Daughter's birthday

Today's a birthday of my beautiful daughter! Here she is in the early evening, holding the bunch of roses she just received from her ex-spouse, and ready for her birthday party.

This is going to be her second birthday party this year. The fun party.

The elegant party was two weeks ago: an elegant dinner with her seven best girl-friends and.... a butler.

Yes, a butler: a company executive of English extraction offered his services as a butler at a recent company charity auction and she bid and won. Thus the two-part party: elegant and fun.

There was also a third, miniparty this morning, for just the two of us, when, according to a Swedish tradition I woke her up early in the morning carrying a tray with a cup of tea (she prefers it to coffee), a mini-cake ( a fruit tartelette, actually) and a symbolic candle.

A quick trip to Costa Rica

down memory lane (Hey, check the link, I found some of my old, pre-blog pictures!) I lived and worked in Costa Rica 5 years ago.

No, not in San Jose, although I traveled there sometimes, both on business and for pleasure, visiting its musea - particularly its fabulous gold museum, which fascinated me to no end - enjoying its plazas and other sights.

I lived in the famous cloud forest village of Monteverde, established in 1952 by a group of Quakers from Alabama, who did not want their sons to fight in Korea (Quakers are pacifists). They were farsighted enough, that they established a fabulous, and now famous, nature preserve around its village. To this day the village of Monteverde is at least partially English speaking and full of blond, blue-eyed children attending one of the small villages two English language schools.

I worked at the Monteverde Institute as its director of development.

Here are pictures from the Institute and a couple of workshops there.

One outdoors, on sustainable architecture. It included actively building stone retaining walls ,

was led by Institute's executive director, Nat Scrimshaw



with lively participation of staff and guests

and no less lively discussion during lunch after the workshop. The other one indoors, led by me and addressed to all non-profit organizations in the area, on various development strategies, and how to align them with the organizations overall strategy and modus operandi.


I know, I know, the jargon I use when I act "professionally" seems sometimes at least a tad confusing also for my workshop participants ;-)

but they concentrate, exchange ideas
and do their best!

Places with a view: Monteverde, Costa Rica

My rustic cabin in Monteverde, Costa Rica

In Costa Rica, my wooden, VERY RUSTIC cabin (built by a couple of inexperienced Quakers as their first abode there) in Monteverde, on the outskirts of a nature preserve, had two acres of land attached to it
with a fascinating, gone wild tropical garden in front and to the right of the cabin,

a path of candy-cane amaryllises,

and wandering blue irises suddenly and quite unexpectedly appearing behind the curve of a jungle road, framing a path to the front of the cabin;

On the back, the land was raising on both sides,

with a mini banana plantation on one side
and a remnants of a vegetable garden, now taken over by the jungle, on the other. In the middle there was a small patio - and a large concrete contraption on legs and with a roof, a pila, but I did not know then what it was or what it was to be used for. So, with a rain season approaching, I promptly... filled with soil and planted mesclune in it, seeing that it had a roof.

My Costarican housekeeper went speechless for a long while, when she went out with a bunch of rugs under her arm, to wash them in a pila (as they were too big to fit into the cabin's small electric washer)... and then burst laughing explaining to me what a pila is supposed to be used for. So I had to replant the mesclune before her next visit ... or live with dirty rugs.

I learned a lot of things from that young lady. I learned how to cook Costarican, where and how to shop, where and how to hang the laundry in the rainy season ( drapes, for example, are being hanged wet directly back on the window rods, while the rest of the laundry hangs on a long line spanned through the entire length of the cabin, from the front entry to the back exit and the wood stove in the "living room" is fired up to dry the clothes - not a bad idea!), etc, etc. She was a very conscientious and energetic worker. But I digress...

Behind the patio, there was a down slope and a clearing at the back of a cabin, allowing a view of the mountains,
of the rain- and cloud forests at the tops, coffee and dairy fincas on middle part of the slopes, and a glimpse of the Pacific down, down and away between the green, green slopes.

There, besides the view of mountains, the sea, the tropical flora, I could also observe some of the fascinating local fauna: butterflies huge and colorful like flowers, some so iridescent and blue like the ocean away, and the birds: funny-looking, “singing” brown colored bell-birds with their long “mustaches” ( I guess they are the only kind of bird with that type of an unusual “adornment”), and fabulously colorful mot-mots, with their tails swinging like a pendulum of an old fashioned clock, and - on a very rare occasion - even a very rare and very shy resplendent quetzal digesting a wild avocado.

The view of the birds I could enjoy most often at predawn, when howler and capuchin monkeys were feasting on my bananas, on the metal roof of my cabin, making such a racket, that it was impossible to sleep, so I usually got up, muttering some expletives addressed to the monkeys, drank my morning coffee outside or at the window (if it rained), and enjoyed the views and the birds, who liked particularly a stump of a broken of branch just outside my "dining room", to sit on and regurgitate their breakfast of wild avocados.
This little fellow (?) on the other hand decided to digest his breakfast on a stair step...

I was initially afraid that lack of sleep would affect my job performance, until I figured out that electricity and with it computers, Internet etc. usually went down early afternoon for a few hours, so I could take a leisurely stroll through the jungle to my cabin, take a little midday nap, a siesta, and return to the institute to work till the evening, when we anyway often had open lectures or musical performances for both tourists and the locals. I just had to remember to keep my headlamp with me at all time for that pretty scary - imagine all the snakes living there in the brush of impatiens - night stroll back to the cabin. But I digress again…

Mamma Mia!

I had tons of fun yesterday night!

Went with a group of 12 SWEA friends first to a preshow dinner at a good food Italian place, Baraona and from there to the fabulous Fox Theatre to see the Atlanta premiere of a touring Broadway musical, Mamma Mia.

The funny story is skillfully incorporating a large number of ABBA hits, mostly in a humorous and unorthodox way.

The show lasts almost three hours and at the end the public is encouraged to sing and dance with the performers.
Great fun for almost 3 hours and about $ 100 - with dinner!
But the audience was predominantly all age female - a musical equivalent of a chick flick?

Blue and yellow

Friday, June 6th was a Swedish national day and all Swedish clubs in Atlanta celebrated it at a party at Emory University.

Swedish National Day is a recent tradition. It was established as late as 1983 and at the same day the Swedish national costume was introduced by no other than Silvia, queen of Sweden.

Thus at the Atlanta celebration some women, including the honorary consul of Sweden in Atlanta, wore the most recent version of the Swedish National costume.

Many more people, however, both men and women, tried to incorporate in their clothing the colors of the Swedish flag: blue and yellow, because Swedish National Day was previously celebrated as Swedish flag day.

Thus the party was full of guys in navy blue suits with either yellow shirts or ties and ladies in blue and yellow dresses and ensembles. The room was really blue and yellow, or as the Swedes say "blaagul" when they mean quintessentially Swedish.

Songs were also very Swedish, and so was the food served at the party:

smoked and marinated salmon (lax),

Jansson's temptation (a baked dish of matchstick potatoes and anchovies with onions and cream),

Swedish meatballs with lingonberry preserves,
crisp bread and cheeses.

Life without cats

is liberating. Imagine: I can leave a plate of food:grilled chicken, salad and a glass of wine, go away for as long a while I need, come back and ...lo and behold, the chicken is still on my plate, untouched, and the glass of wine has not been turned over, either, in the cat fight for the chicken. Marvellous!

But life without cats already feels at least a tad empty. I miss my rascals and their antics.

City slicker

Ooh, how fun it is to change the surrounding - for a time at least.

Yesterday I arrived in Atlanta, after 7.5 months in Puerto Rico, living on the beach and in the rainforest. I did enjoy it - and will enjoy it again, but

recently the rain forest had became somewhat less than fun: when the torrential rains started about two weeks ago, the water in the casita lost pressure ( I know, it does not seem logical, that outside rain should cause a shortage of water inside, but such are the quirks of an ad hoc rural water system) so that in order to take a shower I had to soap up, shampoo... and then run outside to rinse off in the rain (thankfully, no neighbors, so I could "indulge" freely).

Worse yet, with rains tons of bugs moved inside through every imaginable opening and I have been bitten not only by ants and mosquitos but also by this somewhat hairy spider - and that hurt!

And with that my rainforest adventure got definitively less enjoyable.

So it was with an utmost pleasure and anticipation of a 4-6 weeks of a big city life, that I enthusiastically packed my city clothes, which I hardly had a chance to wear in Puerto Rico - except for an occassional trip to San Juan.

Upon arrival I thoroughly enjoyed my daughter's creative dining room redo - a party tent (see above), a candlelight dinner

with good food, great wines and lovely company

I enjoyed sleeping in my old - but oh, so comfy - bed

admiring my daughter's prize winning fashion design:

and a tiny part of her fabulous shoe collection