isoglossia

Magda recently discovered that the camera bag contains a set of magnifying filters, stackable lenses that greatly decrease minimum focusing distance. Within minutes of screwing all three of them onto the front of the lens, she announced, “I have a new hobby!”

We are big fans of the camera-as-toy concept. Jon Armstrong recently wrote a bit of calculus regarding the economy of digital photography relative to film. However, one area that’s impossible to quantify is how much your behavior is altered by knowing that there’s no waste of film, paper, chemicals, processing, and time (all of which equal a lot of money) if you press the shutter when you maybe shouldn’t. In Argentina I had two film cameras: the Minox, which is extremely expensive to operate regardless, and a P&S Olympus. Given the high cost of film and processing there, my math indicated that each time I pressed the shutter it was costing me about one U.S. dollar. Since I was always short on money, this meant that I took very few pictures, and nearly every time I did take one I wondered if it was worth it. This is no mindframe in which to take photographs. It was while living there that I realized how quickly a digital camera would pay for itself.

A camera is not only a toy, but also a learning tool. How much faster would I have come to grips with exposure times, aperture, ISO, and on and on, if digital photography had existed when I got my first camera? Not that I regret learning about film any more than I do starting to telemark when leather boots were the norm. But now, watching Magda get into experimenting with the camera, seeing her reactions to the instantaneous positive feedback from it, is very fulfilling and enjoyable for me. Shrinking down from 3008 pixels to 165 has killed a good deal of the cool textures and crispness Magda captured as she crept around the house peering at things with a keen eye. Below, some of her first close-ups:

In case you’re wondering:
Row 1: wine glass reflecting mouse; throw pillow; “Northern Exposure” box-set–
Row 2: coffee machine; African violet; TV speaker–
Row 3: fusilli; toy-box top; rabbit heart dissection project sun-dried tomatoes in oil–

Thanks go to the excellent Mandarin Design for help with the formatting. If the table above does not appear properly in Internet Explorer, go here and follow instructions for resolving browser issues.

I mused about the cost of photographic experimentation back here, too, from a time when I wasn’t paying for the film.

Primož Trubar, 10 SIT.
Slovenia is slated to join the Eurozone in 2007. Accession to the European Union happened nearly two years ago, but since then we’ve been in something of a probationary period, making sure that all the little details necessary for full membership are taken care of, stuff like ensuring that law enforcement practices and road safety are up to EU standards. Next year, Slovenia will be granted all of the privileges of the Schengen Agreement. Border controls will come down along frontiers with Austria and Italy (and Hungary? Ready?), sex workers will move freely, and we will replace the colorful tolar with the, let’s face it, aesthetically drab euro.

Even faced with the prospect of the homogenizing dullness of the euro (and the anticipated price-hikes it may bring) I, for one, will not mourn the passing of this particular bit of cash featured here.

The ten tolar note is the smallest of Slovenia’s folding money, both in buying power and physical size; like many other nations, Slovenia issues notes with sizes relative to worth. The image above is actual size.

I do not love the ten tolar note. Seven of these little slips of paper, if you are unlucky enough to have so much capital tied up in this form, will buy you a cup of coffee from the vending machine where I work. That is, if you can entice the machine to accept them, because ten-tolar notes tend to reach the end-user in a highly rumpled, torn, dirty, dog-eared and Scotch^®-taped state.

At today’s rate of exchange, this note is worth €0.041741, or $0.051558. Imagine having a nickle bill. What this means to the walking-around cash-spender is that, if conditions conspire against you, you can have a sizeable wad of money in your pocket yet not have enough buying power for a beer. The humanity!

Much as I dislike this note, I will hew to precendent established in previous money shots #1 and #2, and discuss the iconography. This note honors, if that is the word, Primož Trubar, a champion of the Protestant Reformation in Slovenia (until excommunicated), and the man credited with both standardizing the Slovene language and publishing the first books written in it: the Catechismus and Abecedarium (whose titles look distinctly un-Slovene to me). The latter gets notice in the upper left on the obverse of the note. Trubar also published the first New Testament in Slovene, traces of which you can see on the reverse. Also on the reverse is a picture of the Ursuline Church, on Ljubljana’s Kongresni Trg. Although this page claims it as “the most beautiful Baroque work in Ljubljana”, I have to say that architecturally speaking, it’s not my cup of tea, and only adds to my antipathy toward the note, as does the color scheme. Can we agree that shades of olive, phthalo green, and maroon do not constitute the ideal palette for a note that is doomed to the grubbiness of filthy lucre?

One last thing: this page notes that “Almost every larger town in Slovenia has a street named after” Trubar. Ljubljana, in fact, has a bar named after him: “Trubar”.

Me: So, I somehow managed to get a month 16 report posted.

Magda: Yes, you didn’t mention anything about his new teeth! And what about that picture of him with the green watering can, through the glass?

Me: Umm, ugh, tired, what?

Well, Adam,
This has been quite a month. For you it’s been a good one, play- and growing- and learning-wise. For your parents it’s been rather tough, but not because of you. Before we get into the all-about-you part of this post, let’s have a little context.

This month has seen a big job-hunt on the part of your papa, with mama doing some of the heavy lifting. We need to figure out where you’ll be spending the next few years, and how your parents will afford to keep you in Huggies^® (you’re up to #5s now! Pull-ups!) It seems to boil down to this: we stay in our comfortable place, in this job papa has gotten so used to, or we don’t. Robust rumors have it that my contract will be renewed for not one but three more years here, so option one seems viable. But in the flurry of job-hunting, that exhausting coil of searching, finding, writing, attaching, corresponding, imagining, hopingwaitingloathingetc, one gleaming possibility was unearthed, and if it pans out I guess we will be relocating. But we just don’t know yet, so as I write this report your immediate future is up in the air. I hope that by the time you’re 17 months old we’ll know where you’ll be celebrating your second birthday. All this uncertainty has made us feel a bit hemmed in and stressed out.

So the job hunting is finished for now, and it’s just about waiting, not entirely patiently, to know. But your poor old papa is so spent from struggling to fit the job hunt in between heavy loads at work and the morning & evening playtime demands of you, along with the stress brought on by looking for, finding, and hoping for a job that he really wants, that he’s basically going to phone this one in. Fortunately, your mama has been taking lots of pictures, and we’ll let them do most of the talking.

Up there at the top we can see you pointing at the moon. This was an especially cool event because two trophic waves of plasticity converged into one epiphanic stream: you learned that there’s a great glowing silver satellite in the sky, one, and you also finally figured out why mama and papa are always waving their index fingers around in the air. Guided by the light of the moon, you stopped staring at THE END OF THE FINGER, and looked at WHERE IT WAS POINTING. Eur-Malkovichin’-reka!

Now you love love love the moon and look for it at all hours of the day and night and regardless of cloud cover or the phase of said moon. It’s a little bit pathetic when you can’t find it, which, sorry to say, is about 99 times out of 100.

At some point since your last report, spring has more or less arrived here in Primorska. It’s still a little sketchy, with lots of moon-obscuring clouds and/or rain, not to mention hail, but it’s (grudging) progress. You are very interested in the plants that are popping up in our window-boxes and outdoors, particularly the edible ones, which to you means all of them. During this time the second anniversary of your conception has come and gone. No pictures of that.

There’s been increasing time spent outdoors when the spring weather manages to peep through, with walks and explorating of the playground down Cankarjeva ulica, where there are lots of delicious things on the ground, like gravel.

With spring has come daylight savings, but even with the sun an hour lower in the sky, you still wake up very early most mornings. Sometimes there’s time for a little story-reading before papa goes to work. We’re really happy about how interested you are in books, although it often drives your mama crazy when you pull out and strew about every single book you own before returning, predictably, to one of the three you keep in heavy rotation: The Very Hungry Caterpillar (now loved to tatters), The Little Engine That Could (you especially like the baby elephant riding in the coal tender), or Goodnight, Sweet Butterflies (a remarkably well-built book).

Some mornings you just play with your own shadow.

You’ve continued your training as a stuntbaby this month. The sofa-diving mentioned last month has now become an officially sanctioned daily event, since you’ve shown the good judgment of constructing a pillow-pit for safety before beginning the hurling of yourself into the air. The climbing up onto things, particularly in the high-bonking zones, we’re not so wild about.

But you also spend a fair amount of time creeping about closer to the floor, helping with the vacuuming, for example:

Or playing around under the desk:

You have been showing growing pains this month, with greater understanding of what the big people do, and you want to do exactly what they do (sit in chairs, for example, drink coffee, type at computer — hmm, seen through your eyes, our lives look painfully dull. Are you sure you want to grow up to be like us?) One of your favorite activities is to haul the kitchen chairs around like they are massive granite blocks and you are constructing the Great Pyramid of Khufu, then you climb up onto them and admire yourself in mama’s plucking mirror:

Sometimes we catch you kissing your reflection. Like we don’t do enough kissing around here.