Family History

Yesterday we went back to the old Jewish Cemetery in Salgotarjani ut because the caretaker there arranged for my great-great-grandmother's grave stone to be placed back on its plinth from which vandals some decades ago pushed it to the ground. Now, you can see how nice it looks and how substantial it is - made of Swedish granite.

Today, as the sun shone we went walkabouts and as Roy came too it had to be family history related. We live in the 7th district and the more downtown part of our district used to house the Jewish Ghetto and a couple of ancestors of mine lived quite close to the Synagogue. We intended to photograph those two blocks, but ended up on an interesting historical walk.

This area is being gentrified at the moment, but the process has slowed down due to the credit crunch. It has some very modern, new blocks of luxury apartments and hotels, mixed up with renovated lovely old buildings as well as near derelict, neglected and dilapidated ones.

There is an old set of blocks called "Gozsdu Court" named after the Romanian business man who promoted their erection over a 100 years ago. It was in a bad state and some developer decided to turn it into luxury apartments and shops. The idea was great, the timing less so. It is nicely done, but is very empty due to very few of the units having been sold. Still, I am glad it was not allowed to fall down.

In another place we found that after the last bit of the Ghetto wall was demolished in 2006, some conservationists have rebuilt it this year as a memorial to those that perished there. The contrast with the luxury block behind was disturbing.

The photos in order:

1. The grave stone

2. An ornamental door panel nearby

3. The main frontage of Gozsdu Court

4. The back of a slum visible from one of the fancy courtyards of Gozsdu Court

5. A memorial tablet in the Ghetto
6. The rebuilt bit of the Ghetto Wall

7. The map of the Ghetto

Definitely spring!!

Spring Cup (Hungarian style) on the sand dunes, amidst lots of ups and downs, vague vegetation boundaries, some juniper and generally good courses. As most people are building up to the extra long championships at the moment, all events have rather long courses. The oldest women's course was W50, so I was out for quite a while. As you can see, apart from the stupidity of the first control (mostly caused by the map being quite old), I did it quite well. Without that mistake I would have been 3rd, but even 4th is not bad considering that the first 3 were somewhere between 10-12 years younger than me and I was only 2 and half minutes from 3rd. The day otherwise was really lovely. The temperature was in the 20's, almost too warm to run around. We forgot the camping chairs so we had to lie around on the ground sunning ourselves.

Indoors in BP time was yet again spent getting extremely frustrated with computers. The one that expired is still dead, but now the one we brought in to replace it is also playing silly buggers. It has always been a very unstable machine, which I wrote down to the fact that it was an early Vista before the bugs (at least some of them) have been ironed out. I keep doing system restore on it, but it doesn't like updates, takes serious exception to a variety of peripherals and is useless on drivers. Either all the ones it has are corrupted or it cannot access them on the net. Who knows? Upshot of all this is that we can't use Skype on it for it will not accept either the Skype phone or the microphone we bought, neither can we use FreeCall for the same reason. It refuses to work with the existing printer and when we tried to download the driver the whole operating system went unstable. Aaaahhhhhhhhh!! May Microsoft and all its employees (especially the programmers) burn in eternal hellfire AMEN!!!!

Tomorrow's target is to get all the roses pruned. Something really peculiar happened to them this year. I know it was a cold winter, but we must have been very unlucky with icy winds or they were especially exposed, because a lot of them have gone completely dead and black. I hope I can cut them back to living parts, especially that I put big mounds of peat round their bases to protect them. We'll see!

Spring?

We're back in the village and had so far two gorgeous sunny days with temperatures around 20 degrees Celsius in the sun. As I could download my pictures from my phone here, there are a few attached to this post.

Stephen loves the big market and we had a really good shop there this time. He bought strange vegetables for Lucy, a few bottles of booze, honey and a few other goodies.

En route back home we came via Hatvan and met up with Nelly to do some market and Tesco shopping. We all bought some lovely pansies: Nelly for Szuszi's grave, we just to put them into boxes. I don't think I mentioned Szuszi's demise before. He was 11 and half, which is not a bad age for such a large dog. His grave shows how big he was, but now Nelly has a shrine, which should help her to overcome the grief.

The good news around here are that I managed to defrag the latest laptop, which I have never done before in its 2 years of life, therefore it took nearly 8 hours to do it. Now it is quite a lot faster and from now on I will remember to leave it on every Tuesday evening so that the scheduled defrag in the early hours of Wednesday morning can take place. On the other hand, the bad news is that we cannot find the XP CD that came with the oldest laptop, so that might not be revivable. It might turn up yet, but I am not upsetting myself over it. Currently the weather is so nice that I went out and read some Maureen Lipman on the bench outside in strong sunshine, which was lovely. We will probably go back to town tomorrow, but should be back sometime next week. Next post probably then.

Congratulations!!!

Some lovely good news for once: Stephen and Lucy have announced that they are getting married in September 2010. We are all extatic and hope that they will both be very happy. Those of you that know some details of Stephen's last few years must realise how happy Roy and I are at seeing them so genuinely happy. We only said recently that we have never before seen him with such ear to ear beaming smiles in every photo as he published regularly on Facebook, especially when accompanied by Lucy.

WE WISH THEM BOTH EVERY HAPPINESS LIFE CAN THROW AT THEM!! xxx

In Memoriam Aranka Molnar

My mother would be a hundred years old today. In another 5 weeks it will be 30 years since her death. It seems both like it was yesterday and a whole lifetime ago. The memory is still pretty sharp, but it certainly was in another era. Both my kids are heading towards middle age, I am now a grandmother myself, not to mention a few changes of career, location etc. since. Time rushes past you at such a rate you never have time to appreciate it.

Now on more recent events: the Grand Prix season is back. Spring is trying to arrive, although there has been 6 inches of snow in some parts of the country this week, fortunately not around here. Our first guest of the summer is booked in for definite and another one is in the process of booking his flight. Both in June. So life is getting back to normal.

RIP first Dell laptop

No piccies this time because I don't want to load the software for downloading photos from my phone into this machine. As the title might have suggested one of our laptops has come to the end of its useful life. The fault is entirely mine as I didn't look after it as well as I could have. I have put enormous photo and video files on it and failed to defragment the hard disc often enough to prevent a mess in the operating system. Stephen, who was over for 48 hours doing a gig and visiting us kindly offered to help speed it up a bit and after hours and hours of deleting and saving files to an external drive and degragmenting it about 20 times, it failed to boot up this morning. That is the end. If I can find the XP CD that came with it I might try to reinstall the operating system, but if the fault is in the hardware, then probably the poor thing will go to its maker in the sky. It lived less than 5 years, but that is how Bill Gates is still the richest (or possibly the second richest) man on the planet.

Currently I am on the netbook, which is only 6 months old and is delightfully free of junk on its hard drive, hence my reluctance to load onto it the Nokia software for downloading photos. I think this one should be kept for just travelling with, for communicating with others and as a fall back option, like now. Mind you, even this one was a bit funny yesterday. I tried to play Lexulous on Facebook on it and it wouldn't load it. I suspected that Facebook has taken exception to its tiny screen, which happens in Yahoo as well, but this morning Facebook was back to normal and Lexulous loaded fine. So that was obviously one of the millions of bugs Facebook has, just as they prepare to charge for using it. Marvellous, isn't it?

Our war with things electrical started yesterday morning by me tripping the main meter and losing the entire circuit to all the power points everywhere except in the kitchen. We turned it back on but the circuit breaker for that particular part was not down, so we were a bit lost for ideas. Until, that is, Roy (resident clever clog) thought of turning it off and back on again. That works like a charm every time, whatever gadget you apply that primitive method to. Great!

We have decided to stay put for the long weekend, partly because of the weather, partly because of East Enders, but mostly because of the start of the Grand Prix season. I can't wait. This should really be fascinating to see. So many good drivers in potentially good cars, I have a feeling that 2010 will live up to its billing.

By the way, Stephen's gig was very good. I have spoken to a Canadian friend yesterday who said that her friend, who has never seen Stephen before, needed a change of underware due to severe giggling. Unfortunately the world wide economic crisis has badly affected all the expats and attendance was severely down on previous years. Still, it was very good and he managed to sell a few DVD's as well.

Andor caught some lurgy from one of his grandchildren, so I haven't seen him lately, but we had a good session at the Nemeshazis with Jutka, catching up on the last couple of months and that was good. Last Sunday, when the weather was good I even managed to drag Roy out for a walk in the forested hills of Buda, which needs a big mark in the calendar. The ground was still frozen, but it was quite nice and sunny. Must do it more often.

Callum's latest hits

I know this is boring, but I can't resist posting his latest pictures every time they appear on FB. Roy and I were wondering what his final eye colour is. With a blue eyed father and brown eyed mother he seems to have acquired dark grey eyes. Or am I not seeing colours clearly?