Problems with Links in Blogger

Every year on our holiday in Turkey, Tanya and I take a one-day excursion to someplace with ancient ruins.  We both love history and Turkey has a great deal of it.  The first year we went to Demre and Myra, then to Pamukkale and last year to Phaselis. This year we went to Dalyan (not to be confused with Dalian; THAT would have been an expedition).


The above paragraph is from yesterday's blog post.  It contains several links but they don't show up as they should which is blue and underlined.  They come our grey and not underlined - example being Dalian in the last sentence.  I have tried to make them noticeable by bolding, underlining and using blue font before I create the link but I still get the grey .

Anyone have any advice on how to correct this problem other than by changing blog host?

Dalyan, Turkey: turtles, crabs and ancient ruins

Every year on our holiday in Turkey, Tanya and I take a one-day excursion to someplace with ancient ruins.  We both love history and Turkey has a great deal of it.  The first year we went to Demre and Myra, then to Pamukkale and last year to Phaselis. This year we went to Dalyan (not to be confused with Dalian; THAT would have been an expedition).

We left our hotel at 5:00 am.  Dalyan is a 4 hour bus ride mostly east from Antalya on very good but very winding roads crossing at least four mountain ranges. We stopped for breakfast going and supper returning, all included in the Odeon Tour price.

Southwestern Turkey from Antalya to Dalyan

Turkish country side

Dalyan is a popular tourist resort area with a sandy beach, sea turtles, crabs galore, muddy sulphurous hot springs and ancient ruins.  The Köyceğiz-Dalyan Special Environmental Protection Area covers an area of over 460 sq km and is home to many unique plants, animals and birds.  The Iztuzu beach, a sandy spit at the end of the Dalyan River  estuary is the nesting site for the Loggerhead Marine Turtle and includes a sea turtle research centre run by the University of Pamukkale.

If you click on this link HERE, you get a very detailed picture of the beach and the estuary of the Dalyan River which is slowing filling up with silt and forming reed bed islands.  While we could have driven to Iztuzu beach, we were given the "three hour tour" down the river.  We stopped to go crab fishing.  A simple process in which a piece of chicken is tied to a string and thrown overboard.  It is immediately grabbed by a crab which will not let go and is scooped into a net.  For $10 they would cook us one for dinner.  Yeah, right.

Dalyan Estuary

As we approached the beach, we saw a crowd of boats around one boat which had raised a sea turtle with a bait on a line.  We got close enough to see it.  It was still at this boat when we left 1 1/2 hours later which made me wonder.  Either the turtle was dumb as spit or it had the gig down cold and would perform for treats or, and I hoped this was NOT the case, it was somehow anchored to the spot.

Loggerhead marine turtle

One our way back from the beach to Dalyan we stopped for lunch.   After lunch we threw pieces of bread into the water for the fish.

Feeding frenzy.  The fish loved bread.

From there we went to the mud baths, which were swarming with tourists.  Tanya and I are just not team players.  We didn't have crab with our lunch, we didn't go swimming at the beach and we didn't go into the mud baths.  What we wanted was to tour the ruins of the ancient city of Kaunos,  Kaunos (2nd link).  It was not to be. The ruins are a local tour and not included in our day trip.  We only saw the tombs and some rock structures from a distance, while we were on the river.

Ruins of ancient Kaunos

Lycian rock tombs similar to those at Myra

 Anyhow, it was still a good day, we saw some new country and got back to our hotel about 9:00 pm dead tired. 

Cookie Monster

We have been on a cooking spree this week.  It is something we totally enjoy doing together.  It is our quality time.

Monday was Borshch and potato salad; Tuesday Tanya made a yellow cake and I made Mexican cornbread, of which most went to her boys.  Cooking for two is no fun so we send stuff home to the family all the time.

Wednesday we made 8 pizzas.  Once I found out Tanya could make the dough and she found out I knew what to put on them, we were set.  This is the third time for us.  Tanya started the dough about noon and from 2 to 4 we cranked them out one every 15 minutes.  Our oven will only hold one 12" pizza pan at a time.  We sent five home with the boys.

Thursday Tanya made pumpkin-rice "casha" which means "mush" but we might translate it as porridge.  Pumpkin, rice, honey and milk. I don't know the name of the squash, but do know it is not pumpkin per se.  The hide is hard and the flesh thick, hard and bright orange.  It can be eaten hot as vegetable, or as breakfast porridge or cold as dessert.  I love it.

We had roast beef for supper Thursday night and lucked out on quality.  Mostly I never complain as beef is beef and a treat to me, tough or tender.  This roast was cuttable with a fork!  With beef supplied by the dairy industry and no grading system, mostly we eat it as ground beef.  A roast is a rare privilege, so to speak.

Today was cookie baking day.  Tomorrow Tanya is going with Masha and her school class to Krivii Rih to the circus and a museum.  Masha requested oatmeal raisin cookies.  For 27 kids, two teachers and Tanya.  So we made two recipes today.  When I put the cookies in the pans I am lucky to get 40 from a batch, so I asked Tanya to do that part.  She got 60 cookies from the first batch and 48 from the  second.  We lined a new shoebox (apparently I wear large shoes) with serviettes and filled it with cookies and still sent home a dozen to both Andrei's and Roman's.

Did you ever notice when a recipe MUST turn out good, it presents all sorts of problems you never experienced before.  So it was with the cookies.  But they taste pretty good and the kids will love them.  Tanya figures Masha is thrilled because it is HER Babushka bringing them.

Tomorrow I make chili.  Yeesssss!  Tanya can't eat it, too spicy, so I make it when she is away.

Ukraine Slowly Loses Its Freedom

I said in an earlier post that the Regionnaires would likely win the election 10 days from now and it appears I was right to think so.  The Economist blog Eastern Approaches today posted this article: 

Ukrainian politics - Ten days before polling day

The ruling Party of Regions and its allies look set to win Ukraine’s parliamentary election on October 28th. They may even gain a constitutional majority with control of two-thirds of the parliament. This will likely happen despite the fact that most Ukrainians regularly tell pollsters their country is heading “in the wrong direction” and less than a quarter of them plan to vote for the Party of Regions.

Perhaps the most important reason for this is that Ukraine has reverted to the mixed proportional and first-past-the-post system last used in 2002. Back then, it allowed Leonid Kuchma, an unpopular president, to secure a working majority in parliament thanks to a divided opposition and post-election defections to his camp.

The same conditions are in place now for Viktor Yanukovych, the current president. His candidates can come out on top in first-past-the-post constituencies where three or more opposition politicians are competing. On October 14th the two main anti-Yanukovych forces agreed to withdraw some of their candidates in some districts in order to limit this phenomenon, but they have stopped far short of a genuine alliance. It is testament to the current parliamentary opposition’s ineffectiveness that it allowed this electoral reform to pass last year, giving the ruling party a chance to retain power in an election that could be classed as free and fair (given that an elected parliament had agreed to its rules).

Still, it appears Mr Yanukovych’s team sees no compelling reason to take that chance: there are plenty of ways to skew the vote before international observers, who see this election as a crucial test for Ukrainian democracy, arrive to observe the polling itself. Evidence from various quarters suggests this machinery is in motion across the country.

For more click HERE

This article is not comforting and simply reflects how Ukraine is sinking deeper into the morass.  It is becoming more and more like Putin's Russia.  It was more free under Yushchenko than ever before but that is rapidly giving way to government control and a police state.  Ukrayinskiy Tyzhden, Ukrainian Week has a very depressing article on how the government is clamping down hard on the few remaining independent media outlets, including their own magazine. They concluded the article with this information on a new Law on Slander that will kill investigative journalism.

On September 18th, the Verkhovna Rada passed a bill “On Amending the Criminal Code and the Code of Proceedings of Ukraine to Increase Liability for Attacks on the Dignity and Business Reputation of Individuals”. Officially sponsored by the Party of Regions’ Vitaliy Zhuravsky, the draft law was actually designed at the Presidential Administration as proven by an electronic file posted on the parliament’s website. The list of crimes in the new draft law includes slander, punishable with prison terms of one to two years or two to five years. Slander that accuses someone of a serious crime may carry up to a three-year jail sentence. Top officials are not hiding the purpose of the draft law. In its response to a question by the online publication Economic Truth regarding corrupt property foreclosures based on court decisions, the Ministry of Justice wrote that it was “dishonest activity” similar to that of the publication that “brought forth the legislative initiative to implement liability for slander”. The question about corruption was left unanswered.

  

If passed, the law on slander will destroy the remnants of independent journalism in Ukraine. In lieu of a fair judiciary, any journalist who criticizes an official or publishes an investigation on potential corruption will automatically become an object of criminal persecution with the outcome known in advance. This is essentially an attempt to apply the tools used against jailed opposition members to attack legitimate free media outlets using obsolete soviet provisions of the Criminal Code. Despite promises from government representatives to soften the draft law following sharp reactions by the Western and Ukrainian public and politicians, the law, if passed, will signal the end of free speech and journalism in Ukraine. After that, journalism in the country may degrade completely.The government seems to have taken a step back under pressure from the public. When this publication was being prepared, the Party of Regions’ Vitaliy Zhuravsky stated that he would recall his draft law on slander. However, he also said that he was going to submit a finalized version to the parliament after the election. According to The Ukrainian Week’s source in the Party of Regions, legislative changes on criminal liability for slander will “definitely” be passed after the parliamentary election. 

This is nothing new. If the tactics employed by the government on a massive scale succeed to win them a constitutional majority in the new parliament (300 out of 450 seats)—even if supported by no more than 25% of the population—the Yanukovych regime will be able to completely ignore the international community. In doing so, he may point to having “absolute popular support” and a constitutional majority in the parliament as signs thereof. “All questions about Ukraine will be answered after the election,” said Yanukovych at the Yalta European Strategy conference. In this light, this phrase may gain an entirely new meaning.

For the full article, click HERE

To be honest, moving to Russia is appealing.  At least there it is all Russians and one knows how the system works.

Alarm at Greek police 'collusion' with far-right Golden Dawn

Return of the Brownshirts a result of IMF austerity in Greece.

Greece's far-right party, Golden Dawn, won 18 parliamentary seats in the June election with a campaign openly hostile to illegal immigrants and there are now allegations that some Greek police are supporting the party.

"There is already civil war," says Ilias Panagiotaros. If so, the shop he owns is set to do a roaring trade.

It sells camouflage gear, police riot gloves, face masks and T-shirts extolling football hooliganism.

On the walls are posters celebrating the last civil war in Greece, which ended in 1949.

"Greek society is ready - even though no-one likes this - to have a fight: a new type of civil war," he says.

"On the one side there will be nationalists like us, and Greeks who want our country to be as it used to be, and on the other side illegal immigrants, anarchists and all those who have destroyed Athens several times," he adds.

You hear comments like this a lot in Greece now but Ilias Panagiotaros is not some figure on the fringes: he is a member of the Greek parliament, one of 18 MPs elected for the far-right Golden Dawn in June's general election.

To read more click HERE

Prairie School by Lois Lenski

Sometimes a kids' book is not just a kids' book.  I last read Prairie School by Lois Lenski almost 60 years ago.  It was 1954 and I was a Grade 2 kid in a one-room prairie school that my father had last attended some 20 years before.  The book came in a box of books from the school board office which had to be read and returned within the month. I never forgot the book. My kids found it on E-Bay for me for Christmas one year not long ago, 1951 hardcover, exactly as I remembered it, and I read it again just now.

In the Foreword, Lois Lenski explains that in May 1948 she received a letter from Maple Leaf School, a "one-room rural school in South Dakota, just west of the Missouri river and near the North Dakota state line".  The pupils wrote to tell her how much they liked Strawberry Girl which the teacher read to them when it was cold and they gathered around the large floor register over the furnace to keep warm.  Ms. Lenski received other letters from the students of Maple Leaf School in school year 1949-50, describing the terrible winter and their life on the Dakota plains.

She determined to write their story and inspite of delays of snow storms into May, she made the trip, met the students and their families, observed during class, slept in the teacherage.  Prairie School is a composite of their stories.  Maple Leaf School became the model for "Oak Leaf School".  The community was mainly German-Russians from the Odessa region of what is now Ukraine who settled there in the early 1900s. Their language and customs are captured by Lois Lenski's dialogue and also her wonderful pencil sketches.

 Eleven kids from 6 to 13 from six families came on horseback or horse drawn cart or walked in summer and winter.  Farm work interrupted school work for the older boys. The winter of 49-50 was long and hard; the Christmas Concert was cut short because of weather; school was closed often due to weather and once the children were caught and had to stay at the school. Spring was late but never-the-less arrived and the meadowlarks sang. The book ends (for me) with sadness and a feeling as empty as the school. Oak Leaf School (and Maple Leaf School) closed at the end of the year and the kids were bused to town in the fall.  As Miss Martin, the teacher, said "You must grow up and go on to better things".

Ten years later, the one-room rural schools were closed in our school district (which, by the way, was mainly German-Russians from the Volga who came to Saskatchewan in the early 1900s) and the kids bused to town.  I was in Grade 8 by then.  Prairie School described a piece of my own childhood and reading it was like a trip back in time.

Sometimes a kids' book is not just a kids' book. Sometimes it is a reminder of how life was.  Anyone who did not grow up on the prairies and who did not go to a one-room school will find the book interesting, even though it is intended for "8 to 12 year olds", but not nearly as meaningful as for those of us who shared the experiences.

The Quiet Life

We've been home a week now and settled back into the old routine.  Plus rain.  Fall in Ukraine is when we get the rain we needed all summer.  So far we have had about 60 mm or 2.5 inches; my dog dish isn't very precise.

Tanya managed a half day in her flowers and gutted the front flower bed so it was a good thing I got pictures when I did.  Since it is too wet to work outside we are in cooking mode.  Which is time we can share so we are both happy.  Borshch yesterday.  Potato salad today.  Pizza tomorrow.  Mexican cornbread next day or maybe tomorrow too; Tanya has a hankering. Friday will be a double batch oatmeal raisin cookies as Saturday Tanya is going with Masha's class to Krivii Rih to the circus and museums.  There will be 27 kids plus two teachers and Tanya.  So I need 60 cookies.  Or maybe 90.  Masha made a special request.

Kuchma and I are in the doghouse.  I suppose we should be in the cathouse by rights but that has a different connotation.  I let him in the house at 7:00 am and went back to bed.  We were out of milk so I gave him sour cream instead.  The cat didn't complain so I guess it was OK.  He must have lost his mind as he jumped on the bed on Tanya's side.  She flung him over to my side and he proceeded to pick dry mud out of his feet all over the blanket.

So far the green netting on top of the fence has kept Bobik from climbing out and when they are let out to run, they come back in an hour or two, happy to go back in their pen.

The Bible commands us to love our enemies and love our neighbours, which Mark Twain observed is usually because they are the same people.  We have not been on good terms with our neighbours for a couple of years now.  They are not easy to get along with but again, there are always two sides to a story.  I am by loyalty, forced to pick one side...however...

The rain has washed holes in the pavement that were patched earlier in the year, making driving difficult again.  Water soluble pavement is a new one to me.

We have an election coming up this month sometime for Deputies to the Verkovna Rada (Parliament).  The Party of Regions are the crooks currently in power and have little support in most of the country except Donbass region.  There may be up to 90 parties to choose from; one of the "benefits" of proportional voting.  Deputies from the smaller parties will sell their souls to the highest bidder after the votes have been counted.

The Regionnaires will most likely win.  It is not who votes but who counts as Stalin noted.  Several parties have teamed up to try to defeat them but I won't hold my breath.

Tomorrow is garbage day.  I am so excited.

Bobik climbs the gates without the green mesh on top.

Front garden Oct 11 before Tanya re-readied it for winter