Back in snowville

Sunday when I last posted I went off in the evening to a lovely nostalgic theatre performance with music. One of my favourite actors did some singing and dreaming about the old days. I was on my own, which actually was fine. Monday we were back in the Record Office where we managed to copy quite a few documents from my ancestors legal and other affairs and order up a few more for next time. Tuesday I had an appointment with my homeopath and she came up with a few concerns, but hopefully not too serious. I am back on probiotics and 1 litre of lapacho tea a day, so I think I'm OK.

In the evening I went to the Opera with Andor and Kati. It was the first time that they had Wagner on ever since I have had this subscription ticket. The Flying Dutchman is a very early opera from Wagner and I must admit it was a lot less heavy than most of his other operas. We had to sit still for 2 and half hours as they played it in one go. Andor was seriously worried about his bladder, but eventually he survived as well. With me it is just my joints that suffer when I can hardly move for this long a time.

Wednesday was spent mostly on the computer, packing and in another theatre in the evening. It was Tony Kushner's Angels in America, which has been sold out for months and we could only get the tickets way back at the beginning of December queueing early in the morning by freezing nearly to death outside. Not all of my friends liked it, but I think all those that understood it were impressed by both the handling of the social and political problems in the States around the AIDS crisis and many other aspects of modern life. The direction and the acting were superb, I am glad I went. On Thursday I managed to squeeze in a quick appointment with my rheumatologist before we caught the bus to the village.

The countryside was beautifully white, but the house was not too cold. I went and lit the stove immediately after feeding the birds. They took a while to find their way back to us, but within 24 hours they were back in large numbers. Blue Tit, Great Tit, Coal Tit, Gold Finch, Chaffinch, Hawfinch, Green Finch, Nuthatch and one or two others who I have not managed to identify yet. Other than the bowls full of sunflower seeds, I have put up a big piece of speck fat as well as two balls of suet with seeds in it. It is such a joy watching them mobbing the food and unfortunately in the case of the goldfinch - each other. Argumentative and agressive the gold finches are, which is a shame, because the rest of them are ever so sweet and friendly.

Since we have got back the weather had been pretty perishing. No more snow, but so cold that the lot that had fallen a week and a bit ago is still everywhere. Roy managed to catch one of the locals who was in need of a sub and made him chop some logs for it. He was happy and so was I as I don't think Roy is strong enough for axe work any more. There is a fair amount of work still on the computer, and whenever I can get away from all that, I currently escape to one of my favourite crime writers, Lynda la Plante. I have never seen the television version of The Red Dahlia, which is good, because in my experience the book is always better than the TV adaptation, but if I feel like watching it after I finished the book I can always get it on DVD.

And finally today I managed a little chat with my little monster from across the seas. As you can see he was packing for a trip up to Ottawa where his mother is running in The Hyperthermic Half Marathon tomorrow. The weather forecast is for -16 Celsius, so I hope she will wrap up well.

Grandchildren

Recently I got a few really nice pictures of my two grandsons, so I thought I would devote an entire blog entry to the two little monsters. Elian is over 7 months old now and he is developing into an irresistible little charmer. Permanent smile on his face, cute looks and generally very lovely.

Callum, who is now 3 and half, is still a right little tearaway. Watching him on Skype haring around their flat this afternoon I had a good laugh at the way his father described him: "Callum came with an ON and an OFF button. However, the intermediate settings are missing!" Spot on!

Another busy week

On Friday we came into town and since then life had been one never ending bit of fun. First, however, we managed to finally order and pay for my clubcard for the baths which will entitle me to half price entry. The queue seemed a bit long when we arrived, but it was dealt with quite quickly eventually. Hopefully it should be done in two weeks, as promised, but who knows? During the weekend the weather was not particularly nice, so we stayed indoors catching up with stuff.

On Sunday I went to one of my piano recitals at the National Concert Hall in the Palace of Arts for a concert given by a phenomenal young pianist by the name of David Fray. He - in spite of the sound of his name being ever so English - is French. He played Bach: two toccatas and two partitas, both of which he rendered with mastery belying his tender age of about 25. That was indeed magical and in the interval the girls and I tried to finalise the date and program of the next country weekend for ourselves to be spent with eating, drinking, hiking and listening to classical music. It is now fixed for 15th-17th February and the attendees are: Klari, Jutka, Bozsa, Annus and Jozsi. The latter friend being of the male persuasion it won't be a girls only weekend, like last time, but it will still be fun.

Monday was an arduous, long, but very productive day. Roy and I have been involved with an orienteering friend's attempts at researching the life and art of the father of Hungarian orienteering, Henrik Ripszam, who was an exciting painter, sculptor and all round artistic, as well as sporty, bod. He lived from the early 1930's until his death in 1976 in England and Roy's family history research skills have unearthed plenty of detail on his life for the coming publication. On Monday the writer of the book, Roy and myself travelled to visit Henrik Ripszam's great nephew to interview him and perhaps view a few pieces of art he still has. The old man was a really lovely person with a memory which flitted here and there, got slightly confused in places, but was also coming up with gems now and again. Like when the writer of the book showed him some old photos of Henrik Ripszam's life from a different source and he pointed to the young man at the piano: "That's me tickling the ivories there!"

We saw and took photographs of a few artefacts, one of which - a self portrait - is likely to end up on the front cover of the book. Roy made up a folder of all his researches and gave him a copy, which he was quite pleased with. After returning to town I managed to visit my doctor for some repeat prescriptions, which were long overdue, threatening to making me run right out of my pills. On Tuesday we visited the City Archives to submit requests for the sight of quite a few documents. The bureacracy in these parts is still horrendous, but at least they let you see them. The process included: 1.put the details, fond numbers, date and anything else relevant on a form and then 2.fill out a long piece of card with the same details, so when they remove the file from the shelf they can replace it with the card. I appreciate that that must have been the method of marking where files have been removed from for decades, if not centuries, but why is it my job to write up the gap card? Why can't they do that? So filling in these forms and cards took hours, but finally we could get on the computer to see those which they told us not to bother to request, because they are on the computer. Well, they might be, but they could only be viewed if they could find them. So, we will have to request them next time. We are due back there next Monday to receive the files, view and/or copy them and then put in more requests for further ones. Fun, isn't it? Especially this toing and froing, due to them taking 3 days to produce any document requested.

Yesterday I went geocaching with Andor. Provided we are credited the one cache we couldn't find, we would have increased our tally by 8 caches yesterday. And even if they don't, a total of 7 caches is quite respectable, not to mention the fact that we had a lot of fun while doing it. We forgot to set the GPS's total distance funcion, so we don't know how much we walked, but it was quite a few miles I think. You might be interested about these two dogs in the photo: well they had nothing to do with the caching, but I took the picture due to my fascination with the sculptures while waiting for Andor who was quite uncharacteristically late. The dogs are made of pieces of wood about 2 inches, by 2 inches, by a foot approximately. I loved them. They were supposed to be the guards to the gate to hell a la Dante and they were quite sinister in the bad light of the morning.

Later the sun came out and it was getting warmer, but even that didn't help when we couldn't find our very first cache amongst a thousand padlocks as seen in the picture. I rang the owner and she kindly told me the password and I think she ought to go and sort her padlocks out because judging by the comments on the cache web page, nobody had found it for quite a while.

The next one was a 5 part virtual which gave us a pleasant downtown amble, followed by a 4 part multi, which gave me a lot of pleasure. It was put out by a friend of mine who is ill at the moment, so I will have to congratulate him on how clever it was and how many interesting places it took us to. It might cheer him up in his sickbed. The two photos above represent the two parts of a brilliant piece of street sculpture, representing the characters in a book whose writer was the subject of the cache. The three kids are playing marbles and the two standing ones are plotting to pinch their marbles. They are made of bronze and are absolutely spot on. That is exactly how I ever imagined these characters from this particular book. If you can lay your hands on a copy the title is "The Boys from Pal Street" by Ferenc Molnar. Worth a read!

In the evening I went to see The Sunshine Boys with my friends and enjoyed it tremendously. One of the leads was played by the husband of one of my old university friends (the guy on the right) and he was jolly good. Fighting each other and the onset of old age gave both of the lead actors a chance to shine. Very funny but poignant too. Today we are staying indoors again. Lots of correspondence, catching up with e-mails and other stuff is on the cards.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

It's been 10 days since my last post, not to mention that it was last year! Lots of things have happened since, but now it seems like they were not very memorable. The New Year's Eve party went off very well, the atmosphere was nice (unlike the last time I spent a New Year's Eve there), we had good food, drink, dancing, television watching, board games etc., etc. Even Roy was happy, and that is something as he is not usually a party animal. New Year's day we veged out in the flat and then caught the bus on the 2nd to the village. Originally the plan was to journey to the offices of the baths to purchase (or at least order) the much advertised, all singing all dancing new clubcard which enables you to visit the baths at half price, but my precautionary telephone call revealed that due to "technical difficulties" the card is not yet available and I was advised to try again in a week. :-(

Thankfully no great disaster awaited us in the village, so we set about firing up the stove, make a cup of tea and turn on the computers. Seems to be a ritual nowadays. I can't imagine how we managed in the past when we had to share a computer!!? In the evening we watched Death and the Divas, which was good, although I'm beginning to tire of Midsomer Murders: no particular complaint, just a sort of tiredness one usually gets after this many years of a format that has not changed much in all those years. Thursday was not a good day. We had some news that upset us both and while I don't really want to go into details, I must admit that the real reason for my upset (I don't know about Roy) was that I brought it all upon myself, which is never a good feeling. I proceeded then to agonise about a solution which I felt had to be there, but doubts, ignorance and fears were not pointing me forward. I ended up with very little sleep, usually going to sleep in the evening due to exhaustion, but then waking up in the night and struggling with my demons. Finally, five whole days later Roy came up with a solution. He remembered that I had an old friend and comrade who worked in a field that could prove useful and urged me to give him a ring. He proved to be an absolute godsend. Practical, extremely helpful, non-judgemental - in other words a true friend. And I haven't talked to him for 6 or 7 years. The solution is on its way. I am not saying that I don't still feel pretty bad about the whole thing, but now - hopefully - I should be able to sleep at night.

In the depth of the winter the pottery stove is the absolute focal point of the house. When we are in the village for any length of time it attains such a permanent heat that its consumption of logs goes right down, so it is not only providing fantastic warmth, atmosphere and scent of burning wood, it is also economical in the extreme. Unfortunately, our lifestyle is such that frequently we go away, into town or even further, so this economy is not always exploited to its full, as it is allowed to cool down and then has to be brought up to that temperature time and time again on our return. Still, I am the resident pyromaniac, so lighting and nursing it is my job. That and feeding the birds. Both jobs I absolutely love and never have to be reminded to do. Well, almost never!!

As you can see from these photos the snows have returned. The village really has a chocolate box feel with snow on it, even though today's fall was no more than an inch, if that. Today I have to carry on with my myriad of jobs, in the house, on the computer and occasionally outside. Yesterday I managed to make a start on a lot of phoning around I needed to do, including sorting the question of a lost theatre ticket (hopefully it is done), then agreeing on the method of transport and departure time of next Monday's trip to see an old man with a lot of artefacts of an artist I am assisting somebody to write a book about, then Roy's sister Pamela rang and she needed some information, advice and some help to organise her trip to the UK next month, so there is always something to be getting on with. Today I have further bits of paperwork and organisational work to do as well as putting in a couple of hours on the family history marriage register transcription project I am a volunteer on. That will have to fit round the fire, the birds and, of course, the major organisational task of getting together all the information and papers to solve the major crisis I have written about above. No peace for the wicked (and I'm very wicked!!), so tara for now.

The Year is drawing to its close

The snow came in fits and starts, but it did stay until Boxing Day, which was nice. The whole village has such a magical feeling when its white. Good job we bought that 20kg sack of sunflower seeds, as the birdies have been very, very hungry this winter. The colder it gets the more food they need to survive. We added a chunk of speck fat to their diet, especially for times when we are not around to tie them over until we get home and fill the bowls with seeds. We have also started giving them walnuts, which we have still several sacks full from 2011 (2012 having been a zero walnut year), and which are going a bit too old now. We just bang on the walnuts and put it in the bowl complete with shells. They are so thorough, that there is not a morsel left by the time we look to see if we need to put out more.

Christmas Day was very quiet. We had a little chat with the family in St. Catharines near Niagara, but other than that it was just us. Nelly was in and out over the holiday period and in fact she did show me some old family photos, one of which I have never seen before and she gave it to me. It showed me on my Father's lap by the cottage on Roman Shore when I was about 4 years old.

Lots of people asked me how it is to spend Christmas just the two of us. I suppose, it can be a little bit lonely and you can miss the family, especially since we have grandchildren. But this, just as much as many other things in life, depend on your attitude. On whether you think the glass is half empty or half full. We try to see the positive in everything and that makes it easier. Yes, I wished I could see the little ones opening their presents, but we could also see the upside of this isolation: no fuss, no cooking for a week, no expensive decorations and the usual hysteria. Our dinner was in tune with this philosophy: salmon for me, fillet steak for Roy with a nice lot of vegetables and English cider for bubbly. Yum, yum!!

We came into town on 27th. I had my two remaining sessions in the thermal baths, which were nice. The weather cheered up a bit, no wind, no snow and I managed to spend a lot of time in the outer pools where the massage jets come out of the sides. That is so good for my lower back, it is therapy itself. One day we went to the Natural Science Museum where we saw a load of beautiful crystals, dinosaurs, mammoths and a special exhibition of nature photographs. Some of them were superb, almost as good as those my beloved Bence Mate takes. There were three photos by him too, but I have already known those, on account of having bought his book.

I have also returned to my outstanding Reginald Hill books which are still to be read. I set out to read all Dalziel and Pascoe stories and there were 8 which I have not got round to a year or two ago. I have now read another two with 6 more to go. I absolutely love Hill's style, wit, clever characterisations and storylines, but most of all his mastery of the English language and his sense of humour and fun. His turn of phrase, use of the English language and depth of knowledge are good enough for "serious" literature, but I'm glad he turned out dozens of these crime novels, which are probably the best of the genre I have ever read.

Finally, yesterday and today we visited the Jewish Cemetery to see if we can find Berta Brull's grave. Yesterday it was lovely and sunny and we really felt like going, but the cemetery was closed. As it happens, they are closed every Saturday. Today the sun was barely out and towards the end it got perishingly cold, but finally we found her grave. It was in parcel 33, row 1, grave 40. Or so we thought from the internet archive we found it in. However, the sign when we got there confused us no end. They were pointing the wrong way, rows and grave numbers were mixed up etc., etc. Finally we did find her grave, which was in row one (implying something special) but it was probably the plainest gravestone I have ever seen, pointing to the fact that she must have been alone and poor when she died. However, this is all conjecture and we still don't know much about her, other than she was one of two sisters that Adele Diosy had, who was the muse and famous lover of Endre Ady, great poet and journalist in the early years of the XXth century. I am related to her in a roundabout way as her mother was the sister of my paternal great grandmother.

Tomorrow we are invited to a New Year's Eve party at the Nemeshazis. We hope we will be able to stay awake, which is never assured nowadays. I suppose we will have to have a daytime nap to make sure we don't disgrace ourselves. Back to the village on the 2nd. HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL IN THE MEANTIME!!

Two parties and a busy Saturday

As mentioned in the previous post in the planning stages, we travelled in to town on Friday to a gettogether at a friend's house. It wasn't really a Christmas party, more like a reminiscing about our trip to Spain and Italy at the beginning of November. Whenever we have gone together anywhere in this group we always tried to get together to look at and share our photos and videos. Never, ever did we have a successful evening doing that - until now. It was really nice to have a lovely 4 or 5 hours eating, drinking, chatting and looking at each others photos and videos. We didn't actually get round to my photos, but everybody watched my Flip videos with great interest after I coupled the Flip camera directly into the USB port in the back of Laci's brand new all singing all dancing television set. (I WANT ONE!!!)

Just in case you're wondering what this gorgeous photo is doing here, I will explain: in all that photo and video watching I took no photographs on the night, so this gets inserted just for your delectation instead. It came from Bernard Wilson, an old friend, who at the age about 80 (roughly) went on a long trip with his grandson to Australia and New Zealand. Very brave, I thought, but what a scenery. I always wanted to go to NZ, precisely for these vistas. This is Lake Tekapo on South Island, and heavenly it is too.

This little robin from an old Christmas card got scanned and attached to my festive greetings to my friends on Facebook. Isn't he/she/it(?) cute? To return to my last few days: another interesting event was receiving two invitations for New Year's Eve. One from Robert, where we have never been in the winter before and to the Nemeshazis, where we have been before. Serious dilemma this is, especially for Roy. He doesn't want to drive, so we would have to go by train to Robert's, that would mitigate in favour of the other party. On the other hand, a visit to Robert's would be much more exciting, so the jury is still out, although my choice is Robert's without a doubt. The decision, therefore, will be Roy's.

En route to the bus station on Friday we visited my mum's favourite market. We now call it the Crazy Market, as after a century of it being a simple, open air fruit and vegetable market, about 10 years ago they built an ultramodern multicoloured building seriously resembling a pirate ship. It had grown on us since and we love it now, not to mention the fact that whatever it looks like, the product and services it offers had never been less than superb. I got a massive piece of fresh salmon for my Christmas dinner and a whole (albeit small) fillet of beef for Roy. We caught the bus in plenty of time and arrived back home in good time for the village Christmas party.

We took Nelly and found a seat somewhere in the back. The program was very slow getting going, but finally with almost a half hour delay it was on its way. They started with the Nativity Play performed by the kindergarten children. It was very sweet, if somewhat shambolic at times. After that we were entertained by several groups and individuals either singing or dancing. I enjoyed all of it, but Nelly was getting a bit restless. In her view as the alcohol level in some of the guys was getting higher, the atmosphere was less and less to her liking. Roy seemed to enjoy himself chatting to his mates whom he hardly ever sees now since the demise of the pub. Finally, we did depart a good two hours after arriving, even though there was still no sign of the dinner promised. As both Nelly and I are vegetarians, I don't think we could have eaten it anyway. It was still a lovely evening and we were seen to take part, which was the most important thing I think.

Having safely survived the projected end of the world, we woke to what turned out to be an endlessly busy Saturday. Lighting the fire, having breakfast, feeding the birds, chopping up and freezing the surplus of the steak and the salmon for Christmas Day, then going in and fetching the phone which had the restrictions taken off it and do last minute food shopping. On the way home I had a bit of a shock when I found the damned phone didn't work. Considering that it is a 40 mile round trip we didn't feel like going back. As it happens, once at home I took the phone apart, put it together again and it worked. The problem was obviously with the sloppy work of the girl behind the desk by not putting the SIM card in properly. Later in the afternoon we had a chat with Callum on Skype, or more like with his father, as the little devil was not exactly in a communicative mood. Alex and I were discussing our summer plans and it looks that we might not only meet up prior to World School in Greece this year, but that Roy and I would join him there afterwards. While the 100+ decibel coming from the direction of Callum didn't help, we sorted as much as we could this early and I am already looking forward to next summer. It will be here in a jiffy while you're not looking. At least that is my experience if the past is anyting to go by. In the meantime my favourite little Canadian monster climbed into a large box and pulled the opening closed on himself. I don't think he was sulking, more like imitating the cat.

Today I wanted to prune the roses on the Famhouse side, because when I was doing the pruning earlier in the month, there were still dozens of blooms on them and I didn't have the heart to cut them off. Since then, of course, freezing weather came and I never felt like getting out in it. Should be done soon, I'm afraid. Not today, though, as it is snowing currently and I am much happier in here than out there!! There is also a fair amount of work to be done on the computer. I have translated a really good article today and should write my own commentary on it before sending it up to the Centre to put it on the web site. Mind you, there is no urgency as they have just closed up for Christmas and will not be back until the 7th of January. I should also get back to the MACSE transcription, which has been around for months and which I haven't even looked at for longer than that. Must dash! Talk to you in the New Year!

Thaw, birds and a crazy fridge/freezer

Had my last session with Balazs in the baths, had good chat with my friends in the red corner where we managed to chase away a neofascist old geezer. Roy came to pick me up and we got going. We visited a pharmacy en route to get my pills, then an agricultural shop to purchase a large bag of sunflower seeds to feed the birds. We did an almighty great food shop in Tesco, then deposited my old telephone at the guy who I bought it from to get the restrictions off it. On arrival home we walked in gingerly, remembering the disaster that awaited us after three weeks away back in February. This time we were only away for a fortnight, but we were full of worry, considering the temperatues had plummeted in the meantime. The only problem we found was the fridge/freezer which had stopped working. In a total panic (we had bought lots of frozen stuff) we started emptying the fridge/freezer and packing its contents and all the shopping into the considerably smaller fridge in the Bunkhouse. This gave us a chance to look over the contents for defrosted and/or too old stuff and we did indeed chuck a good few bits away. As it happens, just after we did all that the errant machine had started working again. It is back to its bad habit of singing, but at least it is still working.

The weather stayed cold for a day or two, but then started thawing, which always creates a dirty, untidy and miserable looking countryside. I don't like it. The added twist, however, this time was frozen rain on Saturday, which made us really happy that we came down on Friday, avoiding the lethal roads frozen rain usually produces. The birds have obviously kept an eye out for us, because as soon as we filled their bowls they were back in numbers. This time we not only put out the sunflower seeds we bought, but started giving them the old walnuts, which are now too old to eat and they loved that too. The picture above is that of the first hawfinch I saw this year.

These two little tits were happily eating when I snapped them, it is a shame that I can only photograph them from inside the house, otherwise they fly away as soon as they spot me. This way with the light behind them they end up rather dark. We got a bill in the post which showed that there was a previous bill we didn't pay. I couldn't remember receiving it. Finally I worked out that it was delivered to 52 and we did find it sopping wet from three months ago. There was a lot of work on the computer, translating and other stuff. Finally I also got round to getting really acquainted with my smartphone and am now quite proficient in its use. I downloaded Facebook and Skype onto it, the only thing I can't find is a GPS, so it probably hasn't got one.

This weekend past we managed to see Callum whom we haven't seen for ages. He is beginning to show traits of his mother, as he put all his cars and trucks in neat rows in the snug. He then went onto putting together two puzzles and even said hallo to me. He is still very cheeky, but growing up nicely.

We are invited to a gettogether at the Nemeshazis on Thursday, so we will go in by bus. My old phone, which was not supposed to have been done until after Christmas, had been done, so we'll have to somehow organise picking that up as well. Perhaps a bit of food shopping would not come amiss either, but Roy wants to get back for the village Christmas party, which starts at 5pm on Friday.