I plan to stay home and go to bed early lol. It's a rainy day and a dangerous night to be out with the amateurs driving around after a few. Not much sun for two days now and it's not even going to get up to 70 today.
Chit Chat in VOLTVILLE Thread #2 :)
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Good morning from 0mg. She asked me to tell all of you that her computer will be down until Monday.
Rave's back has been giving her a bad time so she will be back when she is feeling better.
Happy New Year from all of us.
Rave's back has been giving her a bad time so she will be back when she is feeling better.
Happy New Year from all of us.
It's a whole 33 here now, was in the low teens when I got up, but the sunshine is pouring down and there is very little wind at all.
We plan on our quiet night at home. We're skipping the steak and tails this year because my tummy is still a little messed up from the recent "invasion", still not quite back to normal. We will have some Bailey's Irish Cream at midnight, if we can manage to stay up that late (hazards of getting older LOL).
We plan on our quiet night at home. We're skipping the steak and tails this year because my tummy is still a little messed up from the recent "invasion", still not quite back to normal. We will have some Bailey's Irish Cream at midnight, if we can manage to stay up that late (hazards of getting older LOL).
Good morning all! It's 17°, feels like 2°, and just a little dusting of snow on the ground. Kind of windy, but I'll take that over s-n-o-w any day, I don't even want to say that word out loud. Much different than last year, thankfully!
Christmas was fine here Lizzie, hectic and fun. We went with buffet style dinner, much easier than trying to cram everyone around the table at the same time. We celebrated by dancing the "traditional" Bob dance. My son's next door neighbor Bob is somewhat of a celebrity with the kids, they love to scream BOB whenever they see him, which is often. He is one of those guys that inspects his lawn every single day and manages to find some kind of maintenance that needs to be done, mowing, edging, raking, etc. He recently found a mole tunnel marring his beautiful lawn. The kids saw him stamping on it to restore order, naturally they copied him: jump up and down, stamp your feet while spinning in a circle and shriek BOB! BOB! BOB! Lots of fun!
Tomorrow my sister and brother, BIL and niece will come over to have our Christmas and New Year celebration all wrapped up in one. That will complete the holidays for my family. We got off easy this year by not having to do any of the driving to any family gatherings, which I have to admit, I can get used to, lol.
It's been a good year, some highs, some lows, and much to be thankful for....including all of you here in Chit Chat. Have fun everyone, stay safe whatever you decide to do, good health to all, (and your computers!) and see ya next year!
Christmas was fine here Lizzie, hectic and fun. We went with buffet style dinner, much easier than trying to cram everyone around the table at the same time. We celebrated by dancing the "traditional" Bob dance. My son's next door neighbor Bob is somewhat of a celebrity with the kids, they love to scream BOB whenever they see him, which is often. He is one of those guys that inspects his lawn every single day and manages to find some kind of maintenance that needs to be done, mowing, edging, raking, etc. He recently found a mole tunnel marring his beautiful lawn. The kids saw him stamping on it to restore order, naturally they copied him: jump up and down, stamp your feet while spinning in a circle and shriek BOB! BOB! BOB! Lots of fun!
Tomorrow my sister and brother, BIL and niece will come over to have our Christmas and New Year celebration all wrapped up in one. That will complete the holidays for my family. We got off easy this year by not having to do any of the driving to any family gatherings, which I have to admit, I can get used to, lol.
It's been a good year, some highs, some lows, and much to be thankful for....including all of you here in Chit Chat. Have fun everyone, stay safe whatever you decide to do, good health to all, (and your computers!) and see ya next year!
To All "My" ECF FRIENDS, Especially Here In "Voltville" . . .
As The Day Changes One Year for the Next . . .
Old Man Time Awaits A New Beginning . . .
As "We" - "Ring Out The Old, Ring In The New" -
It's Time To Celebrate The End Of A Year . . .
While The Beginning Of The New Year Is About to Start . . .
So - Let The Countdown Begin . . .
AND - To "You" and "Yours" . . .
In This NEW YEAR . . .
2015
May It Be Filled With . . .
. . . HAPPINESS & CHEER . . .
. . . GOOD HEALTH & LAUGHTER . . .
. . . GOOD LUCK & FORTUNE . . .
AND - May They Always Be With You
For The Whole Year . . .
Old Man Time Awaits A New Beginning . . .
As "We" - "Ring Out The Old, Ring In The New" -
It's Time To Celebrate The End Of A Year . . .
While The Beginning Of The New Year Is About to Start . . .
So - Let The Countdown Begin . . .
AND - To "You" and "Yours" . . .
In This NEW YEAR . . .
2015
May It Be Filled With . . .
. . . HAPPINESS & CHEER . . .
. . . GOOD HEALTH & LAUGHTER . . .
. . . GOOD LUCK & FORTUNE . . .
AND - May They Always Be With You
For The Whole Year . . .
@ "Terry" - THANKS for the update . . . 
@ "Rave" - One of "My" Other Special Friends who is a nurse is very willing to Help Ya' (Hopefully, BF will understand the NEED for a couple of extra hands . . . ) . . .
@ "omg" - Just in case, this might help . . .
@ "Wuzz" - Just like "You", I plan to stay home too . . .
@ "Rave" - One of "My" Other Special Friends who is a nurse is very willing to Help Ya' (Hopefully, BF will understand the NEED for a couple of extra hands . . .
) . . .
@ "omg" - Just in case, this might help . . .
@ "Wuzz" - Just like "You", I plan to stay home too . . .
Well, I see Voltville is quieter than it used to be, but of course Uncle can still bring it in for a smile or two. Hope all of you have had a good year to remember and are looking forward to the great year that is coming.
Yes it is!
Happy new year to all of you, i wish you health above all and let that be a creative year.
btw thank you all for being my friends (i'm sure i spelled it wrong but anyway)
No, you didn't spell it wrong. Thanks for being a great guy and putting up with me anyway.
I hope your year is very creative and very successful!
I hope your year is very creative and very successful!
I'm wrapping it up early so have a happy, safe, healthy, productive and prosperous New Year everyone!
And a special Happy New Year to Terry in her new house in Indiana!
And a special Happy New Year to Terry in her new house in Indiana!
SandySu - Culture's can be very different. I can imagine that marrying a Turk might be too different to work out in a relationship
I would venture to guess that the Turkish culture as I experienced it in the late '60s/early '70s was a lot more different than European cultures. I think part of my problem was that it took me a while to sort out what was craziness on my husband's part vs. cultural differences. Finally, I came to realize that he was just plain irrational by any standards.
I think we were married a total of about 6 years. I may be wrong. I can't remember the exact year I got a divorce. I guess I try not to think about that phase of my life much, though my experiences in Turkey have stayed with me.
We met in a disco. I went there with a Thai friend. She was really into the disco scene, and I was exploring NYC as a new arrival, so I went. It wasn't exactly my cup of tea, but I was willing to go see what it was about. I was pretty naive then, brought up in the suburbs and then went to the big city when I was young and dumb.
I lived in Turkey for 6 months, just after my daughter was born. She was born in 10/70, and I went in 2/71 and stayed till the end of the sumer.
Before I went to Turkey, I had studied Turkish a bit. The only book I could find on how to speak Turkish was a military manual, so I learned a lot of less useful words like "submarine" -- "denizalti." Still, I worked at it.
My mother-in-law spoke no English, but my father-in-law was fluent, since he had gone to college in England. If I needed translation and he was around, he helped me communicate, but I learned to not be shy with charades to get my point across when I had to. I fear my Turkish was similar to what we'd call Pidgin English, since I'd string nouns together with no grammatical correctness. I found, though, that I picked up the language in those 6 months to equal the 4 years of French I had studied in school. I wasn't too good at French, anyway, but still, it shows what total immersion will do for learning a foreign tongue.
When I first arrived, we lived in the winter house in the suburbs of Izmir. I took walks around the neighborhood, pushing the baby carriage. But first, my FIL had to walk me around the neighborhood and introduce me to all his cohorts, who sat in sidewalk cafes drinking tea and smoking hookahs, so we wouldn't be bothered by the townspeople. They all knew who I belonged to.
The drivers in Turkey are maniacs. They would pass a slower car, risking death to do so. Once, I was walking alongside the road that led into the city, along the bay, and a car, wanting to pass someone, drove up on the sidewalk, right at me, only shooting back onto the road at the last minute. I thought I was a goner then, but I survived without a scratch.
They had a kind of public transportation, in addition to buses, called dolmushes, which were large, old, American cars that would cram as many people as would fit and take them over a certain route.
My MIL said I shouldn't wear my blue jeans because I looked like a farmer. So she bought me clothes that she deemed appropriate for me and pretty much told me what to wear. I accepted this. I figured she knew more about it than I did. However, she wanted me to bundle up my baby for the winter cold, which was nothing, compared to NYC, and I played dumb. I saw other small children dressed in snowsuits so padded they could hardly move when it was about 40º outside.
Did you ever get irritated at some foreign person who pretended to not know what you meant when you said something? Well, I learned why they do it when I found myself doing it, too. It's easier than an argument.
Once, when we looked out our front window, some people went by with camels laden with large packs on their backs. The men were leading the camels, not riding. I thought that was exciting, since I had never seen a camel outside a zoo. Another time, people went by with a mother bear and a cub, apparently part of a traveling show, where the bears would do tricks.
Then there were the bahchevans (all these Turkish words aren't spelled correctly, but are so you can figure out more or less how to pronounce them). They came in a horse and cart to sell vegetables, and would cry out, "Bahchevan!" so people would know they were in the neighborhood. The milkman also delivered with a horse and cart, though we bought our milk from a local store. One bahchevan had a gorgeous seal brown horse that I loved.
They had trash pickup where I lived, and they came along with trash trucks with a long, fat hose that would suck the trash right out of the trash cans. Here, we bag it, but we have those hoses to suck up fallen leaves that people rake up to the side of the road. But I had never seen these hoses back then, and it amazed me. I wondered why they didn't do that in the US.
I never saw a supermarket. They were all little stores, the baker, the little grocery, etc. The baker had big brick ovens to bake the bread and my favorite, simit, which is like a soft pretzel with sesame seeds instead of salt. They went great with white cheese, which was a goat cheese, feta, I think. I loved eating that with an apple for an evening snack. Our big meal of the day was at midday.
When company came, they ordered a cake that I loved. It was made like a jelly roll with white cake, but in the center of the roll was a banana, and the roll was smeared with chocolate cream icing before being rolled up. Then the whole outside was covered in the same chocolate icing with dark chocolate shavings on the top. Yum!
I had cloth diapers, but I bought a few disposable diapers for the plane trip, and when company came, my MIL would bring them out and pass them around for the company to be amazed. No one had seen disposable diapers. I knew more Turkish to understand what was said than I could speak, and my parents-in-law didn't understand this, so they talked to the company about me and Americans in my presence. I was amused when they told how, when they visited us in NYC before, they asked me to make them a typical American meal, and I made a roast beef, nice and rare, and they told their friends Americans must be cannibals to eat raw meat!
We had a cleaning woman who came once a week and she did the laundry by hand in the bathtub. During the week, I also had to wash by hand all the baby diapers to keep up with them. We didn't have hot water right out of the spigot, so when I did diapers, I'd fill a kettle of water and heat it on the stove and do them in the kitchen sink. When the housecleaner came to do all the family clothes, she lit a wood fire under a hot water heater in the bathroom, which is how we also got hot water for showers.
Our housecleaner was a peasant, and she didn't dress European style as we did. She wore a dress-like tunic over baggy pants and a scarf on her head. She didn't know how to read or write, but she knew how to tell time on the clock and when it was time to go home. My MIL commissioned some local seamstress to make a cute pillow and quilt for my daughter's baby carriage, and the quilt had a deer cavorting with music notes coming out of its mouth. The housekeeper wondered if they were bugs. I told her they were music, and she wouldn't believe me. I guess she had never even seen music notes.
As the temperatures warmed in spring, we had a bad mosquito problem. My parents-in-law set up mosquito nets over the beds, but I found that one nasty bug would get under the netting and drive me crazy, so the nets weren't a very good solution. I suggested installing screens. My FIL didn't know what I meant, so I described them in detail. He had a carpenter come and fit all the windows for screens, and everyone was much happier. They liked them so much that they also installed screens in their summer house. I wonder if now, when all of Turkey must have discovered the wonders of screen windows instead of mosquito nets, if I could get the credit for it.
Another suggestion I made that didn't go over so well was that they used short brooms, sort of like a large whisk broom, to sweep the walk outside the house and the floors. I suggested a long handle, as brooms have here, and they vetoed it, saying it was good for you to bend over. I didn't think so, but you win some and you lose some.
When it was summer, we moved to Cheshmi Alti, the summer place. That was way out in the country, past Urla Iskelesi. I can see Urla on the map now, but I'm not able to really locate where that place was. We were about a mile down a dirt road (2 wheel tracks) from a very tiny fishing village. Our place was right on the water, on a cliff over a small rocky beach, with a long stairway leading down the cliff to the water. I swam nearly every day, and they taught me how to snorkel-dive. After I practiced and learned how to blow the water out of the breathing tube, I ventured out into the water, which was fairly calm and warm from underground springs and very bouyant from salt. It was gorgeous watching all the fish and diving down to be among them or explore the bottom with tufts of waving grasslike seaweed and large shellfish sitting on the bottom with their mouths open, waiting for something to fall in, I guess. These shellfish were like oysters with a brownish red shell with a wavy edge. One time I was just swimming on the surface, breathing through the tube, looking through the mask at the wonders below, wandering wherever my interest took me, when I thought I'd better look up to check my whereabouts. I panicked when I could hardly see land! I swam back frantically, used to currents in the Atlantic Ocean that'd carry you out to sea if you got that far out, but the water there was calm, and I probably could have wandered casually back the same way I swam out so far. I was panting for breath when I finally dragged myself ashore.
Next door to our house was a motel where tourists came to stay. Lots of Germans. The Turks seem to be really fond of Germans. And one day, a German man said something to me that, of course, I didn't understand, but I knew it was inappropriate for him to even speak to me, so I told him in Turkish that I didn't speak German. My MIL saw this and called him "hayvan" -- animal. Of course, he could have been saying something rude, but he was probably saying, "The water's nice, isn't it?"
The summer place didn't have running water but a hand pump from a well. I have never tasted such sweet water! We pumped it into a terra-cotta jug for drinking water and up into a holding tank on the roof for a little water out of the kitchen sink to do dishes and laundry, etc. I got into pumping each day to fill the tank. It was sort of a zen thing.
One day, some Turkish soldiers came to the gate at the end of the drive, and I ran to get my FIL. They had heard I was living there and wanted to know what that was all about. There was a lot of political unrest going on at that time, which I had heard about on BBC radio at the winter house, but in the summer house, we had no electricity. I was scared. I had heard that they were stopping foreigners from entering the country and preventing Turkish citizens from leaving. There was a possibility that my daughter could be considered a Turkish citizen, since she had spent 6 months in the country and had a Turkish father, and I, of course, wasn't. So I feared that maybe they would tell me to go and forbid my daughter to go, too. So I decided to head back to NYC before something like that happened. Maybe I was being paranoid, but I think not.
So there, in a nutshell is my Turkish experience.
After that long story, Happy New Year, everyone. Today, I tutored the kids, and I taught them to sing "Auld Lang Syne." I couldn't find a new year-appropriate photo to say good night, so here's a waterfall in Ithaca.
I plan to go to bed early so I can go riding tomorrow morning, but I might check in again before I hit the sack.
I plan to go to bed early so I can go riding tomorrow morning, but I might check in again before I hit the sack.
Happy New Year my Voltpeeps!!! I hope y'all have had a good night and I hope we all have a great next year.
I've just finish getting my mom's apartment emptied and I took the last load to storage a few minutes before midnight tonight. Now we have to get to work on my pawpaw's house.
I'm hoping I'll get to have this next week off from doing all that for right now.
Oh and my 20 year old son knocked up his girlfriend so I'm going to be a grandma in August. I hate that they are going to have it so hard but I'm happy to be a grandma, this will be my first.
I've just finish getting my mom's apartment emptied and I took the last load to storage a few minutes before midnight tonight.
Now we have to get to work on my pawpaw's house. I'm hoping I'll get to have this next week off from doing all that for right now.Oh and my 20 year old son knocked up his girlfriend so I'm going to be a grandma in August. I hate that they are going to have it so hard but I'm happy to be a grandma, this will be my first.
Wow, Sandy!! What an interesting story!
Thanks for taking the time to share that with us. **************
As Terry reported, I'm having some really bad back problems. Normally, if I have a back ache, it's gone by the next morning. Not this time. I've got a TENS unit on and don't even bother to remove the electrode patch. I figure it's better than painkillers, although I've been living on Aleve and one day I took something stronger. I now have a heating pad that I can wet down for moist heat. Can't move around a heckuva lot, but it seems to be getting better. Anyhow - I'll live.
The New Year began while I was sleeping. I lead such an exciting life.
For all of my special friends here, I wish you the best year ever!!
Good morning and a Happy New Year to everybody. I knew it would turn 2015 at midnight whether I was up to see it or not so I chose a good nights sleep lol.
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