New Camera-New Lens = ?????

 We are taking a little sojourn. As things are opening up every so slightly and as at least in certain parts of the country, people are acting in a more and more responsible way, we both felt the need to just get out. We thought about going to Colorado but honestly we live in the mountain west and we were just there in the summer. So we decided to try the Finger Lakes area of New York.

This is our first time flying since the pandemic

Things were quiet in the Albuquerque Sunport

Less so in Chicago where we changed planes. But I was literally giddy entering the airport, going through security, all the way until actually being on the plane where it was right back to the old airplane experience. 

Both in the airports, the airplanes and in the hotels (both Hilton brands), the protocols for safety seem to be adhered to pretty strenuously by the vast majority. We chose the area we did for low population density, good state numbers and rates, and strong state policies. We felt good with people using safe behavior patterns with one exception which was close to a University. We was double careful there and left as soon as possible. 

Our goal was just to get back out, see what things were like, feel how comfortable we felt AND use our new cameras and lens. Wife got the newest version of our Olympus OMD-M III and gave me her old M II. It operates different than the M I than I had. We were also trying out a new walk around lens that is a 12-200 zoom with a lowest f-stop of 3. 5. If that means anything to you, you are probably more photographically oriented than I. 

Day one was a lot of frustration with the two new devices. Plus we were looking for authentic, older architecture. We'd read there were lots of 'quaint old towns' but evidently that is code for 'refurbished old towns with lots of trendy places to shop and eat.' I was also tired which meant I was fighting a lot when driving.

Anyway, on to Saturday's photographs 

First on in the town of Canandaigua - Lake front

 In the town

The Finger Lakes are major wine country. Unfortunately, tasting with pandemic restrictions is by appointment only and we hadn't done enough research as to where we would be do do so.

                                                    Along Seneca Lake in Watkins Glen

Responsible Photography

It is important to understand what we value most in our country

Watkins Glen is home to a Grand Prix race track

                                                    And finally SIGNS OF THE WORLD

                                        Do we really need to 'Practice' Social Distancing? Can't we just do it?

The Pace Continues Unabated - Theodora Rising

 What does it feel like to be totally in the hands of fate? To feel like you are just a passenger along for the ride in some greater adventure? To my inspiring six superstars in Ghana who I am pushing as hard as one can imagine to grow and accomplish, I gave this analogy.

Imagine the seven of us are told we have this most important mission to undertake. We need to leave the West Coast of Africa and go over the Atlantic and get get to the United States. To accomplish this voyage we are given an incredibly powerful marine engine and propeller. We mount up and start crossing the ocean at prodigious pace. Water is splashing up and we are holding on tight, the speed is so great. Then one of us says, "Shouldn't there be more to this craft taking us across the ocean than just an engine?" We all think. By Jove, Yes! No one takes a voyage on just an engine. Someone says they have heard of something called a 'boat'. Another says they think it might be called a 'ship'. We take our devices out and begin searching (somehow in this analogy I decided we have high speed internet access no matter what). 

Yes! There are things called boats and ships. They are just the thing that we need to take this voyage...THAT WE ARE ALREADY GOING ON AT BREAKNECK SPEED. So we are trying to decide what kind of craft? What should it be made of? How big should it be? How should it be laid out? And on and on. We are getting building materials and tools airlifted to us (don't ask me how...it is my analogy...it is sort of like an awake dream) and we are frantically building the boat while we are still deciding just what the boat should be and careening forward.

Yes that is exactly what it feels to be running the Theodora Project at the moment. Those of you who know me, know I have not a bit of experience doing charitable work or doing developmental work in another country. Everything I've heard from others is that this kind of work can take years just trying to get traction. Here we are in just months not just getting traction but getting beyond liftoff to full Earth orbit. Now we are plotting our true voyage with a feeling of more and more momentum (yes I know I changed analogies...my blog, my rules).

I won't bore you with details. If you'd like them, I will be happy to send you detailed information. But here are the high points some of which are a bit repetitive from prior posts but I think are necessary to see the full scope of how this project has blossomed (ha, ha yet another analogy...analogy-a-mania!).

• In February, we thought we had an idea of how we were going to train our women. We had our money and were ready to start

• By April, that plan was blown out of the water by the pandemic. We had reinvented our training to on-line (don't even ask how hard it was to do that in days, in a developing country, with half our people not having computers or ever having used one, with only days to go before a lock down.) At the same time we undertook a massive project with my Trusted Advisor Network (TAN) to do 25 interview transcriptions in two weeks.

•  As June turned into July, it was clear that our women were progressing way, way faster than one could have anticipated. Our initial work with TAN had led to a few test client engagements. They were tough but the women power through and gain the hands-on knowledge they need. #3 joins as head of development, a huge addition. We put one of our women into TAN since all meetings are virtual now (even though she is terrified and the TAN members aren't quite sure what to make of her other than she is nice).

• By August we have gotten our 501.c.3 designation (which I find takes many organizations years). We are getting more new clients. And we really know what we can do for them. A number of our women are getting really good at delivering specific services.

• As September begins, the young lady who I put into TAN has now pulled in three new clients. She told me last week that the next one, she wants to make the pitch by herself. And she has proclaimed she wants one day to be the CEO of Theodora. I have two others who regularly interact directly with U.S business people without any active engagement on my part taking care of their client needs. In October we should bill 8 clients or $1,600 for the month.  That is two-thirds of what the women need to cover the salaries! 

• We should have our website up by the end of October for sure. Then we will be going after much more significant donor targets. We have new strong prospects for our Board. We have major organizational work to put in place between our Ghanaian entity and our U.S. entity. 

So much to do. We have come so far so fast. Our women, our beneficiaries, are growing from seeds to little trees before our eyes. A bow...doesn't a boat need a bow?

Sleep Revelation

 All bow to the wisdom of Wife

For years I have had issues with sleep. I don't sleep much at one time. Maybe 5 hours. I compensate by take a couple of naps a day when I can get them. Particularly infuriating has been a pattern. 

On days when I have to get up early (for me around 4 AM), I will set my alarm. On those days, I seem to sleep particularly deeply. I will be in the deepest sleep when the alarm goes off. Then on the days when I can sleep late, I don't set the alarm. But instead of sleeping deeper or later, I tend to not sleep as well and am always up early anyway. 

Wife suggested that maybe there was something psychological going on. Her thought was when I set the alarm I can relax knowing I will be woken up and can therefore go into a deeper sleep. But when I don't set the alarm, I somehow am less relaxed and therefore don't get into such a deep sleep.

This weekend I had three days in a row where I didn't have to get up a a particular time. On Friday I set the alarm for a time much later than I would normally get up. Indeed I slept straight through until the time the alarm went off. On Saturday, I did not set the alarm and I had a very disrupted, not restful sleep. On Sunday, I again used the alarm set to a later time and had the same deep, later awakening sleep as on Friday.

Could this be a breakthrough in sleep? I hope so.

Return Of The Great Foodie Posts - Running Amok

 I am now up to 2016 in my review of my blog posts. It seems it has been ages since I wrote a real food preparation post. Like so many whose prior life patterns are disrupted I too have been doing quite a bit of cooking. On Friday I went to our local Asian Supermarket for the first time since the pandemic restrictions. I bought a bunch of special condiments AND I bought a couple of fresh fish. Wife and I have found the fish at this market are always better and less expensive than elsewhere in our landlocked city plus there is more variety. I bought a couple of Golden Pompano. I knew this was more than we needed but planned to use the surplus for another meal. My inspiration - Amok - the national curry of Cambodia.

Step One - Make Your Curry Paste

Curry pastes are foundational to the cuisines of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Cambodia (Vietnam has a different ethnic and food heritage). They are made by taking a combination of roots, stalks and leave and pounding them with spices until they become a paste. The recipe I used for Amok calls for garlic, shallot, galangal (similar to ginger), tumeric root, lemongrass, kefir lime leaf, salt, brown sugar, and hot chile paste.

Below from top to bottom - Kefir lime leaf, galangal, shallot, lemongrass, garlic & tumeric root

I buy these in quantity and freeze them so I can whip up variations when I need to.  When using I then grate them into my Mortar and Pestle. This makes it much, much easier to pound into a paste than when they are raw (because the fibers all breakdown when they are frozen)

After the requisite pounding

Next on to our fish stock

I took the leftover fish and separated the meat from the bones and skin. I took the latter and added onion, carrot, garlic and ginger, covered with water, brought to a low boil and cooked for 15 minutes.

Now on to making the Amok Curry

We take Crab or Shrimp Paste and cook quickly in oil

Then we add some of our fish stock and coconut milk 

Now we add a healthy dollop (that is a scientific Grandparent cooking term) of our Amok paste. NOTE - putting the cooking liquids in first and adding the paste is distinctly Cambodian. All other SE Asian cuisines fry the paste in oil. This Cambodian technique produces a decidedly lighter flavor.

After cooking our paste for just a few minutes, add your cooked other ingredients - in my case the cooked fish and some cooked squash

Heat through and serve on rice

Dinner is served 

(Note - the corn on the cob is NOT traditionally done in Cambodia lol)

Breezing Through The Summer

 Whether it is climate change or just normal long-term cycles, the last three summers have had unusual patterns with rain coming earlier and our looked for late summer monsoon raining and cooling down being preempted by hot dry weather. So again this summer we are in August heat. The last two years Wife and I suffered mightily. We use evaporative coolers instead of central air conditioning because they are way more energy efficient in our desert climate. But the one we'd had since we bought the house wasn't getting the job done at all which made the environment for living and sleeping miserable (as #3 can attest to from current circumstances in Amsterdam). I'm still not sure why that was. It's a pretty freaking simple device. Just some pads (think giant size sponges), a system for pumping water over them so they get soaked, and a fan for pulling air through the pads causing the water to evaporate and thus cool down. How such a think could stop working is beyond me. But after a number of repair calls over the two years we finally threw in the towel.

So last fall me made the decision to get rid of the old thing. We were thinking of switching to air conditioning on account of wanting cleaner air with my asthma and Wife's allergies. That was going to be a big bill because we have two separate systems. Our upstairs evaporative cooler is working fine. But we couldn't have half the house on refrigerated air and the other on a swamp cooler (local parlance for the evaporative cooler). In shopping around, we found there was a new, much higher efficiency swamp cooler now available Two out of three vendors recommended it even though it was a lower cost product. They claimed that not only would it produce good cooling but was in fact better for air quality as they claimed that central air keeps all your air locked up without replacement and that's bad evidently.

Whatever, we bought the new unit which is a Breezair. With the summer mostly over,  I will report the product is everything that the vendors promised. It provides great, consistent cooling with much lower fan speeds than the old style units. Most of the time we hardly even know it is on. But despite days in the high 90's, we are enjoying the best cooling since we've owned this house.

With our new solar system, even with the coolers going all day, we still produced surplus electricity (this being the time one would be expecting maximum electricity usage).

 

Don't Be In Despair

 I have been going through my entire blog. It started in 2007 and I am now in 2015. I came across this post from 2015 that gave me a lot of comfort given our current state.

http://de-intimidator.blogspot.com/2015/07/just-be-thankful-anything-works.html

An Ode To Gratitude

 I am continuing my reading of all my blog posts. I am a bit over halfway through. I started writing in 2007 and I am in the spring of 2015. 

I have been amazed at all the eating, cooking, air travel I did during my pre-transition life. Now I am fully immersed in the second of our great long trips when we went to Istanbul for the first time. I am mildly amazed. My God we have done a crapload of experiences Wife and I. While this Covid-19 thing has us down that we (like everyone) are stuck and we can't get out and do, I am recognizing more and more how much we have actually already done. We truly did not let the opportunity pass us by!

And now I am in the middle of this almost surreal and transformational Theodora Ghana Project. Oh truly Lord let me fall down and bow in humility and give thanks for this incredible ride in life.