Bird Quiz

If anybody knows what these birds are, do please let me know! For the first time ever I have seen them on my feeder, which made such an exciting change after several years of great tits dominating small bird life in these parts.

Apologies for the poor picture quality but when I tried to open the window to get a clearer view they all flew away. So this is taken through the window and in less than optimum light conditions. Still, their colours and patterns are quite clear, so I hope someone will let me know, either in a comment here, or via e-mail what they are.

Geocaching (again)

After a blustery and snowy Sunday - Monday was much improved so we decided to go out for a few more caches. I love geocaching, but that day turned out to be a lot less fun than I expected. The first cache was in a village where a famous writer lived. I had no trouble finding it, hidden down a tree in a lane by a pretty white church. It was on the web site as a traditional cache, so I thought that having found it that was it. Until I read the logbook which then suggested that I had to go to the Museum and read some number on a board. Cheeky, I thought. A traditional cache and then you find out it is really a multi. Needless to say (I found it out since) that it used to be a multi, but they put it back to a traditional because the Museum is closed for refurbishment. However, they forgot to cross off the second instruction, so I ended up very confused. Never mind, I thought I would still get this find credited as it was obvious that I couldn't get in to a closed Museum.

After this we went to a nearby village where the cache was hidden at the foot of a tree on top of an ancient hill fort, now thickly forested. I left Roy at the bottom by the row of wine cellars (sadly closed) :-( and climbed straight up. Found the exact co-ordinates, but no sign of cache. There was a suspicious looking large hole at the bottom of a tree, but still no cache. I was getting a bit p....d off by now, considering my lack of success, but I took some pictures and hoped to have it credited on the basis of the photographs.

When I got back down to Roy and the car I was seriously considering jacking in the whole thing, but felt that at least the next one should be done, as it is en route to home anyway. We got going and stopped in the village appointed (although the village name plate was missing) and asked where the stages of the cross were. The locals looked very puzzled, but thankfully we managed to work out that we stopped one village too early, so we motored on. Before that we did try to put the coordinates in the TomTom, but it decided to send us on a 25 mile trip in a Northerly direction, so we were puzzled yet again. Never mind, perhaps I made a mistake with the co-ordinates or printed the wrong details on my sheet, but as we could now see the village where we should have been on the horizon we journeyed on. Upon arrival we had our sandwiches and then tried the co-ordinates again, same place 25 miles away. Now I decided that I must have got myself confused when copying the details from the web site and the weather seemed to turn as well, so we decided to call it a day. On our way out of the village we suddenly spotted the blue house with the path next to it which was supposedly the departure point. Looking up on the hill we saw the big cross and even spotted the finger post right next to us that pointed up the hill directing you to the cross. Hurraaahhhh!! We must be in the right place. At this point we realised that we were very silly assuming that I boobed with the coordinates as having the hand held GPS, we could have checked. We did so straight away and discovered that our poor old TomTom must have been having a bad day, because everything was correct and all I had to do was to climb the bloody big hill right above us to the big cross and find the cache. This I duly did, so we amassed a grand total of 3, having suffered all kinds of mishaps and frustrations. Sill I can't complain as I was out in the fresh air, had some exercise and took a few really lovely photos of the glorious countryside around me.

Upon arrival home I put my finds on the web site: it accepted the password without the one from the Museum for the first - GREAT!! - the second was put up without the password, and the third normally. Having re-read some of the comments on the hill fort one it transpired that the last time anyone found it in situ was at the end of September, nothing in the following 3 months, then one person at the beginning of January found it accidentally in a bush 30 metres away from its place and another poor bugger 5 days before me couldn't find it at all. Since then the owner of the cache has accepted our find based on the photos, but only after I nudged him by e-mail. Great fun this geocaching lark, I must say!!

Travel Map

I have come across Travel 66, an interesting site which I should probably register in, but I'll have to read all the small print before I do that. In the meantime, have a look at the world with all countries I have ever visited in red. Interesting, isn't it?


create your own visited country map
Well, after I checked the map it turns out that the whole of Asia got chopped off, which means that you wouldn't know that I have been to Nepal and Bangladesh before. Also, you cannot enlarge it, so I can't check if, for example, the Canary Islands are highlighted or not, if not, that's an omission as well. So, nothing's perfect, but it is still fun.

Finally, I found another page on the Travel 66 website which only shows Europe. This way it might look better and considering I have rarely been out of Europe (Nepal, Bangladesh and Canada) this is more representative of my travel experience.


create your personalized map of europe

On a lovely sunny Saturday

The weather this week was totally erratic. Sometimes cold, sometimes not, rained a lot, but occasionally it was sunny too. Well, today we had a gloriously bright, a bit cold, but still gorgeous day. We instantly decided that staying indoors was not an option. After feeding the birds in the morning we set out for our first activity.

I may have mentioned some time ago that there is a high ranking policeman in the village who has been working abroad for the last 10+ years, so he is not much in evidence, but does own a fair amount of property in the village. We have only ever seen him in the flesh once about 8-10 years ago and found him very nice. He bought an old property and had it done up, then he bought next door and did the same. When we visited his daughter a few months ago, she was living in the second property and they occasionally let the first one.

Then about 6-8 years ago he bought the old tumble down mill with another house nearby, but nobody knew what for. Finally, about a year or two ago he bought two more houses near the mill and about 6 months ago started renovating the lot. I was very much fascinated by this development and took it upon myself to Google him, which produced a telephone number, so I rang him in London, which is where he works at the moment. We had such a lovely long chat and he seemed pleased that I was enthusiastic about his renovations. As the development is going to include a restaurant and pub, so was Roy. This was in the autumn and I have not been in that part of the village since, only to discover recently that the building works have advanced quite fast since then. So, to cut a very long story short, we went up the hill and inspected the project.

I was really happy that the mill has got a roof on it, although not quite finished yet. They also built the dam on the stream to create the mill pond a bit above the mill and have made good progress on two of the buildings.

When we got back we suddenly realised that this lovely sunny day was perfect for geocaching, so having put a packed lunch together we jumped in the car and drove West and then North in search of elusive little plastic boxes. The first stop was in Vanyarc, where I had a very suspicious audience while squatting in the undergrowth at the edge of their cemetery. The next stop was at a Buddhist Stupa, which was only built about 3 years ago and it shone magnificently in the sunshine. I managed to disturb one of the faithful saying his mantras while thrashing through the undergrowth, but I am sure he forgave me.

The next cache was near a fishing lake and by now the sun started setting, so I managed to take a few amazing pictures with the sun reflecting back off the water.

We got to the last one just before 3pm. And my old curse of the lousy cache always being the last one struck again. It happened before that on what was a fascinating, fun and very successful geocaching day, the last one turned out to be awful, impossible and very frustrating. Well, this was definitely all those. The Tom Tom sent us to a funny place, then I followed my own hunch and that was better, but once I was right where the coordinates said it should be, there was nothing. Not only I couldn't find the box, but I couldn't even find a single tree that looked like the one described on the web page - at the bottom of which should have been the cache. After a good half hour I gave up, but thankfully the guy whose cache it is granted me a find based on my uploaded photos. I would dearly love to know:
1. Was I at the right place?
2. If I was, then where was the bloody tree?
3. And finally, how is it that having even found the cacher's track I still couldn't find the bloody box?!!!!

It might have been nicked, but I suspect it was me who got a bit too frustrated and blind. On the way back I chatted to some really lovely fishermen, as this cache was near a reservoir which doubled as a wildelife reserve, especially for birds. How on earth he could fish when they are supposed to be in hibernation, God only knows.

Two old codgers keeping Alzheimers at bay!!?

I was thinking the other day why is it that our days go so fast, even when apparently we do not do much? Then today in the news I heard that some American study proved that one of the most likely ways to avoid Alzheimers is by staying active, reading, thinking, finding out new things, communicate, learn, in other words - use the grey matter! Is that what Roy and I are doing, even when it seems we are not doing much? Just to illustrate, I thought I would try to describe our recent activities to see if we have done enough in the last few weeks to keep Alzheimers at bay?

I would love to talk about three young men who have taken my fancy recently, even though they could nearly be my grandsons, never mind my sons. First of all there is my beloved Kristof Barati whose violin playing is good enough to give the most seriously depressive, unhappy person the will to live again. I listen to him as often as I can from CD's, from the TV or radio as well as at concerts.

Then there is a much newer interest of mine, who had come to my attention recently and who I am sure is a favourite of lots of women a great deal younger than myself. Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Sherlock Holmes in the new brilliantly updated BBC series of the Conan Doyle classic. He is superb and the six episodes so far have given me a great deal of pleasure.

And then the last young man is of another class altogether. Quite by accident I managed to catch the repeat of a mini-series on the Spectrum TV channel about a Hungarian wildlife photographer by the name of Bence Mate. He is still only 26 years old, but has collected a dozen or so international trophies and prizes for his photography and is now making his living from organising photo tours to all parts of the world. His photographs are superb, which is not surprising or he would not have won all those prizes. However, what got me was the personality of the guy. Young, unassuming, but at the same time confident, resourseful, very environmentally aware and great fun into the bargain. I was glued to the three parts of his life story on TV and am now an avid reader of his web site, which is also great. I have just ordered his book and I would recommend to anyone who likes out of this world wildlife photographs to look him up on www.matebence.hu

I have no scientific proof of this (notwithstanding the above mentioned American study), but I firmly believe that as long as you are still interested in a lot of things and manage to preserve not only your curiosity but your enthusiasm for all manner of things and people, you cannot ever really grow old. I am getting pretty creaky physically, but in my bonce I still feel about 16. Is that a good way to keep Alzheimers away? I sure think so! Needless to say that I don't know what Roy thinks about this, but I can assure all of you that if my hypothesis is true, then he is safe as well. Family History, local history, DIY, renovations, gardens etc., etc. are in his sphere of interest, so I don't think his brain will ever get a chance to atrophy either.

Talking of Family History, he has just quite by accident discovered a new database which has now provided him with copies of marriage certificates that he never had the chance to find in the past, as without an index or a searchable database the job was impossible. I have not heard a peep out of him since this discovery and he has been in seventh heaven using the database for a couple of days now. I know that the enclosed scan of an old register is not very clear, but if I tell you that my maiden name is Molnar, can you find the marriage entry of my parents in the register?

And finally my article mentioned a couple of posts ago has got written on Sunday (that required some brain activity too!!) and appeared on the web site yesterday. I did find a typing error in it since, but I'm sure the readership will either miss it (as I must have done in proofreading it) or forgive me one little missing space.

Must go now as the fire needs poking. My sister always called me a graphomaniac and yes, I do like to rabbit on, but from now on I have a perfect excuse: I AM KEEPING ALZHEIMERS DISEASE AT BAY!!

Snowy anniversary

Woke up around 7am and realised it was still dark outside. That means one thing - I thought: snow clouds. And I was right! 10 minutes later it started snowing, not much, but snowing. As it was the 55th aniversary of my father's passing, we put all our warm clothes on and trudged to the grave at the top of the garden with some candles and lit them.

The rest of the day was spent reading, watching TV and on the computer. Isn't retirement wonderful?!!

A busy week (again)

The last week was crazy and we were travelling back and forth with frightening speed. On Sunday we were invited to Erika, our Canadian friend for dinner and that worked out great. She had a couple of people there that we didn't know, plus an Australian, who we have met before. They were all very good company and a good time was had by all.

On Tuesday I went to a concert in the Bartok villa again, this time a gorgeous young flutist played a variety of pieces all with great enthusiasm and with skill and feeling belying her very young age. She was not only a joy to listen to, but lovely to look at, not to mention the interesting things she told us about the composers and their works on her repertoire.

On Wednesday we got a lift from the friend who was coming down for negotiations about the orienteering event menioned in the previous post. We had no problems getting the required services and a very advantegous agreement was made. After that he went for a 2 hour run all over the terrain to check it out, then we had lunch and around 4 o'clock they went home. I only opened the post after they went, only to find that the Opera House moved forward the performance of Die Fledermouse to Thursday of this week, so having lost the chance of a lift from our friends we had to bump in on the bus the following morning. Mind you, I did watch a couple of really good TV programs that night, so the day wasn't a total loss after all.

Die Fledermouse was fun, if a bit too long. Unfortunately Andor couldn't come as he was working in the North East and couldn't return early. I hope we can get him another ticket for some future date, although I doubt he would go on his own.

In the meantime I got commissioned to write an article about the recent events in Hungary for the IMT website, so I had to start collecting material for that and hopefully that'll get written in a few days' time. My favourite political conference - this time in Italy - has announced its dates in the summer, so I am now trying to make up my mind whether to go or not. Summer is already shaping up to be busy (what's new?) and the plan was to stay put. I suppose Roy would not come to this, so perhaps I can go. We'll see! A bit of a good news in the village might have a bearing on this: Attila, son of a good friend of ours in the village, has decided to relocate back to his birthplace and asked if we have any work for him. He is a graduate horticultural engineer, so a tad overqualified as a gardener, but he is desperate for any work, so we might offer him the position and that would ease our need to be around right through the summer. When we are back there we'll have a chat and see if he would accept our offer.

Finally, this morning we made a train trip to a friend to pick up some O maps of our hills, because I can't for the life of me find the old stock I had from 7 years ago. It was fun, especially that we were on brand new rolling stock, quiet, fast and clean. No scratched windows or graffiti anywhere!! Long may it be that way!! On our return we had a call from the little monster from across the pond, as you can see from the photographs.

Tonight I am due to go to another concert, this time in the Palace mirrorred hall and the soloist is my absolute favourite, Kristof Barati. I ran into him on Thursday night en route to the Opera and that was exciting enough. Tonight he is playing Beethoven, Bach, Brahms and Saint-Saens, so I will surely be in seventh heaven.

First week of 2012

After the New Year's Party we managed to surface amazingly early and decided to catch the bus home in the afternoon, as planned. Since then a few more pictures appeared from other people, one of which is posted here.

The weather was surprisingly calm, no snow, no wind, so the house wasn't as cold as we thought it would be. However, firing up the stove was a nightmare. The mild weather, no wind and high humidity simply depressed the air round the chimney so much that we only lit it after a great deal of struggle and once it was lit, we could hardly keep it going. My sister experienced similar problems, and we both resorted to heating by other means eventually.

I finally managed to finish the transcription I was doing for Ana and vowed never again to volunteer for another one. I loved listening to Fred, but his style of speaking is not easy to transcribe, not to mention the hassles of rewinding an MP3 file and switching between it and the Word file with the text in. I thought I might get on with other work now, until yesterday a request from Jordi arrived for an article on the situation and recent events in Hungary, so there is no peace for the wicked, as they say.

We had some chats with the little monster as well and received a video of him playing with our main Christmas present, which was a joy. His entire being radiated not only pleasure and excitement, but an inability of knowing where to look and/or which bit to play with. I am glad it gave and gives him joy, although his parents are not necessarily pleased with the size of the thing. Once it is put together there is no way of getting into the snug, which is a bit of a bother, I have to agree.

We came into town yesterday as I had several engagements, including making truffles with my friend Jutka and attending another concert in the Basilica. The truffle making was tremendous fun and finally we managed to make about 40 truffles, some with boozy cherry pulp and palinka in, the others with walnuts and covered in tempered chocolate. We divided it into two and I even used one of the lovely little boxes Stephen got me for Christmas to present some of them in.

Shame I can't really eat them, but I am sure we will have volunteers for making them disappear. Talking of which, a Canadian friend of mine, Erika, has just come out of the woodwork after having done a vanishing trick. She did come to the first Hash party at Hulk and Haggis's house, but was absent from the subsequent two, including the New Year's Eve one. On both occasions Roy took some of his palinka for Erika to taste, but she didn't turn up. Finally, she rang today and invited us to dinner tomorrow. Yippeeee!!!! I do like her and she only lives 10 minutes walk away, so that should be a hoot!

After the truffles we went to the second Basilica concert, which was pretty good again. I managed to take a picture with my phone, apologies for the bad quality, but that's the best I could do. The music is always amazing. These guys have such mesmerising voices and this time there was a woman singing with them as well as a female opera singer who was doing some of the solos. Magic!

We are in town until Tuesday when I have another concert and the plan afterwards is to get a lift home from an orienteering friend who is coming to start negotiations with the owner of the local estate about having an event there at the end of March. Orienteers amongst you might be wondering how negotiations about land permission etc. were not started earlier, but this is normal for these parts; although in this case they are a result of being let down by the forestry and environmental authorities, who having given verbal permission for months on their original choice of venue, just recently decided against giving it in writing. And permission is not the only issue, the map is nearly 7 years old, which means that even if they get permission, getting the map ready will keep them rather busy in the next month or two. Still, this guy is a marvellous young man and both Roy and I are fond of him, so we offered to put him up and help any way we can. I am sure that given half a chance the event will be a great success. By the way, did I say that it is actually the Extra Long Distance Championships? :-)

Must go now as tummy is beginning to rumble. Taraaa to you all and just for the last time, have a peaceful, prosperous and healthy 2012!!

New Year's Eve

We came into town on Wednesday without any hitch. We went to visit a friend who had an operation and was recuperating at home. Roy also managed to take a bottle of his palinka to her husband and we had a good few hours chatting. We had theatre tickets to Cats that night, so we walked from their place to the theatre. En route I took some pictures of the Christmas illuminations which were quite pretty this year.

Cats was really good. I still remembered the music after 30 years, which was amazing.

During the days we were both on the computer a lot and I read my book and watched TV. I saw Sherlock again and hope to have the second episode soon, as that is the one I missed first time round. In the meantime I managed to order it on Amazon as well, considering they are selling it for £4.99 nowadays.

Klari pointed out a really good concert in April with the Royal Philharmonic and Kristof, so we snazzled the last two reasonably priced tickets on the internet.

Finally, we went to our Hash friends' New Year's Eve party, which was great. Nice people, good atmosphere, music, dancing, food and drink. We have even got a couple of home made Bulgarian fortune cookies forecasting our luck (or lack of it) in 2012 which came up with MONEY for me and JOY for Roy.

Presumably he will be joyful for the riches I will receive especially if I will let some of it go his way!? Of the three parties we have been to in December the first one was probably the best, but this one came pretty close. We saw the New Year in, drank some champagne and came home around 1.30am. We were hoping that the kids might have rung, but no. I'm off to bed and a Very Happy New Year to everyone!