Walk home

When my wife and I went for an early morning stroll out the village, I noticed that the air was crisp and the weather fine for walking, so after my 12:00 Sunday dentist's appointment at Dr. Walid's in Abu Ghosh, I left the car with my wife and walked home from Shoresh. It's a distance of only 14 km but with sharp descents and an elevation difference or around 400 m. A couple of poor choices when following OsmAnd and Google Maps lengthened the trip, and I got home at 16:30.

God bless the Tsar and keep him far from Anatevka

Wild cyclamen growing out of rock, seen near Wahat al-Salam - Neve Shalom

Journal:Photographers, reflections

It's a Saturday; my wife is in a mindfulness retreat, and my day is even less structured than usual. In the morning, my brother, an aviation buff, had sent me a link to an air museum in Sirvihisar, in central Turkey, joking that he'd love to see it some day. I looked up Sirvihisar in Wikipedia and noticed that one of the central personities who hailed from there was an Armenian poet, Moushegh Ishkhan, who once wrote that, for Armenians, whose diaspora lacked a territory,

The Vegetarian

Read Deborah Smith's translation or adaptation of Korean writer Han Kang's "The Vegetarian", which won international awards. Han Kang herself won the 2024 Nobel in literature. It's the first Korean novel I've read and it's pretty good.

Among the anemones

It was a beautiful day, so in the afternoon, we drove with the wife's 92-year-old mum a little down the hill to sit in a field which every year lights up with bright red anemone flowers. There, we happened to meet a few other of our village friends who had had the same idea, and sat with them.