Local News June 10 - 30, 2002 as is appropriate for the silly season, we are bringing your our unimportant news about trivial things around our house.

After our three-month storm of house shopping, moving, and fixing, plus after my trip to Prague and back, we finally reached a "boring" phase, and nothing has been happening. I must say that I started feeling much better, now that I have some time to deal with little, unimportant things; and that's what I want to tell you about.

	Monterey, CA another sunset from Kren's residence

Like about my job and my car. With summer advancing and mercury rising, I developed a dramatic affinity towards those individuals who commit so-called road rage. Till recently I could not see how somebody might want to express their opinion on someone else's driving skills by means of punches or gunfire. So now imagine that it is 100 degrees F (about 37°C) outside and I have been sitting in my car for close to an hour, hopelessly caught in a traffic jam, gasping for any available fresh exhaust fumes pouring in through my window, with a drenched sweat band stretching across my back from shoulders to mid-thigh. I'd love to meet the daredevil who would squeeze past in front of my car and deprive me thus of some twelve feet of road distance. I think I would be capable of pulling him out of his car and single-handedly tear him to tiny shreds.

I often left Cecilia parked in our driveway then -- I would not trust myself, in such a state, to take heed of small details like our brand new washer, dryer, or lawnmower, which I must avoid while backing into the garage. Then, I usually shed clothes on my way through our kitchen, and spent the following forty minutes soaking in our pool. After this calming treatment, my teeth rattling and my mind in a somnambulant haze, I was able to do a minimum amount of house chores, eat my dinner, and turn on my alarm clock, just to wake up in the morning and feel more devastated than when I went to bed -- into another day of clear blue skies (which promises to stay so until late October).

Around that time, we finally started appreciating our pool, originally unwanted. Although we had one in the apartment complex where we used to live, we had used it perhaps once, because bathing in the little blue puddle typically required:

	Pool = most favorite part of our back yard ... no need to mow a lawn here

• finding a bathing suit or a similar attire that would pass for one
• finding rubber slippers
• selecting least favorable towels; ones that can be discolored or stained by chlorine, can be lost, soiled beyond salvage, or torn to pieces
• changing into above mentioned bathing attire, and putting something on top of that, to block openly inspective looks of random mailmen, handymen, or plain tenants hanging out in the hall
• marching across a very long hallway and an entrance tunnel, emerging at the pool, which can be conveniently observed from some thirty living rooms
• reaching water without being hit by a charge from a number water pistols, wielded by dozens of pubescent and pre-pubescent tenants there
• attempting to enjoy swimming in a pool of approx. 15 x 30 feet, in the company of above mentioned herd
• dripping water, rushing back across the whole complex, into our bathroom
• spending the rest of the evening cursing our inevitably wet carpet, covering floors in the whole flat, including parts of the bathroom

Would you not agree that this can't compare with our own pool, where we alone determine its cleanliness, where no one may urinate; a pool which we can hop in whenever we feel like it (one must simply walk out of our living room and take off clothes), where we can swim naked, for nobody can see us from anywhere. Our maintenance, after a few weeks of desperation, shrunk into a need of occasional vacuuming (= to apply hoses and release a robot) and a periodical adding of a chlorine tablet into a float. Since mid May, it has been really hot here, and so the two of us seem to be the only people who spend some time in their back yard. I don't blame anyone, as our neighbors don't have pools and the heat is deadly even in shade. Everybody keeps cool inside.

	Jellyfish are terribly hard to photograph for they keep wiggling and their tank is understandably dark to make them stand out.

Unfortunately even the pool could not improve my everyday nervous breakdown from the heat and the commute stress. And so I changed my original opinion and had an air conditioning put in Cecilia, a thing I regarded, a year and half back, only a gadget for weaklings. Well, eighteen months ago, I was unemployed and could pick times and places to travel -- nothing would make me spend 70-80 minutes daily in my car, while temperatures are well over eighty and desert-grade sun beats down on everything. I also negotiated for shrinking my lunch break to half hour, so I may come home earlier. Traffic stays the same miserable mess, but I manage a lot at home in that extra half hour.

	Attention! VIDEO By clicking on the picture, you download a Quicktime video of a swimming jellyfish (almost  1 MB).

With our house, our desire for "outdoors" diminished. While we lived in a dark apartment, facing north, I seemed unbearable not to run out into nature on a weekend. Now that we surrounded ourselves with own flowers and sunshine and back and front yards and a pool, a weekend spent at home, swimming, reading books and browsing the net appears highly desirable. Perhaps that allowed me to eventually put together a few articles, and Sid helped me post them, adding graphics. It's about my experience with America, somewhat outside the scope of these journals, and so I kept it separate.

Another school year ended with mid-June; Kren's had sent, with a relief, their water sprite to England (Madeleine dyed her hair green, as well as a bathroom and half of their house, the other day). Being their good friends, we did not hesitate and visited with them in Monterey -- no way they could relax and enjoy a carefree weekend, after all those years!!!

	Guaya looks like a ship out of 19th Century - but is only a fraction of that age

Monterey Aquarium opened a new exposition called "Jellies: Living Art", which we were very eager to see. Jellyfish are beautiful creatures, elegant, noble, fragile, dangerous... we spent about ninety minutes with them, and then had a Wiener Schnitzel dinner with Krens at an Austrian restaurant.

	Sometimes (naturally only for a moment!) I let my husband hold the rudder...

And to compensate for our nutritional sins of that evening, we had prescribed ourselves a morning walk on the Monterey beach, all the way to the city. It's quite a distance, but there was a reward. Buoue Escuel a Guaya - a beautiful training three-master of Ecuadorian navy - was anchored at the Municipal Wharf. Due to some occasion it was freely accessible to the public. It was a lot of fun. Sailors were throwing fiery looks and judging by behavior of ladies there, those looks were not without effect. I felt transferred 150 years back in time, to a port where an arrival of any great ship meant entertainment for the whole region. Unbelievable crowds pushed on, off, and around the decks -- people in their best clothes, with an air of an international celebration, crawled all over the bridge, took pictures of themselves behind a rudder, treading cautiously over a raised, smoothly scrubbed board. Although the port was rather well sheltered, Guaya rocked frighteningly. The combination of the convex board and a very low railing gave the impression that out on the open ocean, the proverbial "man overboard" may get unpleasantly personal. Sid growled about the crowds, but I tremendously enjoyed this unexpected attraction with chivalrous, uniformed cadets.

The last important affair of recent days was my visit to an optometrist. I don't see very well, and I've known that since I was little; two years ago I found out that the only time it bothers me is when I drive, and I got myself, before moving to America, a pair of glasses. A Czech optometrist then declared, that I have a weak right eye and I would never see well with it; she gave me a prescription of half D for both eyes. I bought my glasses and lived happily with them for two years, excited to be able to reliably decipher those large highway signs. Recently, I reckoned it was time to have my eyes checked again, and so I trotted into an optometrist's office here. Instead of an old man (I somehow always expect all optometrists to look like white haired scholars), a young lady listened carefully, then spent about an hour checking all kinds of lenses and had me read many rows of letter over and over. Eventually she said that it seemed that my right eye was a lot more myopic (2.5 D) and that I should not get startled -- she would affix another lens to my glasses, but she does not know, what it would do with me, as my brain trained itself to ignore any image coming from my right eye; I could see double, have a sense of vertigo, or get sick. I disappointed her. I was not getting sick; instead, the world around me gained on colorfulness, depth, perspective. So, maybe, I could now, after so many years, experience even more beauty.

Copyright © 2002-2005 by Carol & Sid Paral. All rights reserved.