dress up day(128/365b)

silly dress up day

first all like soccer players, where they borrowed brian's socks to look "really" like "socker" players

the hurri kane

then as some kind of king

it was felix sewing projects... we made a cape, we sewed his car seat back together. and we wrote invitations to the entire kindergarten for a soccer game that will happen in our backyard, boys against girls. i am hoping he forgets all about it or changes his mind before kindergarten starts back up again.

if i were king

complete with popeye the sailor man pipe earrings
(really the handles of chocolate shaped like umbrellas)

treasures (127/365b)

brian was back at work today for the first time in forever, and the kids asked "why do you always have to work so much?"

Henry got to get his "new" cello from the KUG, where Nadja has it out on loan. Technically only education students can borrow it, but she had them make an exception. Also technically only the person who is borrowing it can pick it up, but she had them make another exception. Henry was very happy with his 1/2size cello, and played for a long time on it when he got home.

putting away our stuff from the suitcases and cleaning up a bit we found lots of little treasures.
the boys, but mostly felix, wants to start a shop to sell things for "real money" and they spent a long time painting shells, painting rocks, and cutting feather pens

lots of old stuff we threw away, but i couldn't help noticing a certain potty talk theme, complete with unbelievable perfect spelling.

No Poti Wöds

Potty talck? NO!

here are the beginnings of felix's shop

taking inventory

colorful shells

colorful shells

also, Nina may have noticed that when we watched the lunar eclipse with multiple hobby photographers that not one of us took a picture to capture the event. Turns out, Theodore and Priya captured it with a quill pen and some 20 year old red ink they found in a drawer.

Mars is that red dot directly above the word MARS
The moon is slightly malformed.
The colors are pretty accurate, all told.

back to graz (126/365b)

Mary and her nephews

Time to leave, and somehow it's always so hard to break away. It took forever to get our stuff together, not because we had very much of it but because we didn't really want to go... but leave we did. we played a little more music, picked a lot more figs, and packed the car and left. i drove a little way, but it really wasn't my favorite ride. i think it was in limp mode, the ac didn't work, and there was pretty much no acceleration. as soon as brian took the wheel again it was fine. ah VW (or as the kids used to call it, auweh)

at home we tried to unpack and put away as much stuff as we could. the kids were pretty distracted by trying to set up shop, painting snail shells and rocks to sell, with no plan for target market or advertising. i had promised to read them the hobbit if it had arrived in the mail, but it hadn't yet. too bad. i'm excited to embark on the project of reading that book aloud.

layers layers layers (125/365b)

woke up too late to go to the beach, already way too hot. so we closed the blinds and watched a really very terrific russian movie... Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession, a 1973 Soviet science fiction film that's pure comedy gold, with some very danceable songs.

Then we watched another one.

Meanwhile, Mary and I crafted and painted and cooked. We ended up with Lecsó, 3 canvases, new earrings, and a brand-new leonard cohen poem that we tried to turn into a song.

11:20 and almost done with the movie.

the trick, said mary, to painting, is layers.

and she's right.
kids are adding the next layer... 8 so far, and it looks great!

it's only 35degrees celcius, why wouldn't you want everyone sitting on top of you reading?

You're so lucky I love you
when you make puns before lunch
You're so lucky I love you
when we spend our morning
watching movies with subtitles
soviet science fiction
with gypsy inspired sountrack
you're so lucky i love you
when you make puns before lunch
asking me how i felt
was it a good "mood-vie"
do you want to watch another?
you ask me and i think
you're so lucky i love you
when you make puns before lunch.

 I tried to learn to "chop" and the sound made Martin's teeth feel like they were falling out so I stopped - I even payed 13euros for Casey Driessen's official tutorials about this.

Everyone else went swimming in the evening, but Mary and I stayed behind to take headshots for her duo band.

i think they turned out quite well!

i practiced chopping in the other room while they rehearsed, and then i offered to cook for them before i opened the fridge and found we had absolutely nothing. not even an egg. so tomi took the challenge and cooked. tunafish and pasta, while i played fiddle music, which apparently tomi hated so much he asked me to stop. no pleasing anyone today. the rest of our group got back nearly at 10 and i thought we would have an early night since everyone was so tired, but since it was my last night of course we tried zsolt's palinka and drank and talked till brian fell asleep on the floor.

and eat a peach on the beach (124/365b)

Mary was so nice to let us sleep in nice and late today. She took all the kids down to the beach, and Martin had a work meeting. Eventually we were up and walked ourselves down to the beach by way of some fig trees. The picnic blanket was in the blazing sun. The nice spot we like so much was getting the grass reseeded and so it was cordoned off, all the shade trees were therefore inaccessible. Last year I had had so much fun reading in the hammock there. Too bad.

Mary and I went to get some béla kava, where we first tried to sit at a different table from our "usual" but it was too hot and sunny, so we moved to our very own personal table. I got one coffee with Mary, and we talked, and when Martin joined us I got another cup of coffee. Eventually it was too hot for the beach so we walked to the bus stop and took the bus home. Brian ran and beat us by a long shot.

After lunch we just played music and all the adults fell asleep for several hours, and all the kids kept playing. When we woke up again we went to a different beach, in Izola. It was "fun" to try to park the gigantic rental van we had, and "fun" to get it back out of the teeny-tiny parking lot. We forgot the hammock, which was the whole reason for choosing this beach, but we hung out in the shade anyways for a while, and then brian and i went for an ice-cream walk just alone, and held hands and got lost in the cobblestone streets. it was so very nice.

Mary the true artist, she can make something of anything

My dearest runner in post-communist blockhousing

Agnes showing Felix the sunflower she planted and then they harvested two seeds

the sLOVEnia triangle (123/365b)

we extended our rental car agreement so we didn't have to drive 3.5 hours home today, and instead drove 4.5 hours to slovenia! hoorah for seeing my sister's family. the morning hours were of course packing. zsolt's family left pretty early in the morning, especially considering we were still swimming around in the lake at 2:30am this morning and brian drove them to the train station. we looked around for missing things, and packed our stuff pretty slowly. henry was being a wonderfully special help, and ran around checking drawers and other potential "hiding places" until one of those very tall very cheap empty ikea wardrobes fell on him and broke his sunglasses and thankfully didn't break his head. that slowed things down - i just lay there and held him for a while, mostly just scared.

we gave the kids the rest of our florints since we can't use then for anything else anyways, and they went down to the corner store and bought rice cakes. they could have bought anything, and that's what they chose.

after checking out, theodore and i stopped to play "on the waves of lake balaton" (a piece from a gypsy violin book that we had serendipitous found the day before we left for lake balaton and that centa had magically scanned and sent to us)

see? i said i would go to the lake to drink my coffee this morning

the drive felt long. i didn't drive - i was too tired. and right at the end there was some fighting. we listened to some gypsy music and some fiddle music, but the rental car uses usb mp3 player and the songs have to be just so. i couldn't get them to play properly.

and music was not over yet. at 9:30 mary had a gig that she graciously decided to share with me, so when we arrived at 5pm we started rehearsing. well, first we printed music, then we taped things. then we made a list of things we wanted to play. then we worried about lighting. while we were practicing the menfolk came in and asked questions of how to make pizza. it turned out much better than a few nights before, although we burned one of the pizzas because theodore came in from picking figs with a huge very painful wasp sting. he cried and cried, and it was so painful. that was the second time today a kid essentially got punished by nature for being friendly and fun.

on the shores of the adriatic

our gig went well when we finally figured out WHERE it was. there were 2 tropic bars within a few feet of coast. at the first in was a sandy beach, a very empty public, and a moderately tipsy bartender who helpfully explained that this was not THE tropic bar. The one we were looking for was at the hotel at the top of the hill, in whose shadow we were currently standing. You drive to the top of the hill and take the elevator down 11 flights and there is the tropic bar. Her directions worked!

There they were, waiting. All the worry about lights had been for a reason. We never could figure out how to get them to stay on a single color. If they were behind us so we could see our music so was our shadow getting in the way, and people couldn't see us. from behind one of us was at a disadvantage. and where they wanted it, shining on us like a spotlight made it impossible for us to see anything. we could only play half of our music because the other half was somehow unreadable.

Mary played her solo bach, including her original fantasias on the preludes, which are very inspired, original and fresh. the audience loved us, and now she gets to go back and repeat the program for hotel guests every monday and thursday for the next few weeks. lucky her. too bad we are leaving on sunday.

we must have left via a special kafka elevator though. The hotel clerk had to let us use it, it was locked for the night. When we left the parking lot the thing wouldn't lift for us, and the button we pressed for "help" went to a busy signal. when we finally got out of there we drove into a rotary where a construction vehicle was putting down cones, blocking our exit. blocking actually all 3 exits. we drove around and around this rotary with no exit 3 times, then asked the construction worker, who was very annoyed and on break, what we were supposed to do. DRIVE! he yelled DRIVE OUT OF THE ROTARY! So we drove out of the rotary across the traffic cones and found some other strewn traffic cones in the road ahead of us so we hadn't been the only ones.

last full day in hungary (122/365b)

a day of just swimming and lazing around. we now all have sunburns, and don't even care ;)

i used up a liter of milk that had gone bad (minus some milk that i mistakenly poured into my coffee) to make nockerln with cabbage ... the kids all said "ewwww" and then once they tried it they couldn't stop eating it. as rozanne gold says it's the "ultimate comfort food." ..."Cabbage!"

because the milk had gone bad we waited for brian to pick up milk on his way home from his 20km run. i stayed behind from the first beach trip to update my blog and take a nap. i don't know why but this vacation has made me so very very tired!

after dinner more beachtime, this time, we stayed in the water past sunset. i walked at least a kilometer out with larissa, until we could no longer grab the bottom of the lake with our toes and we swam back slowly, sometimes floating on our back until we were back on the shore.

noflashcapture!

sunset over the balaton

flashcapture

we ended up staying up WAAAAY too late drinking palinka (homebrewed purely from peaches by zsolt's family) and talking. brian and i walked larissa back to her place and stood at the gate for another hour, and then walked down by way of the lake and went for another swim under the stars, complete with very showy perseids and some planets. it was absolutely wonderful, and we shivered on the way home but we didn't even care.