At Least It’s Not A Bridge in Brooklyn
Jane and Marge met up in a coffee house in Clinton Hill, Vermont. They hadn’t seen one another in several months.
“So?” Marge arched an eyebrow over her cup of decaf. “Why did you want to see me?”
“It seems like we are both so busy traveling around the world that we never see one another any more. Don’t you miss the old times?” Jane smiled ingratiatingly.
“No,” Marge said bluntly.
“I’ve got the perfect solution.” As usual, Jane ignored her. “We should buy a house together. You provide the down payment and I’ll provide the sweat equity. I know just the place….”
Marge set down her cup, picked up her purse, and walked away.
The Hub: Rochelle Wisoff-Fields
Photo credit: Jean L. Hays
Kasongan Pottery Works
The area around Jogjakarta, including Kasongan Village, is considered an important area for pottery in Java. It’s called a center for the arts, and know for pottery as well as theater and fabric.
The two places we visited both had pottery brought in and added the finish for resale, mostly on a wholesale basis. The first shop focused on large vases. They painted the outsides with glue, then attached pieces of colored glass for a mosaic effect.
Several women did this work at the same time. They had bars of pre-scored glass that they snapped off with their fingers as they worked.
The glass came into the shop as regular sheet glass. The owner painted the glass, then used a diamond tipped pen to make the scoring.
Suzie’s House 437 : Climbing in Her Own Window
Emma crawled into her own window around six in the morning. She wasn’t quite sure why she felt it was necessary to pretend she’d been home all night even though she’d only crashed with Tracy and Lisa because the gig at the bar went until closing, and she didn’t feel like trying to explain things to her father because she was so tired.
Mystery Volcano
See it? Yeah, I didn’t either. It’s there on the right. Or so they told me. The whole time we were in Yogjakarta we were within a couple dozen miles of a fairly large volcano. We were also shrouded in a haze of volcanic ash the whole time. Although I caught glimpses of the volcano, and even walked on it, most of the time I didn’t see it. In fact, when I was walking on it I wouldn’t have guessed it was a volcano except for the porous nature of the rock under foot. We couldn’t see far enough to discern the cone.
That haze followed us the whole time everywhere we went. On two occasions we flew in or out of an airport that had to close down regularly because volcanic ash doesn’t go well with airplane engines and the airport was down wind.
Ironically, the ash covering the nearby volcano came from a different volcano.
As to the flags, we saw them everywhere for the whole trip. Indonesia’s national Independence Day took place toward the end of the trip. The whole country put up bunting and those odd, cloth-on-a-pole flags. They showed up mostly outside of businesses, but also in front of houses and often on bridges.
Suzie’s House 436: Late Night Talks
Sophie had floated her way into the ER today. To think that when she’d used her nurse training before, she’d only ever taken care of old folks in their own homes, and now she could handle the ER. Maybe nobody else noticed, but she was proud of herself.
Still, even if she hadn’t made any mistakes, the tension was very high. There had been three code blues on her shift alone. Everyone kept joking about full moons and bad luck to be working the ER on such a day.
Dreadful Sink
That dreadful sink. Audrey pulled out the plunger and gave the drain a perfunctory clearing. Over the thirty plus years of her marriage the drain had clogged thousands of times. She didn’t dare complain because she was the reason it clogged so easily.
When they built the house the plumber had said the sink must go in a place that the carpenter said could not be opened up for a window. Visualizing year after year of staring at a wall, she had demanded that the sink be placed in front of a window.
She put the plunger away, carefully scraped the plates, then looked out on a lovely sunset as she washed.
The Hub: Rochelle Wisoff-Fields
Photo credit: Rochelle Wisoff-Fields
Kasongan Village
Kasongan Village is a place our tour guide was familiar with. On arrival we went wandering along the byways of the town, sometimes cutting through what I could swear were their equivalent of back yards. As we ran across people we would stop to talk. Although I’m sure many of those we visited have visited with tour groups before, who we encountered seemed entirely random.
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Suzie’s House 435 : Home Sweet Home
Ethan stood on the stoop of his own house and looked at the key on his chain, glanced at Gabriel, and offered up a sick laugh.
“I’m not quite sure what the protocol is here. Should I knock?”
“It’s your family. I haven’t been closer than a hundred miles to my family since I left home.”
It’s Freezing!
This winter is hitting me harder than most.
It’s not just the extreme swings in temperature. We have gone from highs in the low teens to rain in the last couple of weeks. This is on top of the normal extremes of living out west.
It’s not just that my exercise program has me outside more than before. What’s more, because we only get about nine hours of sunlight a day I tend to find myself out walking in the dark when it’s cold both for lack of sunlight and because my mind insists it’s always colder in the dark.
It’s not just the lack of insulation in our house. We put in insulation where we could reach, by my office is in an area that we couldn’t get to. Where everyone else in the house is reasonably warm, I’m watching a thermometer that liked to hover around 55 deg F.
I like to think a lot of it is that I’ve lost about half of my personal insulation. The heavy sweater I’ve been using as a winter coat for the last several years is no longer miraculously toasty. It flops around loosely and let in freezing breezes. I can’t even fill the space with sweaters, though I’m wearing one on top of another now.
What worries me is that I feel this cold and miserable this early in the season. I’ve got months of this left. Ugh.
Big Bird Bites the Big One
“Oh noooooo! Big Bird is dead!” Ernie rolled his eyes to the heavens and swooned.
“No he’s not.” Bert didn’t even put his newspaper down.
“But he’s laying on the floor with his eyes closed.”
“So? He’s napping. Naaaaaapping.”
“But he’s not breathing.”
“I got news for you, Ernie. None of us are breathing. Not Big Bird, not Oscar, not you, and not me. All of us are just dolls waiting to get the stuffing knocked out of us.”
“Yeah, but most of us still have our tops and our bottoms stuck together.”
The Hub: Rochelle Wisoff-Fields
Photo credit: Luther Siler
Any resemblance to well known children’s programming characters is only in good fun.
13 Pictures from a Cyclo-Rickshaw
I considered calling this 13 pictures of a back side because I was at the end of the line, but decided I couldn’t really call a rice paddy a “back 40”. This was the trip from the glamorous country-side restaurant to Kasongan Village.
1.
Suzie’s House 434 : A Ring of Useless Keys
Nathan told himself yet again that he shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. There’s no way he could have hitched home any faster than Gabriel was willing to drive, but did they have to stop at every friend’s house along the way? At least he was clean, well fed, and warm. He had shelter for the night. It just wasn’t the shelter of his own home.
