Sun 03.Feb.2013
Rhodes, Greece
The last three days or so ... not really spring yet, no t-shirt temperatures,
but still ... the wind no longer bites, only pushes ... the sun stays up a bit longer,
the afternoon has a faint hint of the fragrance of blossoms to come.
This is not yet Spring, not even a foretaste - but a definite hint that it is on the way.
Mind you, today was an ordinary winter day again, albeit a mild one as winter goes.
Greece must have an inventory tax coming up, just like at home. Consumer electronics
prices are way down recently, to the point where this old dinosaur - c'est moi - actually
bought his first smart phone this week. 'Tis my second cell phone ever, the first having been
in the early 2000's.
So I've entertained myself for a couple of days, learning how to use the thing. People
have been very helpful, even if they feel like they they might as well be teaching me
how to walk and tie my shoes. The biggest hassle so far: the small size, about two
thirds the dimensions of a full-sized phone like an iphone. It is hard to hold the
little sucker without inadvertantly hitting some control.
Sometimes even backing up your data isn't enough. I backed up my Table of Contents
page for these posts, before I started testing ideas to make it clearer and easier
to navigate. The
first round of ideas resulted in a garish mish-mash. Uploading the result to test it
realistically didn't help; Time to restore and try again.
Somehow instead of restoring my backed up page, I clobbered it. Oops!
The upshot was eight hours of tedious hand-editing. The silver lining is that the
result really is better looking and more clearly organized than the original.
My great-hearted host just now hit jackpot on the house muzak: Estimated Prophet!
Only the studio album version, but that was one of the the better studio albums, and there
are too many mainstream customers here on this Saturday night for any serious live GD music.
Thanks, George!
First-person view of a swinging camera in Sophokleous Square.
Sometime English translations miss the subtlties. I think this sign must mean
something more like Any day to Lindos. At any rate, Captain Mike has been
parked right there in Mandraki Harbor every day that I have been here.
If this were a travel guide or a textbook, I should have included the larger image
showing the context of this fan-in-a-shed and the plastic-covered storage box nearby - perhaps
instead of the incoherent blurred motion photo above.
But this is just a vicarious travelling photo blog; that context photo was a boring picture,
and it didn't make the cut.
And so, as Greece sinks into the sepia, we hope we remember to return Stanford Radiology's
call on Monday,
and we hope that this foreshadowing of Spring makes its way north to Paris
before I arrive there in a couple more weeks..
Happy February to all the folks in California, and good wishes for surviving February
to everybody else! Survive Superbowl weekend too! It is one of the things that makes me
glad to be on an island in Greece today.