Big ones, small ones, gross ones, cute ones, furry ones, buzzing ones, flying ones, crawling ones, slimy ones…
Insects.
As much as we would like to claim otherwise, they are in our homes, on high shelves and in the corners of the garage.
Arachnophobics beware, California homes generally have at least one spider per person. I have daddy longlegs everywhere, one in the shower, one in a corner in the hallway, several in the living room, and the laundry room has arachno-condos.
I shoo them out, take down their webs and clean up the tiny bloodless insect carcasses discarded. Yet, they rebuild. (Clearly they have a better Federal Emergency Management Agency than Katrina victims.)
Daddy longlegs are part of life here. No one really notices or pays attention.
But I noticed, because it was a contrast.
Ships are a very closed environment with a lot of food, a lot of food. Great efforts are made to prevent stowaways of every type, including the small crawly type.
My ship is extraordinarily successful at this. With the exception of the occasional fly, I never once in my five months aboard saw an insect on board.
That is not entirely true. On the top deck while in St. Petersburg once, we had a terrible infestation of lady bugs. You literally could not take a couple steps without crunching a lady big. But the lady bugs were well restricted to the exterior top deck. As soon as we left St. Petersburg, we left behind the lady bugs.
My point is, among the strange aspects of ship life, is the complete absence of some normal aspects of life, including insects.
This has been strikingly apparent in my return home, not to an empty house, but one with a spider here and there.
They seemed rather indifferent to my return.
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Sunday, October 23, 2005
Understanding the Harvest Season
I am currently in Keene, New Hampshire, New England, the birth place of Thanksgiving. And Thanksgiving traditions all make sense here.
There are big fat wild turkeys waddling around the harvested corn fields. The cranberries are canned. Pumpkins are everywhere and the last apples are falling from trees, amidst other trees that are gold, brown, green and red.
But let’s discuss the pumpkins as they are by far and away the most excessive tradition locally.
Every year, people and businesses carve pumpkins or a few dozen, and carry them down to town square where they REGISTER their pumpkin(s).
Then they find a nice space for the pumpkin along the side of Main Street (aptly name as it is the main street) or on the three story high erected pyramid, pumpkin scaffoldings, provided with honor by local construction companies. Each tier of the mammoth pyramid structures is about two feet high, just big enough for a large of pumpkin. (There were four or five of these glowing structures around Main Street.
And they were glowing, all a light. I have been told there are even people tasked specifically with going around town and relighting darkened lanterns.
So on the night of the pumpkin festival, you cruise Main Street admiring the pumpkins, everywhere, and purchasing hot cider, hot cocoa, hot soup, hot chili, cause it is damn cold out. (Local charities set up booths for fund raising.)
This tradition fosters a lot of very creative carving. Businesses who sponsor pumpkin collection manage to advertise, each pumpkin having a letter to spell McKay’s Market for example. I liked the one with wholes through out the entire thing. It just looked like a very evenly glowing spotted ball. It was kind of abstract.
And there is even a goal. The reason why people register their pumpkin is it is their yearly effort to exceed their own Guinness Book of World Records record for the most lit lanterns in one place.
The other reason is their competition with Boston who is also trying to beat Keene’s record.
This year Keene had 22,167 pumpkins, and apparently Boston had around 24,000. The record is around 28,000.
I would say this is a fire hazard, except it was 37 degrees and raining out.
In the end, people are encouraged to take home their pumpkins. Otherwise, with a forklift, they are fed to the pigs.
My picture did not come out so great, so I will tell you what it is. The pyramid of pumpkins-a-glow is fairly obvious. The white pinnacle in the upper right is the steeple of the standard issue New England town center chapel. (The base is hidden by a very dark tree.) Then those are people with umbrellas in front.
Happy Carving…
There are big fat wild turkeys waddling around the harvested corn fields. The cranberries are canned. Pumpkins are everywhere and the last apples are falling from trees, amidst other trees that are gold, brown, green and red.
But let’s discuss the pumpkins as they are by far and away the most excessive tradition locally.
Every year, people and businesses carve pumpkins or a few dozen, and carry them down to town square where they REGISTER their pumpkin(s).
Then they find a nice space for the pumpkin along the side of Main Street (aptly name as it is the main street) or on the three story high erected pyramid, pumpkin scaffoldings, provided with honor by local construction companies. Each tier of the mammoth pyramid structures is about two feet high, just big enough for a large of pumpkin. (There were four or five of these glowing structures around Main Street.
And they were glowing, all a light. I have been told there are even people tasked specifically with going around town and relighting darkened lanterns.
So on the night of the pumpkin festival, you cruise Main Street admiring the pumpkins, everywhere, and purchasing hot cider, hot cocoa, hot soup, hot chili, cause it is damn cold out. (Local charities set up booths for fund raising.)
This tradition fosters a lot of very creative carving. Businesses who sponsor pumpkin collection manage to advertise, each pumpkin having a letter to spell McKay’s Market for example. I liked the one with wholes through out the entire thing. It just looked like a very evenly glowing spotted ball. It was kind of abstract.
And there is even a goal. The reason why people register their pumpkin is it is their yearly effort to exceed their own Guinness Book of World Records record for the most lit lanterns in one place.
The other reason is their competition with Boston who is also trying to beat Keene’s record.
This year Keene had 22,167 pumpkins, and apparently Boston had around 24,000. The record is around 28,000.
I would say this is a fire hazard, except it was 37 degrees and raining out.
In the end, people are encouraged to take home their pumpkins. Otherwise, with a forklift, they are fed to the pigs.
My picture did not come out so great, so I will tell you what it is. The pyramid of pumpkins-a-glow is fairly obvious. The white pinnacle in the upper right is the steeple of the standard issue New England town center chapel. (The base is hidden by a very dark tree.) Then those are people with umbrellas in front.
Happy Carving…
Friday, October 21, 2005
Landed
I am off the ship and life is weird.
• Driving is strange.
• People asking me what of 8000 things I want on a sandwich is disorienting.
• Everyone seems rude compared to life on the ship where it is our job and lifestyle to be accommodating.
• Everywhere is cold and various in temperature instead of being a nice, steady 68 degrees.
• I have to make a decision as to what I want to eat rather than having it all laid out for me to put on a plate.
• In the Officer’s Mess, there is a bus woman named Melinda. She always takes you plate before you are finished and some how when you are distracted by conversation or something. You find yourself, surprised, looking down, fork mid-air. As a result, I eat convict style. I guard my plate. When you are eating where no one is going to take your plate and you are expected to bus your own, this is really silly.
• I am expected to pick out my own clothes everyday.
• I don’t have a big group of friends to have breakfast, lunch and dinner with.
• There are five hundred channels chock full of mostly commercials, and still there is nothing on. (There is something fairly comforting about six channels of movies you have seen bits and pieces of before all without commercials.)
• Everything seems dirty. Apparently the rest of the world does not have two full time cleaners allocated per 75 sq. ft.
• I walk around town and don’t recognize anyone. On the ship, in every port, you always run into fellow crew.
• It occurred to me as I drove yesterday, I was supposed to have a drivers license with me. This is something I completely forgot about.
• I can take a shower and straighten my arms without touching a wall.
• I cannot touch every wall of the bathroom while standing at every point of the bathroom.
• No one takes my dry-cleaning from my bedroom every morning and returns it the next day.
• I have no pager resting against my spine, clipped to my skirt and I am not supposed to.
• The walls are not magnetic, which makes hanging things with magnets much harder.
• No one here makes friendly jests at my expense from long standing jokes.
• Amazingly I still have difficult users. (I am staying at my mom’s house.)
I am going to try and catch up on back stupid cools.
Stay tuned.
• Driving is strange.
• People asking me what of 8000 things I want on a sandwich is disorienting.
• Everyone seems rude compared to life on the ship where it is our job and lifestyle to be accommodating.
• Everywhere is cold and various in temperature instead of being a nice, steady 68 degrees.
• I have to make a decision as to what I want to eat rather than having it all laid out for me to put on a plate.
• In the Officer’s Mess, there is a bus woman named Melinda. She always takes you plate before you are finished and some how when you are distracted by conversation or something. You find yourself, surprised, looking down, fork mid-air. As a result, I eat convict style. I guard my plate. When you are eating where no one is going to take your plate and you are expected to bus your own, this is really silly.
• I am expected to pick out my own clothes everyday.
• I don’t have a big group of friends to have breakfast, lunch and dinner with.
• There are five hundred channels chock full of mostly commercials, and still there is nothing on. (There is something fairly comforting about six channels of movies you have seen bits and pieces of before all without commercials.)
• Everything seems dirty. Apparently the rest of the world does not have two full time cleaners allocated per 75 sq. ft.
• I walk around town and don’t recognize anyone. On the ship, in every port, you always run into fellow crew.
• It occurred to me as I drove yesterday, I was supposed to have a drivers license with me. This is something I completely forgot about.
• I can take a shower and straighten my arms without touching a wall.
• I cannot touch every wall of the bathroom while standing at every point of the bathroom.
• No one takes my dry-cleaning from my bedroom every morning and returns it the next day.
• I have no pager resting against my spine, clipped to my skirt and I am not supposed to.
• The walls are not magnetic, which makes hanging things with magnets much harder.
• No one here makes friendly jests at my expense from long standing jokes.
• Amazingly I still have difficult users. (I am staying at my mom’s house.)
I am going to try and catch up on back stupid cools.
Stay tuned.
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Next Time with Deeper Pockets
As I was walking by Nadja's office today, I noticed she had some cash on the desk. Kidding, I said, "I’ll take some of that."
She shrugged, "That’s ok. I have 400,000 under my desk?"
"What?"
She casually grabbed an ordinary gray plastic bag from under her desk. She set it on her lap and pulled out a brick of plastic-wrapped hundred dollar bills. She put it on her desk, along with another, and another and another.
She was serious. She had $400,000 under her desk.
$400,000 in hundreds is not that big. I can easily hold it, though it didn't fit into my pockets (not that I checked…).
I love my job. It has given me many interesting experiences.
Holding $400,000 is one of them.
She had over a hundred thousand more on the other side of the room.
A cruise ship chooses a currency to pay wages in. Then, since the cruise ship is the bank on board, there must be enough currency available for the crew to hit the "atm" (her name is Hilde) before a day of shopping in port.
Four hundred grand seemed to cover it.
She shrugged, "That’s ok. I have 400,000 under my desk?"
"What?"
She casually grabbed an ordinary gray plastic bag from under her desk. She set it on her lap and pulled out a brick of plastic-wrapped hundred dollar bills. She put it on her desk, along with another, and another and another.
She was serious. She had $400,000 under her desk.
$400,000 in hundreds is not that big. I can easily hold it, though it didn't fit into my pockets (not that I checked…).
I love my job. It has given me many interesting experiences.
Holding $400,000 is one of them.
She had over a hundred thousand more on the other side of the room.
A cruise ship chooses a currency to pay wages in. Then, since the cruise ship is the bank on board, there must be enough currency available for the crew to hit the "atm" (her name is Hilde) before a day of shopping in port.
Four hundred grand seemed to cover it.
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