No rose withouth thorns?

Having technical difficulties again. ( See post: I am not a total idiot)

This time with blogger: no life support here, I see, extremely difficult to post to a group help. I moved around html code - knowing nothing about it - in order to position pictures the way I want it and must have done something wrong, because now I get an error message, that my code can't be accepted because ending something something lacks corresponding something something at the beginning.

Great, looks like customer friendliness of blog sites is everywhere in the dark ages - if not one way than another.

Malmo botanical garden

Scania, or Skane, the southernmost province of Sweden, has a relatively mild climate, rich soil and a large variety of beautiful gardens: from general botanical, park and palace gardens to various specialised ones, like a pharmacist's garden, displaying all sorts of medical herbs, a green roof experimental garden and a test and idea garden.

Malmo's botanical garden is located in the capital of Scania province, its largest city, Malmo.
The garden is large, surrounded by buildings of such different architectural styles like the modern glass house of Malmo library:

and a traditional building of a regional administration, Landstingshus:

Strolling through the various parts of the garden it I enjoyed its water and bog garden:


and its traditional Skane cultivation garden:

Many of these plants were cultivated for dried flowers bouquets, to be enjoyed during the long, dark months of winter.

Shark, kitties and the hurricane Rita

Two years ago I lived on the north end of Padre Island, an over hundred miles long, and mostly still undeveloped barrier island stretching from across the Corpus Christi Bay to the border with Mexico. It is a nice place, if you like wide, long stretches of sand, a decent surf, fishing and can live without forests, as the vegetation there is sparse. My apartment building was facing the dunes, the beach and the sea behind them. I have a cat, Rascal, a huge black and white "tuxedo":

Rascal loved the sunny dune- level balcony and frequently ate, drank and lounged there. Soon I noticed that a small, skinny cat was visiting him there and helping herself generously to his food, yogurt and his fresh, cold water. Rascal did no object, so I figured the visitor must have been a feline. She was very shy and ran away in panic as soon as she seen me coming, but I developed a habit of leaving her a generous helping of food on the balcony every evening.

A few weeks passed and I noticed that she started gaining weight and became less shy: now she would come also when I was sitting on the balcony, and a few times even ventured inside, helping herself to more of Rascal's food.

At the end of August I went on a couple of weeks long trip and asked my pet sitter to feed both Rascal and the stray, who now practically lived partially on the balcony and partially in the sand under it.

I came home one evening with a dengue-like symptoms, fever, headache, body ache, not really able to care that a hurricane Rita was approaching Texas coast - even though both Emilia and then Katrina taught us not to be too complacent about the possible danger. But I was too sick to care. I fed Rascal and the stray and collapsed onto my bed.

I woke up next morning still sick like a dog, barely able to open the balcony door for Rascal to go out, and just before I fell asleep again I heard that the evacuation of the entire north Padre Island was ordered by the city of Corpus Christi by 2 pm the next day, when the bridge to the fast land would be closed. Oh, good, I have 30 more hours, I thought while falling asleep again.

A couple of hours later I woke up to some strange noises coming from behind the iron-work headboard of my bed, which was placed in a corner of the bedroom, on the diagonal, to assure the best view from the bed. I lifted my very heavy and very achy head a little, looked through the iron lattice of my headboard.... and could hardly believe my eyes. There, in the triangle was the stray from the balcony and four tiny, apparently quite newborn kittens, still blind and barely crawling.

I looked through the window and saw that the sea had already swallawed the entire beach and the waves were already rising above the dunes. No wonder this cat mama sought shelter for herself and her offspring. But now I was responsible for evacuating not only myself and Rascal, but this new family addition, too. Oh my, oh, my.

I willed myself - it wasn't easy in my condition - to get up and prepare my car for the trip across the bridge. I managed to lug over some hard to replace documents and necessary supplies (mainly water and cat food) to the car... and fainted after the second or third trip.

No, I decided. That would not do. I need to get stronger to be able to drive myself and the cats off the island and to the safety of the Texas Hill Country where my friends still lived, since shelters refused to take pets and all the hotels in the 250 mile radius were already booked.

My daughter called and asked if I was about to evacuate and whether I've taken the family albums with me. OK, I promised not to leave the family albums behind and told her I would be evacuating tomorrow, just well before the bridge closed. I did not tell her I was sick and I did not tell her that I have now been appointed a guardian to a stray cat - which I named Shark, since she came from the sea (well, almost) and had very sharp little teeth - and her four off springs. Daughter was too far away to be able to help, so stressing her out would be pointless. I ate some consomme, took some pills, slept most of the afternoon and all evening, fed the cats, ate some more consomme and slept all night to the melody of Shark's and Rascal's content purring and tiny noises made by the kittens behind my bed. When I woke up the next morning, I was feeling better, the island was almost deserted, there was not a single bottle of water and not much gas left at the only still opened gas station, and the water level in the sea was as high as the day before. I ventured as far as to the bridge leading to the fast land and saw that the water level in the bay was also terrifyingly high, almost touching the bridge's driveway at lower levels.
But the sun was shining and the sky was as blue as it could be. It didn't look like an approaching hurricane at all. And then I heard an announcement that the hurricane Rita moved towards Texas-Louisiana border and the evacuation of Padre Island and Corpus Christi was called off, because we were no longer in danger.

And Shark's kitties could now grow and prosper in safety. cared for by both Shark and Rascal, who gladly - or at least patiently - assumed a role of a daddy .

Experiments in minimalist living: Simrishamn

Three years ago when I started my early retirement, I decided to go to Scania (Skaane), the southernmost province in Sweden, where I lived about a decade ago (see post A place with a view on minervavelsangrona.wordpress.com). Although during most of my time in Sweden I lived in Stockholm, and loved it, after I discovered Scania, I fell in love with it, too.

Simrishamn, a picturesque fishing village turned tourist mecca, seemed like a right place to spend a summer in - may be even as a permanent base from which to travel. I was lucky to be able to rent a small townhouse (row house) in a quaint, less touristy and much smaller village near Simrishamn; white brick, red roof and two tiny gardens, one in front and one behind the house. Part of the garden was already planted. A plum tree,
a small lawn, and a hedge of red currant bushes.
And I could instantly enjoy most welcome guests in the garden: flowers planted by my neighbor several years ago, that threaded itself to my side of fence:

But the inside of the row house was empty. Initially I had no furniture - just my clothes, books, laptop and a few " making me feel instantly at home" accessories.

So the day I moved in I bought a camping bed and bed linens, a lamp and a phone. I hanged a painting by a Costa Rican artist friend, put a cardboard box I found to a good use... and voila: a stark, minimalistic bedroom

But with a living room I hesitated. My brother offered to bring from Stockholm my furniture that he stored for me, so I decided to wait a week or two.

Just happened to read somewhere about some music celebrity, who was into a minimalistic design big time and in the living room of his vacation cottage he had only a big rock and a Bose stereo.

OK, I am neither that young - or that macho - to enjoy reclining on a rock, nor a musician, so I decided on an armchair and a TV as my minimalist requirements.

But before I managed to go to town to shop for those pieces, one of my new neighbors dropped in for a visit, to see who I was, how I was settling in and if I need anything. Her gesture delighted me, but also surprised. Swedes are usually shy, do not initiate contacts with strangers, but are usually polite and helpful at heart behind that facade of standoffishness.

This woman from Scania, Carina, was just the opposite: welcoming immediately, trying to be helpful without being asked, not shy at all and not a slightest hint of standoffishness.
Her attitude was that of an instant friend.

And as an instant friend, after seeing my empty apartment and hearing about my plans, she took charge: put me in her car and drove to a country flea market of sorts, where she quickly pointed me to a rustic fall leaf table and a couple of chairs for the breakfast nook in my kitchen and for my living room: an armchair ( an early IKEA design circa 1950? ), a side table, a small puff to serve as an ottoman, a TV, a lamp, curtains matching the chair etc.
When we brought home these purchases, she left me to arrange them, and returned soon after with a couple of plants for my windowsill. And voila again: an instant living room in a grandmotherly-minimalistic? cottagy-minimalistic? style? You be the judge :-)

Where is the service in service economy?

Today I was looking for a different kind of help than yesterday. For simple, manual labor: a move-out apartment cleaning, carpet cleaning, window washing, loading and unloading those belongings I decided to store and those that will go to a charity, but are too bulky/heavy for me to handle on my own.
Until now, whenever and wherever I moved withing the USA, I had no trouble finding that kind of services as I needed them and at acceptable prices. No such luck today.
Well, yes, I found 10 firms offering cleaning services in town and 12 more around town. So far so good. But here the "good" part of the story ends. Most of those firms did not answer their phones or did not return my call. Out of the remaining firms I got three bids. One cleaning service wanted $100/hr for two cleaning ladies with a two hour minimum, the second wanted $225 firm price and the third did not really know how much they were going to charge, but they assured me that the price would "certainly be reasonable"!!! I kid you not!
And no, this is NOT a typo: the service firm wanted $ 100 an hour for sending two cleaning ladies. The cleaning ladies would, most probably be Latino immigrants, who would be lucky to get paid $7.50 an hour each - if that much.
Thus the service firm's direct labor cost for these ladies would be $15 = 15% of the quoted fee!
OK, let's be fair and add to that some indirect labor costs (though I doubt they carry much, if any, of them) supplies, equipment, transportation (if they pay for it, which I also doubt), liability insurance, overhead, administration, advertising, taxes. Let's be generous (well, they might be less than efficient) and assume that the total cost of the service they provide is 25%-30% of the fee they demand. That comes out to a 70%-75% of pure profit! Talk about US still being a land of opportunities!
This pattern repeated itself concerning moving help: similar prices, similar assumed profits.
Where, on earth is any serious, willing to get business competition? Is there no unemployment, no beginning of a recession? Is this situation now typical for the USA at large or just for this particular corner of the Bible belt? And why? Questions, questions.
Ah, well, since I can't get any service from the service firms at a price I am willing to accept, I guess the only thing I can do is to go tomorrow early morning to a place in town where day laborers gather, talk to them - luckily I speak enough Spanish - and hire myself cleaning and moving helpers for about $15 an hour.
I'll have to do my own recruiting, hiring and supervising - but at least the profit will be all mine.
USA has a well developed service sector - I'm sure you heard that time and time again. It was once true, but does no longer seem to be, even as unemployment is rising. Sad and unbelievable!

I am not a total idiot

... I'd like to think, although, I admit, I sometimes behave like one... (Don't we all ?)
I am just not interested in technological details, which, I think, I should not need to know in order to use technology to do what I want it to do.
What??? you ask. OK, I shall explain: do you think that it is necessary to know how the car's engine works in order to be able to drive a car?
No, I did not think you did, because most people, most drivers in fact, would just laugh at such a demand. (And I bet that most drivers - me included - do not even want to know how and when to change gears - particularly Americans, since they had it so good for so long. Everything that can be automated, should.) Yet, when I was a young girl in the then communist Poland I was expected to pass the written exam proving I knew how a car's engine worked and how it was built, before I could actually start to learn driving the car with an instructor and get a license to drive it on my own.
The - ridiculous - explanation for that requirement was that Poland at that time had almost no car service stations, so car drivers were supposed to be self sufficient if anything happened to their vehicles. The incredible naivety of the car techies, who imagined that anybody, without a technical background, would be able (even if he or she was willing and had appropriate tools) to fix his/her broken engine at the side of the road, just after a few theoretical lessons on the inner secrets of car engines, still makes me laugh.
Today I feel in the same situation trying to upload my pictures to my wordpress blog.
Not that i am a total novice at uploading pictures. No, I uploaded tons of images to various power point presentations, email letters, etc. But not to a blog...
During the weekend I wanted to write a post about Scania's gardens and to do that I needed to upload some photos, but no matter how hard I tried, I could either post thumbnails or - when I tried full size images, they came out so huge, as to show only tiny, totally inconsequential fragment of the image on screen... even though one photo somehow accidentally "uploaded itself" (?) to a category (???) ... and ... lo and behold... there it showed in its desired size. Aah, the miracles of technology!
OK, I DID try not to be totally tech-arrogant, so I read - rather carefully - wordpress's faq posts about uploading images, and the forum discussions and did not find what I needed to find, because
1) the information I needed was not there
2) whatever information was there was written by geeks to geeks in Geeklish (= geek English), not for non geeks in English, so, not being conversant in Geeklish, I did not understand most of it.
Thus today I contacted technical support at wordpress to get some help and Mark responded very promptly (I have to admit, giving the credit where the credit is due), that wordpress has no autoresizing ... and referred me to a faq question: how big can my images be..... which I previously read and had no idea how to follow. Sigh....
This reminds me of another technology dilemma, which was faced by one of my former clients, a small, but international manufacturer of a highly specialized, technologically cutting edge product, who hired me several years ago to solve some serious problems they were having with their instruction manual and product training.
The instruction manual was written in an extreme Geeklish ( actually in geek-German and translated to Geeklish and geek-Japanese), by the company's tech aficionados, so proud with the cutting edge technology they developed and used in their product, that..... the manual they have written enabled their most advanced competitors to copy their technology and bridge the gap from their to my client's technological advancement level in almost no time at all, which, of course, was not exactly what the company's management and shareholders had in mind business wise.
But the same manual - and the tech-repair loaded training - was a constant subject of complaints of their clients, because, although their maintenance staff could fix the product if it malfunctioned with the help of the manual, their operators - the very people to which the manual was ostensibly being addressed - lacked enough technical background to be able to use the product on the basis of those waaay too geeky instructions.
It took me no time at all to convince company management to stop the manual asap and withdraw as many already distributed copies of it from circulation as possible, as not to give away all of their secrets to their competitors.... but it took me a lot longer to convince those tech-geniuses to help me as SMEs (= subject matter experts) to completely redesign it and publish in several interactive versions (on line, on DVDs, in different languages, not only those of the company owners, but those of the majority of clients) able to accommodate every kind of user with every level of technical background from - if need be - a practically illiterate (they did happen, particularly in Malaysia and Brazil) operator of a machine, in which this technological marvel of a product, critical to the quality of production, was installed, to a PH.D in physics at any manufacturer of a machine using this product as one of its components - without either boring to death the PhD in physics and similar or going over the heads of any of the end users
Immediately after we were able to get these recommendations implemented, and the new interactive instruction tools were distributed, clients started calling with praise how pleased they were with the improvements and soon after the company got a public endorsement - at the largest relevant technology fair in the world - from several largest manufacturers of those machines that used my client's product as a component, not only for the technological advancement of their product, but for "extraordinary customer friendliness" of their product training and interactive instruction tools. The sales' levels and company's profits shot up and stayed up for almost three years.... until their techies - left again to their own devices - managed to ruin the "extraordinary customer friendliness" of the company's new and improved products' instruction tools, once again reducing them to - incomprehensible for most end users - techno-gobbledygook. And the sales responded accordingly: they fell.
Geeesh, will they ever learn????

How do you like your cantaloupe?

I admit, I have some problems with bland tasting fruit, like cantaloupe or papaya and, unless they are served mixed with more assertive tasting fruit in a salad, I am inclined to.... add salt to them.
Thus my favorite summer desert is a fresh cantaloupe, cubed and lightly marinated in lemon juice (with or without a bit of rum or tequila) and fresh orange mint leaves ( I love orange mint, it is so fragrant, good also with Cuba Libre ) and sprinkled more or less generously (more if with tequila, less if with rum) with coarse Mediterranean sea salt. Help yourselves, please.
A culinary crime of the century, you say? Naah, just my everyday culinary transgression, perhaps. :-)