

These two photos have something in common: they both represent things that a year ago I would have said would never, ever have anything at all to do with me. I did two things last month that were scary and exhilarating and totally unexpected and now I'm going to brag about them, so now is probably a good time to stop reading.

 

The tennis shoes ("tennies", "trainers", "sneakers", "takkies", "athletic shoes", and who know how many other words there might be...) were bought by me, for me, when we were in Germany in April, and are the first tennies I've owned in at least ten years, which is why when Lukas saw me wearing them, two months before he turned ten, he told me I looked like Grandma. (A compliment to me, not to my mother, who is 20 years older than I am but considerably more active and fit and has run three marathons in the last few years. She probably goes through more pairs of tennis shoes in a year than I have in my entire life so far.) In addition to buying these tennies, I actually started wearing them when we got back home to Cyprus. I went out walking in the Salt Lake park near our house two or three times at the end of April and beginning of May, and as of May 18th, have been out every single day since, except for 11 days in July/August when I was in Germany, one day in September when I overslept, and two days in October while my husband was out of town. Some mornings I've gotten a late start and only had time for two or three kilometers, but most mornings I go at least four and often eight kilometers (plus the 300ish meters each way to and from the trail), since the nature path along part of the Salt Lake is four kilometers long.

 

Aaaanyway, when I first started walking, it not only took me 45 minutes to go four kilometers, my heartbeat got up to 200 beats per minute while walking and I was worn out for the day. That kind of scared me--I knew I was out of shape, but not that I was THAT out of shape. Happily, that did change pretty quickly, so that within just a couple of weeks I was having to make an effort to walk fast enough to even get it up to 120. (No, I don't know what my ideal target heartrate would be, and Google wasn't much help, either. But I do know that 200 is way, way too high.)

 

Within less than a month I'd actually started jogging a tiny bit, just a few hundred meters at a time. That was the first thing that I thought I would never, ever do, and then in the middle of August (AUGUST! In CYPRUS!!) I jogged the entire eight kilometers without stopping. At a speed that would make real runners chuckle with amusement, but I was pleased. And then on November 4th, I participated in the 16th Annual Larnaka International Run, a free six-kilometer race along the sea front. While I thought of it as a "fun run", it was quickly obvious that I was the only person there not really taking it seriously. I had three goals for the run, and met them all: to complete it all, to jog the whole way, and to do it in under 42 minutes. The winners were finished in about 20 minutes, and the judges and timers had long since disappeared by the time I finished at 40 minutes 35 and a half seconds (according to the stopwatch on my cell phone), but I was thrilled. (In fact, I was giddy and hyper and totally crazy with excitement, and I love my friends who instead of laughing at me, cheered me on and laughed WITH me. It was so cool.) So, that was the long version of what the photo of my muddy tennis shoes represents.

 

The other photo, downloaded from the NaNoWriMo site, is because Marie and I participated in National Novel Writing Month this year. The goal is to write a complete work of fiction of at least 50,000 words during the month of November, and I really don't know what made me sign up (well, I could partly blame a Facebook/internet/homeschooling friend of mine--you know who you are, D MG!), much less then actually TELL anyone about it, and then Marie signed up, and my friend Sue, and Marie's friend Charis, and...we DID IT! On Saturday, December 1st, the four of us went out for ice cream to celebrate over 200,000 words in 30 days, very pleased with ourselves. I've always loved writing, but rarely even manage to actually finish even short stories, and had never attempted anything like this before. My story (I really can't bring myself to call it a "book", much less a "novel") is fairly silly and not very coherent, but it was a ton of fun writing it. And that is the short version of why I only blogged once in November.

Excuses

It's been almost two months since I blogged, but as far as I know, all but one of the handful of people who read this are with me on Facebook anyway, where I keep linking to my friend Sue's blog because she so often has photos of us or writes about something we've done together. At the moment she's participating in a challenge to blog every day this month and has already mentioned me in several of the first 10 posts, and others covered what I would have written as well, so I just linked them, as well as previous ones. For example: dehydrating fruit. Sue bought a dehydrator, talked about it on Facebook, a friend of hers commented that she had one just like it but didn't want it, I gave a throw-away comment that if she was really giving it away I would like it, and the next thing I knew, I had a practically new dehydrator, given to me by someone I didn't even know! On October 30th Sue blogged about hers, complete with photos, so although I didn't dry exactly the same things (mostly plums, apples, and bananas here, plus fruit leather), I figure her post covered my experience pretty well, too. She also writes about the weather (rain is VERY exciting here!), which is of course the same for us as we're only about 500 meters away, and walking on the Salt Lake path, which she does three days a week with me. Here's one post that covers both.

So my number one and favorite excuse for not blogging is that most of what I would blog about is covered anyway. :-) (No, that does NOT mean that it's Sue's fault!!)

Next, I figure a post is more interesting if there are photos, and half the time when I think of it, the photos I want aren't yet in the computer and I don't know where the camera is. (Or I do know where the camera is, and it's not accessible, such as being in Germany with my husband, as it was for ten days recently.)

Another good excuse is that life is just a little teeny tiny bit busy around here. I'm not all that slow of a typist, and it's taken me over half an hour to write this already, because of getting up to answer the phone, listening to Lukas, getting Helen to stop throwing blocks, etc.

And my best excuse this month is that there's quite a lot of extra writing going on at the moment, which I might blog about later. Or might not.

I think I had some more excuses (all variations on a theme: I am lazy), but I have to go pick up Marie now. I could put this in drafts, of course, but then it likely won't get posted until December or later, so here goes. Oh, and if people remind me, I might blog (with photos, even!) about haircuts.

By the way, DeeDee in UK, I did look for you at FB under your real name, but didn't find you. If you're there and want to find me, I'm under my real name! :-)

Summer scavenger hunt, part three

After I didn't even notice that one of the photos of a fountain that I included in the previous post ALSO included a statue of an angel, I thought I'd go through my photos from May onwards and have another look for the last five subjects. I definitely didn't have any photos of a roadside stand or of a movie poster, but as I had to take Marie and Jacob to a birthday party this evening, I just collected those on my way home, as well. :-)

4. a roadside stand selling something

During the week, there are roadside "stands" (usually pick-up trucks) all over the place, selling whatever fruit is in season. At the moment, there are quite a few watermelon stands. However, Saturday evening at 6:00, I didn't see any in the usual places, so swung by our favorite fruit store, to see if the stand in the parking lot was still open. It was--only just, as they were starting to pack up--and Lukas took a photo for me.

8. a person dressed as an angel or a statue of an angel

Okay, so I already covered this one with the angel fountain. And children ACTING like angels probably doesn't count as being DRESSED UP as an angel, but I just had to work in a way to include this photo, so here it is. Yes, they are both asleep. Yes, they are on the tile floor. Yes, they both have beds.

And this is neither a person nor a statue, but this dog's name is Angel! Shouldn't that count for something? (She belongs to our friends Dena and Joseph.)

 

14. a person playing with a ball

 

This isn't actually a ball, this is a lemon from one of our lemon trees. But Elisabeth was playing with it and kept calling it a ball!

 

In this one, on the other hand, Elisabeth is definitely playing with a ball, or at least, she's holding the ball away from Marie and making it very clear that this is HER ball. It's too bad that the ball isn't exactly visible in the picture--Marie crocheted it for Elisabeth for her birthday, with Elisabeth's name on it.

 

 

18. a movie poster

 

The local cinema seemed a logical, if uninspired, place to find a movie poster, but as I wasn't sure if this one, taken through the windshield while waiting at the traffic lights, really counted. On the left-hand side there are three banners advertising movies, but they're on plastic...

 ...so I drove closer and caught the posters for all of the movies showing at the moment. I haven't seen any of them, although I was pretty impressed that I had actually heard of two of them. I've only been to this cinema once, to see "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" with Marie and Jacob.

 

19. an outdoor stairway

 

I could easily get a photo of an outdoor stairway by stepping outside--many Cypriot houses have a flat on the ground floor (a "granny flat" or "mother-law flat", maybe there are other terms), and then there are stairs outside leading to the next floor, which is very often a full house on two or more levels. I specifically planned to photograph the house of Sue and Richard, since those are the outdoor stairs I most often use, and since we stayed in the downstairs flat for awhile when we first moved to Cyprus, and I still might take that photo. And for that matter, although our house is on the ground floor, it's built on a slope and we have a flat underneath part of the house as well, which is also on the ground floor, which you can get to by walking around the house and down the driveway...or by going out the back (kitchen) door and down a long flight of outdoor stairs. But in the meantime, here are a few photos I found in my files.

 

This is our house, and if you look very carefully, you can see the four steps leading up to our front porch.

This stairway isn't actually outside, as it's inside a boat, Morning Star, which we visited a few weeks ago. But it's sort of outside, because it's not inside a building...

This little shelter is on a peninsula across the Salt Lake from us and I'd been meaning to go to it for years, and finally did so for the first time, just in time for sunrise, a week or so ago. And it is definitely outdoors and definitely has stairs.

 

21. a picture of you (me) standing with something that symbolizes your (my) nation(s)

 

For this one, I had intended to wear my Costa Rica t-shirt, hold flags from the U.S., Germany, Costa Rica, and Cyprus, and maybe include a few children, as well, as they are all dual citizens (German/U.S.) and I hate having my photo taken, so that would make it more bearable. Technically, "my" only nation is the U.S. That is where I was born and that is my only nationality. However, I have spent over half of my life outside of the U.S., the majority of that time in Germany, and my husband is German. I have also been to Costa Rica ten times and feel very connected to my "family" there, and have lived in Cyprus for over three and a half years, so this being home makes it also a bit "my" nation. And then Sue suggested that just a photo of Elisabeth and me would cover it, as she is German and U.S.ian, was born in Cyprus, and her middle name, Martha, is after my host mother in Costa Rica! I loved that idea, and best of all, I didn't even specifically have to take a photo for it. Both of these photos were taken in May, by Birgit. I like the first one better, but in the second one I'm standing (therefore fulfilling the whole target...), AND not only do I have my Costa Rica t-shirt on, I'm wearing American jeans, German Birkenstocks, and Cypriot mud. :-)

 

 



And with that, I have completed the summer scavenger hunt, a week before the official end of summer!

Summer scavenger hunt, part two

It's the same day, and here I am working on the next part already. Maybe I WILL finish by the end of September! Here's the first part, if you're interested, including the complete list.

And now for the next batch of photos.

8. a person dressed as an angel or a statue of an angel, and

9. a fountain

These five photos (and a whole lot more...) were all taken at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna on August 1st. I didn't even remember that I needed a fountain for the scavenger hunt, just couldn't help taking the photos. Nor did I remember the angel or even notice that this first fountain IS an angel, until a friend pointed it out (thanks, Sue!) after I published this blogpost, so have just edited it to add number 8 and am letting this photo count for both. :-)

10. a horse

On our last day in Germany, we went for a walk with Margaret and Phil. Katie especially wanted to see horses, which we did.

 

11. a shadow

 

Maybe it's cheating to include a photo that I already had on my blog, and this isn't the only one, either, but here's one from a walk with Helen and Elisabeth.



12. a maze, a labyrinth, or trail

I have a LOT of photos of trails, especially the Salt Lake Nature Trail, where I've gone walking almost every morning for the last nearly four months, but I controlled myself and didn't include ALL of them. Just this one, because although there aren't even any trees, it reminds me of a poem I love, Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken."

 

And...yet another photo from Schönbrunn. It really is an amazing place!

13. a library

Just before we moved to Cyprus, I saw an announcement that Larnaka would be opening it's first English-language library right about the time we were moving here. That sounded pretty exciting to me, as I haven't lived in an English-speaking country since 1991. My first three years in Germany I read pretty much all of the books of interest to me at the English-language library in Düsseldorf, as well as ALL of the English-language books, interesting or not, at the German branches near the main train station and in Kaiserswerth. In the next 21 months, when we lived in Essen, I read all of the English-language books there, during the next year when we lived near Bonn I read all of the English-language books there, and it only took me a few months in Mülheim to read their very tiny selection of English-language books. Well...we arrived in Cyprus, and stayed for nearly two months in the guest flat of people I had "known" via internet for some years and who have since become very close friends, and decided we could put off going to the library (which was only open for a couple of hours once a week anyway) for a bit, since just in the guest flat, Richard and Sue had enough books to keep us going for a loooong time. (Many, many more books than all of the English-language sections in Düsseldorf, Essen, Bonn, and Mülheim put together, and I like a MUCH larger percentage of them.) And they have even MORE books in their house where they live! We've been here for over three and a half years, and I haven't finished them yet. Added to which, the Saturday morning English-language library has advertised itself as having "hundreds of books", and we brought about 2500 with us in the first place and have acquired at least a few hundred more since, and Sue and Richard have many more than we do...so we still haven't ever made it to that library. On that note, here is a photo of a mutual friend, H, in part of Sue and Richard's "library":

 

As well as a photo of Sue herself, reading to Elisabeth and Helen (and Tessie) on our regular Tuesday morning "not-Tots." (Sue used to help out at the Tots and Co. playgroup on Tuesdays, so when it stopped meeting on Tuesdays and she wasn't available on their other meeting date, a combination of joking and misunderstanding between husbands and children and us resulted in us (the little girls and I with Sue) getting together every Tuesday morning at her house. Heavenly.)

 

15. someone dancing

 

Elisabeth isn't actually dancing in this photo, because she stopped when I got the camera out, but E2 still is. This was at a wedding reception a few weeks ago. There wasn't any official dancing, but that didn't stop the little girls!

 

 

16. a bride

 

And obviously, since we were at a wedding (well, a marriage blessing, actually, as the actual wedding had taken place in England, but it was really the same thing), it wasn't difficult to get a picture of a bride! I didn't actually know either of the bridal pair, although I knew the mother of the groom, but Marie, Jacob, and Lukas all knew the groom, and Marie also knew the bride, so I took the three of them and Elisabeth to the wedding and reception.

 

 

17. a church, chapel, cathedral, mosque, or temple

I did consider just posting a few photos of various friends and family, representing the temple of the Holy Spirit, but didn't want to leave anyone out, so here are some more traditional representations.

This is the Hala Sultan Tekke mosque on the opposite side of the Salt Lake from where we live, a little less than an hour's walk away.

And here is the church of St. Lazarus, about a 20-minute walk in the opposite direction. The Lazarus whom Jesus raised from the dead is said to have come to Cyprus, and when he died the second time and stayed dead, he was buried here.

20. a swing hanging from a tree (or a hammock)

Lukas hung this swing from our giant fig tree some months ago and I just happened to take this photo of Helen on it a few days ago, again, not remembering this scavenger hunt at all. In December 2010 I found the hammock that I bought in Mexico in 1990 in a box in my parents' house and did bring it to Cyprus with me, but still haven't gotten around to hanging it up, so no photo.

Incidentally, and sadly, as of this morning we no longer have the chickens that are visible in the background. Although we'd been told by friends that it was fine to have chickens in the city, someone apparently complained, and we received notice in July that we would have to get rid of them. Jacob fought hard for them, including writing a letter to the mayor, who tried to find a loophole for us. Last week we were told that he wasn't able to grant us an exception and that we had one month to get rid of them. Last night friends who live in the mountains had to come down to Larnaka to go to the airport, so they took the chickens back with them when they left this morning. They'll have a good life there, being even more free-range than we could provide, but we already miss them!

And those are all of the photos I have so far, covering 16 of the 21 subjects, and the only photos I took intentionally for this were those of the trains! Now to see if I can take photos of the last five subjects before summer ends...