Against the Wind

Saturday I worked an election. Sunday I got hit by reality of the omg type. A while back I was asked if I’d work with a youth group for the middle schoolers. We finally met on Sunday evening. I had visions of sugar plums, and knew two of the girls involved. BUT!

One of the main reasons we decided to try to reform a youth group in our church that often has no children and no youth in attendence is that one of the members said she was going to have to move her membership if she didn’t have someplace for her granddaughter to attend a youth function. What I didn’t understand was that the granddaughter is what the education system would call BD. Behavior disordered. Holy macaroni, have we got a challenge ahead of us here.

The whole time we were trying to get this going I was agitating for meeting weekly, on the assumption that every other week or every month was just resigning to defeat before you start. Maybe I should reconsider this?

A– who is on the session and chairs the Christian Education committee has said repeatedly that she can only come once a month for Sunday evening. I well know that she’s over extended, and every Sunday evening is very demanding of time. I’ve told her not to worry. But after she came last Sunday and saw the extent of the problem we had, she called and talked to B– the pastor at least twice on Monday. I could not keep my hands out of the food. I don’t recall when I’ve medicated with food so severely. Everyone was surprised, upset, and trying to figure out how to deal with this girl. I’ve certainly done some praying. We only had to deal with her for one hour, her grandmother who is also being treated for cancer has her 24/7. That is a handful to say the least. This is going to require some love! I do not see good things in the future for this girl, but I also believe in miracles. So, God willing we’ll be able to be something positive in her life AND provide a good experience for the other girls we have in our hands.

I believe there is something for M– our problem child. I believe we have something to offer her. I believe we have a great deal to offer the others as well. But will they be driven away by M–’s shenanigans, or will they see her problems and our acceptance of her, if not her behavior as a demonstration of love? We’ll need to find a consistent line of discipline, and a way to enjoy a live wire.
_________

Another picture from the gardens of the Alhambra today. We spent a good deal of time in those gardens. We had a couple hours to wait before we could go into the Alhambra itself. The gardens stretch out at least the lenght of a football field, but it is broken up by walls to separate the areas for different folks. Do the women have a separate outside garden? I don’t know if they were allowed to leave the “house.” But I think there were separate areas for embassadors, and seekers of justice and so on.

The building at the back is an illusion. It’s just a very fancy wall, with a room on top, perhaps.

______________

And a couple of links. My do gooder loves reading things like this account of an opthalmologist in the Congo dealing with primitive clinic conditions and many many eye problems. He walks you through three or four days of his duty tour, and then asks about the ethical questions of serving thus. I thought the money quotes were near the end, but read the whole thing. Daylight’s Mark

My main ethical dilemma I faced is: is substandard medicine worse than no medicine? I don’t want to think about all the violations of sterile technique I encountered and was party to (flies settling down onto the instrument tray just as an example). We had a couple of complications which probably would not have occurred had we had the regular equipment and instruments – one of which was in a monocular patient. The first part of the Hippocratic Oath is to do no harm. Clearly we did some harm. Did we do more good than harm?

Then an article from City Journal which points to a research finding that the researcher is wanting to kill. What cost, multiculturalism? The conclusion absolutely is in accord with my observations of different groups of people interacting. But we’re not supposed to see the obvious if it’s not acceptable.

And last link, an insurance program. Here’s an insurance scam I want to get in on. But I’d have to buy homeowner’s insurance, I suspect. Flood insurance

Did you know there’s a home in Mississippi that has flooded 34 times in 32 years? And each time it has flooded, the federal government, through FEMA’s Federal Flood Insurance Program, has paid the owner’s claim. The house, worth $69,900, has cost the government $663,000 in flood damage claims. That’s almost ten times the home’s worth and averages over $20,000 a year.

And that’s more than enough from this end of the world I’m sure. Hope all is well in your end of the world.

It’s difficult to imagine the lovely facets and views in the gardens of Grenada’s Alhambra. Grenada is a good distance from the coast of Spain, up in the mountains where the Moors holed up during the years of Reconquest, and maintained some of the last bastions of Islamic rule in Andalusia. The Reconquest was just a part of the crusading spirit that swept Europe in response to the threat of Islam, which was only stopped at the Gates of Vienna. The Reconquest was of several (7?) hundred years duration, and as the Catholic monarchies pressed harder and harder on the Moslems, they moved their courts and centers higher and farther from the sea. Snow covered peaks surround Granada, and the water they furnish makes the gardens of the Alhambra a celebration of lush greenery, quiet contemplative pathways.

A different dynasty build the Alhambra, with a different aesthetic. The claim is that they thought permanence was for the supreme, the great builder Allah, and mortals need only build for the “short” term–maybe a couple centuries, so sandstone was good enough building material.

__________________

Forward to a much more modern time. Here is a movie of Deep Space from Hubble.

One of the first stirrings of the Spirit in my heart came in the mountains west of Boulder, spending a night out on sleeping bags in the Rocky Mountains. Lying there watching the stars, I was awed, dumbstruck in the thought of the vastness of the heavens, the miracle of creation, the amazement that I even existed to wonder at it all. This video awakens the same sense, and I was reminded of it yet again when I read in the Psalms this morning,

Psalm 108
A song. A psalm of David.
1 My heart is steadfast, O God;
I will sing and make music with all my soul.

2 Awake, harp and lyre!
I will awaken the dawn.

3 I will praise you, O LORD, among the nations;
I will sing of you among the peoples.

4 For great is your love, higher than the heavens;
your faithfulness reaches to the skies.

5 Be exalted, O God, above the heavens,
and let your glory be over all the earth.

How insignificant are we? How small and short lived. Yet even we, less than ants in God’s universe are worthy of God’s redemptive love.

We arrived at the Alhambra early in the tourist season. Yet you had to make an appointment to buy tickets. This is clearly one of the most popular tourist destinations in Spain. Deb asked which was my favorite of the two Moorish tours I took in Spain. To clarify my mind, I asked Wally, a local bridge player who has cruised extensively, which he prefered. He thought about it a great deal, and then remembered that he’d missed the Alcazar, and instead gone to the emergency room after taking a fall trying to run up ahead and take a photo he wanted.

“I was appalled. My elbow was torn completely up, but they put no stitches in it. They put in staples. Twelve staples. I also remember the emergency room; I couldn’t help but notice the blood on the floor, and on tables. This in the emergency room!” Ahh, the glories of socialized European medicine.
__________

Does anything important happen in a beauty pagent? I’d have said, “no.” But in Central America, the interest in the Miss Universe contest some 30 years ago was intense. Getting an invite from friends to come watch the final show and see the winner named was a BIG DEAL. Still not my cuppa, but it seems something was brewing this year… at a beauty pagent of all places. From IBD (Investor’s Business Daily)

Quick, what’s the murder capital of the world: Kabul? Juarez? Try Caracas, Venezuela, a city whose dictator, Hugo Chavez, has made murder a means of extending his control.

The silent protest at Monday night’s Miss Universe Pageant in Las Vegas was invisible to nearly everyone — except Venezuelans. On her final catwalk, the ranking Miss Universe, Stefania Fernandez, suddenly whipped out a Venezuelan flag in a patriotic but protocol-breaking gesture.

Fernandez waved her flag for the same reason Americans waved theirs after 9/11 — to convey resolution amid distress. Her flag had seven stars, significant because Chavez had arbitrarily added an eighth, making any use of a difficult-to-find seven-star banner an act of defiance.

Fernandez’s countrymen went wild with joy on bulletin boards and Facebook, showing just how worried they are about their country. Their greatest fear is violent crime.

_________

And the inevitable five years after the storm stuff….

The Picayune, our local paper bought an emmense amount of good will staying and publishing through the storm. This is a rerun of two reports ride through the city as the levies had just broken and the extent of the flooding was still unknown.

Deb took a exception to being part of my target audience, the sad and lonely. But at least I managed a comment! Linda is at her mother’s in Brighton, and I’m getting lonely here!

Wonderful day today. We had what passes for a cool front in August. Drier air for a couple of days. That’s a cool front. Spent the school day time with my two New Orleans daughters checking out the art museum’s display of a collection of artifacts from turn of the 20th century Southwestern artifacts. The photography was fascinating to me. Many of the photos were hand painted slide photos. The collection was of a Pepper fellow, who took a great interest in the textiles. So between the antique photographs, (or reprints from old slides, actually) and the textiles, there was plenty to hold my interest. I could have stayed and documented Guatemalan textiles when I was there in the 1970s. I took a few photos walking to the museum, including a photo of that black swan we keep hearing about! The economists probably aren’t talking about the one in City Park Lagoon.

Miranda is growing apace. Tania is a regular Guernsey.   Little M is up to 15 lbs and you blink and she puts on another pound or two. The sort of scary local news is that Marianne and Barry may be moving to Houston. Haliburton is Barry’s employer, and they wanted to move him to Calgary a while back, but the Canadians didn’t want a furiner on their contract work. But he’s employed by Haliburton for now, and they want him to get some new experiences… time for moving on. Marianne hopes something comes through and they don’t have to move, but that is the life in the oil companies. The Gulf is not going to be drilling ’til big O’s moratorium is lifted and we can get rigs back into this part of the world. I knew this interlude with everyone close to home was to be brief. I’ve surely enjoyed. The up side is that I may have to go visit Deb a lot and seek out Houston quilt shops. I could live with that.

Yesterday D– came by to look at all the repair work that needs doing on my 30 plus year old tract home. Lots of fixing about to happen here.

______________

Back to trip photos. We arrived early in the morning in the port of Malaga. Night photography is a special challenge for me, but this photo of a container ship lit up like Christmas as we docked came out pretty well.

Deb asked which I liked better, the Alcazar or the Alhambra. They’re very different. I’ll think about that more as I go through the photos of the Alhambra. The Alcazar in Seville was built with a sense of permanence, and has been around for 1000+ years. The Alhambra was built as the reconquest was going and the Moors were taking refuge up in the hills. They say the construction was designed to be less permanent, as only Allah, can build perfection. Different sorts of installations.

One key to good writing is to identify your market. Target your writing to the people you would influence and wonderful things follow. A huge following, ad revenue, and blogging happily ever after! Dr. Boli is here to rescue us all.

That solves that problem. Now I’ve got a target audience. I’ll somehow skip sending the funds to Smith & Jones Agency. I’m doing pretty well with the sad and lonely demographic already!

One last photo of Alcazar of Seville

The photos of the trip to Europe are nowhere near ending. So, pulling up my old photos is like a trip down memory lane. From Seville, we went to the Alhambra in Grenada. Southern Spain still carries the mark of the years of Moorish domination, and the major rebuilding of these tourist destinations allows us a glimpse of the splendor of Al Andalus.

From the gardens of the Alcazar, you can see the tower of the cathedral.

This is the “Women’s garden.”

____________

Last a link to the essay on Big Peace relating to the actual history of the Cordova Cathedral and how it was confiscated as a mosque after the Moors conquered Spain. The documents quoted don’t quite agree with the way it’s presented in our press.

History Cordova Mosque

Clearly I’ve been thinking about blogging for quite a while. I have about six different links that I could link and try to explain. I’ve got photos preprocessed and ready to include in the march through all the photos from my cruise. So, on with it!

A good deal of the charm of the Alcazar of Seville, besides all the architectural gumbo are the gardens. We were too tired to do much garden walking, but I did take photos aplenty of the parts we did walk. I knew I was witnessing exceptional beauty, even if I was too tired to register it fully.

As you pass into the garden area here near Dona Maria de Padilla’s Baths, you can look to the right and see that you’re not in Islamic sensibilities any more.

Stand in place, and do a 180 degree turn and your back under the Moorish influences.

The story of the Dona of the Baths as well as the origins of the name of the Courtyard of the Dolls are worth telling as historical notes as well. Linda pointed out how all these pictures remind us that our history is rather short, and our buildings somewhat newer than these that have histories that stretch back 1000 years.

The monumental neoclassical styles of the buildings in Washington are designed to inspire as if they were much older than they are. We are a new country, and new mind set. But we often forget about just how special we are in the world as a beacon of hope and prosperity.

__________

The thing we’re going to be hearing way too much about this week is that this is the five year anniversary of the levee breaks that destroyed an American City. My city. If I were interested in going back, I’d pull up and rewrite the piece I did six months later. But this memoir written by an New Orleanian in exile is a heart grabber.

The night before I evacuated was one of the best nights of my life. My baby was going to start school that Tuesday, I had settled on going back to school in January, and had abandoned my plans to move to the East Coast. Life in my hometown was looking up, so I figured I could stick it out. My girls and I piled into Big Pimpin (R.I.P.), had a good time at True Brew’s Poetry night, hooted, hollered, sang and danced. On the way out we heard a random conversation:

“Yeah man, they’re saying this one might really hit us.”
“They’re always saying that shit. You leavin?”
“I dunno.”

We got breakfast.

________

And some history. This blog post via a new set of daily reading exercise. I’ve always been fascinated by the democratic form and its demise in Greece and Rome. Our philosophical progenitors didn’t maintain their experiments in democratic government long. This brief essay is a warning about how easily a democracy is extinguished by the people who should be ready to protect it.

There is a letter by Marcus Tullius Cicero, dated 18 December 50 B.C. This letter was written to his friend Atticus on the eve of the Roman Civil War. He wrote as follows: “The political situation alarms me deeply, and so far I have found scarcely anybody who is not for giving Caesar what he demands rather than fighting it out.” To explain the situation in brief, G. Julius Caesar had demanded the right to circumvent the Roman constitution, to break laws with impunity, to extend his command over a large army by using that army to threaten the Senate of Rome. “And why should we start standing up to him now?” asked Cicero. The next day he wrote to Atticus: “We should have stood up to him [Caesar] when he was weak, and that would have been easy. Now we have to deal with eleven legions….”

Again, do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

As for me, back to finding fabrics for the round robin. This time I’m gonna do it right. Not twice too big on both dimensions. But I’ve got a nice start on an unplanned quilttop!

I’ve looked up some more info on the Alcazar in Seville, trying to find information on the various rooms and buildings that we encountered. We didn’t pay for the audio tour, but we were enchanted anyway. I think if I had it to do again, I’d pop for that audio tour.

The courtyard in the photo yesterday is called the Patio de las Doncellas, (Patio of the Maidens). I think I’ve also heard it refered to as the Patio of the Dolls. ‘The name, meaning “The Courtyard of the Maidens”, refers to the legend that the Moors demanded 100 virgins every year as tribute from Christian kingdoms in Iberia. The story of the tribute may have been used as a myth to bolster the Reconquista movement, but it may have had some truth to it in the sexual abuse of Christian women by powerful Moors.’ This is from Wikipedia.

The dome in today’s photo is the crown above the area called Salon de los Embajadores (Embasador’s Hall) It was built in the 1427 in the classic mudejar style, which catholic styles and forms onto the older arab/Moslem styles.

“The dome, with interlaced tracery designs, is also gilded. The frieze below depicts alternating castles and lions. Below that is a border of decorative Kufic inscriptions and 32 female busts. Below that Gothic niches contain portraits of Spanish kings.”

This is the main room of a complex of rooms used for public events and affairs of state. (For example, it was the setting for the marriage in 1526 of Charles V and Isabel of Portugal.) According to Núñez and Morales, “the room follows the architectural scheme of a qubba (Islamic mausoleum), and is one of the areas of the palace that remained from the time of Abbad al-Mutamid, when it was known as the al-Turayya (Pleiades) room.

When I was looking at the photo today, I noticed some arches on the same level as the high balcony, and decided those looked like they had representations of people, which is surely a no no in the Moorish styles, so I looked at another photo, and sure enough, there they were, the kings of Spain, as described by the Bluffton University site quoted above.

__________

Nice bridge game today, and a Camellia quilter’s guild meeting this evening. I’ll maybe have time for more blogging tomorrow… or not.

__________

This two minute video put out by the Republican party shows vividly why the Democratic party will be in trouble this election cycle. Oddly, when Reagan was president, I was quite happy to dengrate him as the actor buffoon president. Mind poisoning, that. I realized just how much we had to thank him for when they were forced in obituaries to point out all that he accomplished. His words as edited into this clip surely resonate.

It’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.

Two days ago, the world was wonderful. Yesterday about the time the school kids came home, I finished my quilt blocks for the round robin. I designed them for a 1″ square, forgot the plan and ended up with a two inch square. Oddly enough, my strip was going to be twice as long as the row needed to be.

Crash! Into the depths of despond. This morning while walking I figured out what I was going to do with those semi wonderful, now excess blocks, and almost figured what to do for go two on the round robin.

Life is suddenly quite good again. Tonight I teach a quilting class at the library, which will rev up my motors a bit as well, as over the years I’ve truly come to enjoy teaching, I just got totally disgusted with sundry issues at my school in particular, and with post secondary education in general. I’m still a teacher, so I think I’ll have fun tonight.

But first, over to Abita Springs to continue the practice on the long arm quilting machine.

In Alcazar. More description later.

Some days are just blessings. This was one of them. Some of the highlights? I spoke to Linda, my high school buddy at length. Thoroughly enjoyed our visit. C– my walking and bridge buddy got some very good news on lab results from her husband’s x-rays. They’d been told there was a mass on his kidneys, and now the Dr. says he sees no such thing. Cameron started school, got off the bus, and was so pleased with himself for being such a big guy, he could hardly stand all that pride. Went to stitch at the library bee, and almost was applauded there. It was so good to be back to the library bee. And that was just the beginning. It was a very good day!

Tomorrow includes some dentistry, and may not be so much fun.

So, back to photos and time on a tour on a cruise line.
___________

The next few days will be photos from the Alcazar in Seville. I’ve posted a few of the photos from there, but never got to pick out my favorites, so this time through maybe I’ll get that task under control.

An alcázar is a type of Spanish castle, from the Arabic word ????? al qasr meaning palace or fortress.

Wikipedia

The Alcazar need not mean the Alcazar in Seville, which is such a lovely spot it is still the residence of the royals when they are in Seville. It was built in 900 something by the head of one of the Moslem dynasties that ruled Spain.

The architectural detail is overpowering. This photo is just a detail from the one above, but shows the ornateness on top more ornate that is characteristic of the place. The other characteristic would be the lovely gardens.

A detail that intrigued me was the bit on the left hand side of the main doorway area.  The whole building is draped with a canvas while the building undergoes renovation and reconstruction.  That would be a continual process, but I thought it was very neat that the canvas was covered with an image of what the building behind it should look like, so it’s not so jarring.  They used the same thing in Venice on St. Mark’s square.

______________

And it’s been a while, and I’ve not talked politics. But Obama’s approval ratings are right there along with what Bush’s were, and this with a very friendly press corps. So I’ll take a shot too, though I hope to keep it rare. I continue to pray that he will find footing and lead for the next couple of years. Just not well enough to be reelected!

So I found it nearly humorous to run into this plea by a partisan. Mark Halperin,

in his piece “Obama’s Islamic-Center Stance: Why the GOP Shouldn’t Run Against It,” Halperin–seemingly on bended knee–writes to the GOP:

If you go full force on the offensive, every Democratic candidate in every competitive race in the country will have three choices, none of them good, when asked about the Islamic center: side with Obama and against public opinion; oppose Obama and deal with the consequences of intraparty disunity; or refuse to take a position, waffling impotently and unattractively at a crucial time.

This by way of Big Peace. My goodness if a Republican president is making an ass of himself, do you suppose for a minute the hounds with typewriters would let him go unchallenged? Obama opened the door full wide for the attacks, and deserves to be attacked. Shame on the GOP if they don’t make political hay out of Barak’s support of the building of a mosque near the site of the twin towers.

I’m libertarian enough to say, yeah, they have every right to build there. But it’s a crude triumphalist gesture, and we’re more the fools if we allow that. And BHO is the biggest fool for thinking he can support it one day and weasel out the next. What an ass of a man. And what fools we the American people for electing him.

One of the Southern expressions I ran into and loved today was, “I must have brushed my teeth with gunpowder this morning.” This from Jane of the quilt guild! She was shooting off her mouth a bit, and she’s normally very reserved and proper. I too must have used the wrong tooth powder.

On April 19, Betsi and I took our first excursion with the cruise line. The Gem docked in Cadiz, but most of the excursions were going to Seville. We booked a “Seville on Your Own” tour. The bus took us to Seville, and we explored at our leisure. The Alcazar in Seville was our main destination, and we walked through it and some of the gardens. I was shutter happy, as the mixture of Moorish and Catholic architecture was eye popping.

Traveling from Cadiz to Seville, I was impressed with how many wind turbines they had setting out on the hills of Southern Spain, in amongst the olive and orange trees, there were hundreds of wind turbines.   Where is Don Quixote when you need him?

The photo is from the bus. I was quite taken by all the buildings constructed for a World’s Fair. This one is decorated with ceramic tiles in opalescent colors.

_________

I got to see my granddaughter today. She has a little eye infection, but otherwise looks the picture of health. Tomorrow is a big day for Cameron. He’s starting school, and will have a whole day in class.