Journal of a Sabbatical

April 27, 2001

friday

Today's Reading: Budapest 1900 by John Lukacs

There are not enough hours in a day or days in a week to do even half of what needs to be done and/or squeeze in what I want to do or what ought to be done. Sometimes I don't even know the difference between what I want to do and what I must do. Even pleasure and play activities seem like huge demands on my time. Eek!

So, anyway, I slept for about 12 hours last night and arrived at the Botanical Department around 10:00 AM raring to go only to find out that Karoly and István had to go sell the book at the horticultural expo hence would not be available for the afternoon. Umm, I was planning to spend the day getting them up to speed with the new scanner. Oh well.

I scanned in a bunch of photos of pine cones and spent some time trying to track down a fix for an AppleScript memory leak, which was causing Photoshop to stop running after I had opened and closed it a few times. Details of rant about Apple knowledgebase and alarming tendency toward Meecrosoft-like absurdity hereby omitted. Suffice it to say, I was not a happy customer today.

BiB and I exchanged emails during the day to plan my trip to Kaposvar tomorrow. He emailed me a series of photos of an accident/rescue in Kossovo and I sent him a scan of a metasequoia cone. Different worlds for sure.

When I got tired of scanning pine cones and viewing accident pictures and train schedules, I locked up the office and headed for the horticultural expo. Unlike the Mass. Horticultural Society Flower Show, which takes place at the tail end of the evil Boston winter and hence indoors, this show had a mixture of indoor and outdoor exhibits and booths. You could buy anything from power lawn mowers to geraniums and then some. Many of the booths were in the small arboretum that surrounded the building. Trees were all in bloom. Tulips and lilacs are in bloom. It's full spring and then some here. Of course with all these trees blooming, I am sneezing up a storm, but it's just so beautiful that I don't mind.

The booth where we are selling the conifer book is inside on the second floor near the bonsai exhibit. I left my pack at the booth with Agi and walked around the show. This Hungarian thing for geraniums is serious. There is apparently a geranium category in the show, right next to the bonsai category. They were even in window boxes. All that was missing was the windows. The bonsai is very cool, though. I love the tiny juniper forests. They spark some childhood place in my imagination. I can picture mini-me walking through the mini-forest. I bought a tiny Japanese stone tower with a well, complete with detachable bucket, from one of the booths in the garden. Not that I have a miniature garden, but I thought it might look nice in my little Zen sandbox at home.

Agi and Karoly gave me a ride home. Karoly drove Agi's car, which was a bit of an adventure - an entertaining adventure. Karoly is all worried about my plans for the weekend. I guess he thought I was going to work tomorrow teaching him Photoshop. Oops. I did not realize Saturday was going to be a work day so that people could take Monday off for a long weekend extending through the May 1 Labor Day holiday. Oops. But I've made my plans and I'm going to Kaposvar tomorrow to see BiB. Even with the Monday-Tuesday holiday there remain Wednesday, Thursday, and part of Friday for the scanner/Photoshop project. The weekend is for the Kapsovar Project on Saturday and the Otis tarda Project Sunday and Monday.

[May 3: floppy finally unstuck from drive, photos now inserted into this entry. Top to bottom: view out Botanical Department window, flowers in bloom at the flower show, Agi selling the book at our booth.]

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