isoglossia

Aleksander had a brief meeting with a wasp yesterday that ended rather badly. I have a zero-tolerance wasp policy, but I am a big fan of the honeybee and her works. Here we have an example of the preternaturally industrious Carniolan Grey beavering away for the benefit of her human masters.

As I was lying face-down on a bed of hot grass and tiny, fragrant wildflowers (and also: bees), Zdenka, one of the soldiers in the logistics unit, was yelling at me that the little purple blossoms I was photographing (she couldn’t see the bees) are good for making some kind of tea that is healthful and whatnot. She told me the flowers are called materina dušica (‘mother’s breath soul’). When asked what particular ailment the tea is good for she said, “everything”. When this was met with a small but evidently galling bit of skepticism, she advised asking the internet.

Slovenes will make tea out of your shoes if you stand still long enough and then they’ll give it to you for the hangover you got from drinking their schnapps made from flowers.

A good month later than usual, the weather here has finally erupted into painfully beautiful spring. The pale purple carpet of tiny tea-bound flowers murmurs with hundreds of diligent bees. The air outside the front door of our apartment building is heavy with a flower scent that would be cloying overkill in a perfume. Adam’s little bean plantation has cracked the soil asunder and thrust up his precious little plants whose daily progress thrills and baffles him. Cut grass throws off the snappy smell of freshly shelled peas, and the towering, candle-like cones of horse chestnut blossoms are filling the air with down that drifts in the open window of my office. Birds twitter and chirp, and a distant cuckoo underlines their formlessness with a drowsy but metronomic call for Cocoa Puffs.

In some ways, I will certainly miss this place after July.

Okay, you have answered my main question, Rand McNally.

Maybe I need a satellite view.

Jesus, where can I even begin? This has been the month when we thought maybe you two had won, and we’re still not sure we won’t be clambering into a helicopter on the roof before the next month is out, leaving the place to you and your oppressive regime of endless howling and wanting.

Then you’ll be all nice for 25 seconds and we’ll congratulate ourselves on having procreated until the next whine marathon throws us back into our circular recriminations of so whose bright idea was it to have two of them?

Basically, it’s been 30 days of ear-splitting noise punctuated by the occasional crack of a head against a floor or television set — or, remarkably frequently, another head. The weather has not helped, as spring postponed itself behind a veil of nearly constant rain and drizzle, turning the apartment into a stressure-cooker of times-out and germ incubation. And so of course there’s been the related health lock-down as well. When neither of you was coughing up parts of yourself, nearly all of our energy has been spent in trying to come up with ways to distract you from destroying each other. As soon as we got a break from nearly constant nose-siphoning, for example, we fed your shared locomotive obsession by paying a visit to the old Yugoslav steam engine near the railway station:

And there was the first-ice-cream-of-almost-spring outing:

Serving as both a scream-defeating distraction and an incentive to get Adam’s behavior to suck marginally less, there’s been the Swimming Pool Project. This began as a simple If you want x then behave y arrangement, but it quickly devolved into a byzantine array of charts, graphs, calendars, and color-coded stickers for bad, medium-bad, and marginally not-technically-horribly-bad behaviors in a complex Behavior Matrix. Of course Adam understands all the rules and corollaries thereto.

Anyway, he did get to go to the massive Vodno Mesto Atlantis as an Easter Monday treat, evaded the sinister pitfalls of the Behavior Matrix by the skin of his teeth for a return visit (during which he mastered the water slide), and today as I write this he is one time-out/Alek-choking away from the Behavior Matrix’s incontestable decision on whether another visit will take place soon.

Though Adam is the one determining whether or not we go, Alek took to the water with even more enthusiasm and natural talent.

Alek’s other budding enthusiasms include rubbish inspecting, which is nothing new.

We’ve really been impressed with what a pretty little monkey you’ve been turning out to be, but the sweeter you look the more vexing you become in actual fact, which turns out to be rather important. This is a kind of transition month for you, Alek, as you begin to really shed your baby shell and emerge as something approaching a boy. This is accompanied by much deep frustration on your part and a certain amount of resistance from your brother, who is not ready to let you out of his stick-shaped shadow nor to share the limited amount of boy resources in this house. This has only added to the enormous amount of stress in the place, and there really are days that we’re ready to sell you both for medical experiments.

Fortunately, you’ve developed a habit your brother never cultivated: you’ve got a duda addiction bad, a real monkey on your back. We’re trying to break you of it, but it’s no easier for us than it is for you, since it’s often the only way we ever get any silence these days.

A trip to the playground keeps you two from each other’s throats for ten to fifteen minutes, with luck.

Left: quiet Alek puts in a token appearance. At right, the real story (please mute your computer’s speakers). If Adam’s phase provides any guidance, things should quiet down sometime in mid-2010.

I do not know what this is about. Ask your mother.

Now it’s time to admit that we have turned in desperation to the benevolent cyclopic gaze of the TV screen, in amounts that shame us as much as they bring relief. If endless iterations of Thomas The Tank Engine: The Early Years Disc One will not soothe it, it cannot be soothed. Unsoothable. Papa spent long hours slaving over a hot Handbrake to get the Apple TV packed with kid vid, and now it’s paying off in daily languid waves of LCD opiates.

In addition to the deathless embrace of Thomas and Friends, this month we’ve been watching a lot of They Might Be Giants’ ABC/123 stuff, and you guys are deeply in its thrall. Above, you are watching “One Dozen Monkeys”, which, coincidentally, is also the scientific unit for measuring the destructive power of a 15-month-old baby.

And here we all are watching something about two girls and a cup, I guess:

One day you’ll look back on all this television and thank us for convincing you that trains have personalities and weltanschauungen, you’ll be grateful that we exposed you to the twisted outlook of TMBG at such tender ages. But to be thankful later you’ll have to make it that long, so STOP CHOKING EACH OTHER, YOU MONKEYS.

Please don’t destroy each other. Not quite yet.

Total damage: one UV filter

File under Things I Am A Fan Of: seatbelts, helmets, and lens filters.

I’ve owned three Pentax SLR cameras in my life, and now, as of Easter Sunday, each of them has endured catastrophic accidental droppage. The cameras have always come through fine, which is a testament to the solid build-quality of Pentax’s products, or my luck, or both.

In a bizarre coincidence, my friend Erik had the same damn thing happen just a day or two later, but was also saved by the filter’s sacrifice. I guess it’s going around.

Be safe!

Post-egg-coloring I decanted the dye into some empty Campari Soda bottles and played around with off-camera flash. (The basic starting point for the lighting scheme came from Strobist).

If it’s not the dye but all those eggs that you’re looking to re-purpose, I’ve got a suggestion for that in the comments thread of the previous post.