Meet Joey - he’s a 18-hands Clydesdale and a member of the Express Clydesdales Team.
When the team visited Durham last weekend, we were lucky enough to know where they were staying. so we got a special, personal encounter with these amazing hoses. (see below)
We brought this plumeria back from Hawai’i in 2004 and planted the stem in a pot. For a while nothing happened. Then it started growing leaves. This spring Laura transferred the plant to a larger pot and it started growing more leaves.
When we moved, we gave the plumeria a nice, sunny spot on the deck. The plant loved the hot weather this summer and grew like crazy. Last week we noticed the flower buds, and tonight was the night! The plumeria’s first flower opened. Pretty amazing - it took only 10 hours, and in the last few hours you could almost watch it unfurl its delicate petals.
Click on the picture to see the gallery.
We had a rather dry spring, and so only last weekend we finally found an opportunity to engage in our annual post-solstice ritual of burning our yuletide tree. After getting two inches (52mm) of rain on Saturday last weekend, Sunday evening was calm and cool and it was pretty safe to torch the bone-dry Frasier fir.
This is one of my favorite pictures from Yikpa - it captures a true Yikpa moment during the funeral of the old chief of the village of 
Yikpa-Anigbe in 1991. As the drums were rumbling in the background, and the men occasionally fire an old rifle into the air, the women gathered to burn herbs and say prayers for the deceased. Finally Mama Celi, the chief of the women, put some herbs on the fire, and as the pungent, aromatic smoke filled the air, she slowly dances to the drums and recites with great intensity a powerful prayer for the old man.
I use this photo on my homepage and on the “Yikpa Spirits” page, because it nicely illustrates the sense of spirituality in the village. The smoke and the light illustrate the ancient mysticism of the traditions. The serious faces of the women and Mama Celis posture reflect the intensity of the moment and the depth of their faith.
Last weekend I got an email from a guy at a film production company who asked me if they can use the picture in a documentary film about the tradition of Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans, LA. The image will be used to illustrate some of the cultural traditions that have influenced the African-American Mardi Gras Indian tradition. Sure, I don’t see a problem with them using the picture in this context.
In fact, I think it’s pretty cool that they picked this image. Sounds like a great film project - I hope I’ll get to see the film when its done.
Here are some more pictures from our weekend at the beach January 14/15! Sunday morning was gloriously warm and sunny; in the afternoon clouds rolled in, which made the light for our trip to Cape Lookout quite interesting. (more…)
No -this is not Southern Florida or South Africa - this is Atlantic Beach, NC in January! Looking at the weather report for the Martin Luther King holiday weekend, our friend Susan decided to head out to her beach house for the weekend. When she asked if we wanted to come along … well, we had to carefully consider our plans for the weekend … for 2 seconds.
We drove out to Atlantic Beach on Saturday evening after Laura got off work. Sunday morning was great - it was sunny and warm (mid-70s F. /low 20s C), the kids were playing in the surf (!) and Dolphins were cruising up and down the beach (LOTS of dolphins). The water was freaking cold - 55F/12C - but the kids did not care! I did - I tried it and it was freezing!! I wanted to see if I could get close to one of those dolphins … duh! I spent about 5 Minutes in the water and Laura says I was purple when I came out.
In the afternoon, we took a boat (see right) to the Cape Lookout lighthouse and went for a walk along the beach. It was gorgeous - a gentle breeze was blowing in from the ocean and there were hardly any people around. But lots of Dolphins were hunting right off the beach. Once in a while they’d get a baitball going and the water would start boiling, and the pelicans would start dive-bombing, while the dolphins were feeding on the fish.
On the way back, the skipper picked up a family on Shackleford Banks, where they had been hanging out with the wild mustangs there. Sometime in the spring we should go there camping over night. That would be a great adventure and it’d be so cool to watch the mustangs.
Today, we hung out in the morning, and cleaned the house. Then we went to the Pine Knoll Shores Aquarium (free admission today!). We spent a couple of hours looking at the “fishies,” petted the horseshoe crabs, and gawked at the sharks in the big tank. Around 3 PM we headed back home. What a great weekend!
Last year had a couple of surprises for us, although most of these have yet to be completely realized: we found a new house, but we have yet to move there; we began planning our trip to Togo (and Ghana) for the upcoming July; and the Democrats won back the U.S. Congress.
One of the biggest changes in our lives in 2006 was Agbessi’s move to Durham. He stayed with us during the summer and then moved to an apartment in Durham. It’s great to have him here; he is like a family member to us. Hopefully we’ll all be able to travel back to our village in Togo together this summer. It’ll be really cool to show up back in Yikpa, the village where Laura and I met 15 years ago, with our children AND with one of the Yikpato from America!
In July 2007, Laura will lead a group of customers an volunteers from her Fair Trade store in Durham on a tour of Ghana, visiting some of the artisans and coops that offer their wares at One World Market. We are planning to leave a week earlier and visit our village in Togo first. This is a big deal to us - taking our children back to the village where we met. And if Agbessi can come with us that’ll e even cooler because he knows our life in the U.S. and his presence will strengthen the bond between our families even more.
In August, Laura found a little house for us, a bit closer to Durham, and a very pretty 2-acre property. We signed a contract but the inspection turned up some serious structural problems. The seller agreed to have the problems fixed. Now, three months later, the contractors have left, and a water test turned up problems with the well that supplies the house with water. Currently we’re in the process of determining what needs to be done to treat the water. Probably a filter and a UV light will be alright. It’s really too bad that this is such an obstacle course. Yet, we have looked around, and we have not found another house for sale that would change our mind.
For Laura’s store, 2006 was a great year. They sold over $430,000 in Fair Trade merchandise, which supports communities all over the world. About a quarter of that was sold between Thanksgiving and X-mas! During most of the year, selling $1000 worth in merchandise is a good day’s work at the store. During the peak of the Christmas shopping frenzy, the mostly volunteer-staffed store was selling at a rate of about $1000 an hour! And as they don’t have much storage space, they were almost continuously unpacking merchandise and stocking the sales floor. And Laura was continuously ordering more stuff. Still, when I saw the store last week, I was amazed to see how depleted it looked! But they set new sales records for the store, both for holiday sales, and for the entire year. Congratulations!
The biggest change for Jacob and Julia last year, I think, was discovering the Horse Ranch where they spend a couple of hours every day after school. While Julia got really serious about learning how to ride - and to ride well - Jacob seems to mostly enjoy playing with his buddies around the Ranch. Julia has won several shows at the Ranch, and she can canter a horse across 3-foot (one-meter-high) obstacles! Jacob has learned how to ride a horse, too, but he is still a bit young for the more advanced stuff.
On my end, my job at Duke changed quite a bit. In addition to all the network stuff and computer security business, I also got to re-design an office suite at Brightleaf Square. I moved my office and the server room, and my co-worker’s office into a new, self-contained office suite. The latter, we just completed in December. So, we’ll see how that shakes out …
A nice perk of my job was being able to sneak out and watch football games last summer, during the Worldcup. As I work with several “dang for’ners” from football nations (England, Germany, Turkey, Togo, Haiti) we had a pretty good contingent over at Satisfaction for some of the games. And the folks at Satisfaction even opened the bar early (at 9:00 AM) several times so we could catch some of the early games (like the Togo games).
The Worldcup was great fun: from the ecstasy of Germany’s win over Argentina to the agony of Togo’s first Worldcup appearance. We saw some wonderful football, especially in the first round, even though real upsets were rare and in the end the Worldcup was dominated by “millionaire football” and somewhat tainted by some really questionable officiating, most painfully noticeable in the Ghana-Brazil game and Australia’s 95th-Minute loss to Italy. And then, of course, there was this unfortunate incident during the very unfortunate Worldcup final.
In the fall of 2006, I started another chapter in my biofuels quest: I completed my biodiesel reactor and began producing biodiesel in the basement. I collect the used fryer oil from several restaurants around Brightleaf Square and process the vegetable oil at home into fuel for my 2002 Jetta TDI. Although this is quite a bit of work, it is very satisfying to reduce my reliance on fossil fuels, produce much less harmful exhaust and safe some money doing it. And it is also a fun, relaxing hobby. As I am typing this, my 200-liter “New Year’s batch” is sitting in the washtank downstairs.
Finally, politics. I mean, I am pretty excited about the fact that the Republican’s lost the congress to the Democrats. Almost more importantly, though, are the implications of this loss to the power of the so-called neocons in the Republican party. Right now, it looks like that in 2008, the “New American Century” will come to an end. Finally. I just really hope that the Democrats manage to re-assert congressional oversight and reintroduce accountability into this corrupt, incompetent administration. And get the US troops out of Iraq ASAP!
I’d say 2006 was pretty good to us. We don’t take this for granted, as we see around us people who had a difficult time, and we certainly are quite aware of all the pain and suffering in the world. Yet, we also see all the hope and generosity around us and we try to contribute to the positive things that go on around us. I am painfully aware of the many serious problems and challenges ahead of us and future generations. But I also see all the energy and hope and strength growing in our children, I can’t help but feel optimistic about the future.
So, thanks to you all for your interest in my blog. I hope 2007 brings you good news and exciting things to do. Feel free to comment and share with us what is going on with you.
Cheers, and a Happy, Prosperous, Healthy 2007!
Jürgen
It’s spring and the wildlife in the woods is going - uh - wild!
Chipmunks
The cats are out hunting every day. They catch frogs, lizards, shrews, and chipmunks. Yesterday I saw Deha, the Siamese, in the driveway, hovering over what I thought was fresh kill. So I went to see what she got, and found it was a juvenile chipmunk. Deha had lost interest in it, so I picked it up and carried it off into the woods, so the children would not find it. When I dropped it on some leaves in the woods, it started squirming, and I took another look, and it did not actually seem seriously injured, and probably was just pretending to be dead. When I picked it up it started to squirm vigorously in my hands. “Very clever” I thought “You play dead, and cats get bored with you.”
I put the little guy into our chipmunk habitat, where our other rescued chipmunk has been living for well over a year - pretty happily, I think. After a while the older chipmunk came over to check out the new guy, who was still pretty freaked out. Finally the little guy settled in in a hollow log and went to sleep. That’s where he/she still is. Once in a while the older one goes over there and sticks his head in the log. This morning, Laura dropped a grape on the little guy’s head. He looked up, sniffed the grape, and proceeded to chow down on that yummy “manna from above.”
When chipmunks die and go to heaven, they end up in a place where it rains grapes.
Yet another cold front moved in today, and the temperature dropped 20 degrees Fahrenheit in one hour. This cold front spawned some severe thunderstorms and at one point a 15-Minute hailstorm that almost covered the ground with chick-pea-sized hail.
I like the effect of the hail in the flashlight in the picture above.
More pictures below the fold …
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Julia makes it all the way to the top of “The Rock” at yesterday’s Earth Day Celebration at Duke.
Last weekend my dad visited us and since we were doing a bit of sight-seeing, I figured a trip over to Chapel Hill would be fun. I had not visited my alma mater in a long time and this time of year the old campus at UNC is just gorgeous (despite a huge amount of construction everywhere).
Pretty day too - even the sky was Carolina Blue!
The Old Well is a key landmark of UNC’s Chapel Hill campus.
Last night we did our post-solstice ritual and torched our christmas tree. The tree was still way too green - we should have let it dry out more. Still, it was quite a firework ….
We woke up this morning at 5:30 because Julia was not feeling well, and noticed the woods behind our house were burning. Across an area of about an acre (roughly a third of a hectare) the leaf litter on the ground was burning and the fire was rapidly spreading in a wide swath across the forest. So I called 911 (emergency) and within 5 minutes the first fireman arrived, and now we have the driveway in front and in the back of the house full of firetrucks and about a dozen firemen hosing down smoldering logs.
It looks like the neighbor was burning leaves yesterday and did not fully extinguish the fire. Over night is restarted and spread across their back yard and into ours and another neighbor’s. I am glad that I cleaned our foot/bike path from leaves yesterday, because the fire did not get across the path. That prevented it from getting near our wood shed, which is full of … you guessed it … dry fire wood! That might have made this morning even more interesting. As it is, it does not look like any damage was done, but I bet the guy who caused the fire feels pretty stupid!
[UPDATE: added some pictures - see below the fold]
This morning I went right back to Tsali to ride another trail. Over night the clouds had disappeared and just a low morning fog hovered in the valleys. The sky was clear, the air was crisp and chilly, just slightly above freezing. Last night, the higher peaks in the distance had received their first dusting of snow of the season (see pictures below).
I picked the Right Loop of the Tsali Trail, because it winds along the eastern side of the knoll that juts out into Fontana Lake. So when the sun peeked over the mountains around 7:45 I was on the sunny side of the trail. As I wound my way out to Windy Point, I had a great view of the lake and I watched how the sun slowly burned of the morning fog that hung over the water. It was very quiet, just a few birds were chirping in the chilly morning air and occasionally a squirrel ran up a tree, chattering anxiously. I met no other bikes but a couple of times shots in the distance broke the peace. It was so quiet that the noises from my bike’s gears seemed loud and obnoxious. I had an awesome time - this is a gorgeous trail! When I returned to the parking lot at around 9:30, there was just one other car - a guy with a bow and arrow who was heading out into the woods for some hunting.
More pictures below the fold …
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I like my cars with a hitch. I have a small utility trailer that I use to haul garbage, furniture, cinder blocks, firewood, and other stuff that I don’t want inside the car or that does not fit inside the car. Over the years I found the trailer-car combo much more efficient than owning a truck. However, it is not easy to find a place that will install a small Class I hitch to a car. “We don’t do cars” and “we don’t install hitches” is all you hear.
Well, I finally gave up and ordered a hitch for the Jetta from an etailer - eTrailer.com - and installed it myself. It cost me $150 for the parts and 2 hours last Sunday afternoon. Oh - and it gave me a great reason to buy a nice drill, because I had to drill 4 1/2-inch-holes into the body of the Jetta. The whole operation went well, and the hitch works great, now. And I also have a much better understanding of why no one wants to install these hitches.