The O.S. Addict

Sunday August 13th

This time we did not take the bus and walk to Gaj Wielki, instead Uncle Mietek drove us. After he gave us a tour of Tarnowo, via car, we went to the cemetery where grandma is buried (my Mom’s Mom). The church next to it is 800 years old and has just gone through a conservation process. The cemetary is undescribably beautiful and I can not do it justice by writing about, so please wait for photos. I will say this: families come once a week, mostly Saturday and clean the gravestones, weed, put fresh flowers and candles on the graves and tidy the surrounding area. It always looks as if it was All Souls day. There is no grounds-keeper, the familes keep everything looking nice.

We were hoping that the rain at the cemetary would not follow us but alas we were not so lucky. It was raining through out the day and the gray weather kept the rooster confused. The poor fella was cock-a-doo-a-doing all day long every few hours. We spend most of the day with my Mom’s Dad, Juzek Koziol, his youngest son Uncle Piotrek, Uncle Piotrek’s wife Renata, their 2 sons David-just finished college and Lukasz (Luke) - high school. Their oldest child Evelina, in her early 20s, was not there since she and her fiance were busy personally delivering invitations to their wedding next month, unfortunately we don’t have enough vacation to be here for it.
Althought the weather kept us inside we had a great time talking with Grandpa, (he is 86), Uncle Piotrek and Aunt Renata. Jason has a curious mind and is a very engaging conversationalist, so as a translator it was a hard working day for me, but I was very happy that we had the opportunity for my family to get to know Jason.

Besides learning what life for a farmer was like during the communist times and how it differs now under the European Union, we also discussed farm life in general. They use to grow sugar beets, wheats, corn for feed and potatoes. Everything that was grown would be bought by the communist government at very decent rates, so things were very good for farmers at that time. Now it does not pay to grow such things since there is no buyer for them due to world commerce being the driving force of the European Union. This means that even though Poland can produce many things, they are not encouraged to do so by the EU, because the EU wants Poland to buy these products from the other EU countries. So where once there was a buyers to be found for pigs and cows (for food), now there isn’t one and EU tracks every piece of livestock and every crop. The crops that the Koziol Farmers farm now are for their livestock and for themselves. Although they have pigs, cows and chickens, they sell only milk and get most of there money from that. Sometimes people do come directly to they and buy a pig or a cow, but this is also tracked and not their primary source of income.

When the rain took a break for a short while, we took the opportunity to strech our legs and I showed Jason the farm as the rest of the family tended to the animals. Grandpa went to the bulls to change their straw with a pitchfork. When we went up to him he signaled to us to go ahead and get closer. This was something Jason was not too keen on doing since he has never been this close to an animal that theareticaly could maul him. As grandpa stood in the door way to the bull pen, Jason got close enough for the chained, beautiful blue-black eyed bull to sniff him. All the bulls behaved themselves, they know better then to piss-off Grandpa.
Since we, the adults, toasted with Krupnik, honey and herb vodka liquor, David drove us to Uncle Mietek’s.

After one last hot tea and cake with Uncle Mietek’s family, he drove us to the city to our hotel in Poznan. We had a train the next morning to Warszawa (Warsaw) and it was less stressfull to be able to spend the night in Poznan and walk to the train station in the morning. By the time we got to our hotel we were wiped. Jason snored instantly and I, although completely exhausted from translating all day long, could not sleep. My mind would not rest. Good thing there was a tv in a seperate section of our room so that Jason could comfortably snore away as I watched “The Mummy” dubbed in German, ‘Oh Shnell’.

–Marzena

Saturday August 12th

Our hotel in Tarnow was within walking distance of everything in the Town of Tarnow, so on Saturday morning (5:30) we rolled out of bed and headed over to Uncle Mietek’s place to say good buy to Malgosia, her husband Jacek and the little Zemus (formal is Ziemowit, a very old Polish name, he is 10 weeks old). Jason got to bounce the little fella on his knee and we had breakfast with them. We got back to our hotel around 7:30 but could no longer fall asleep. All that was left was to head to the city where I was born, Poznan, 20 miles away from Tarnow.

Poznan’s beginnings go back to the 10th century, when a settlement was founded there. In 968 the town cathedral was build and the city grew. Today it is a large city with a lot of history and my favorite art museum, the Poznan National Museum. In the summer the museum is not crowded with school children and we spent 3 hours in it. Among the various modern art pieces and experiments in cubism and surrealism there was one floor with the clasical Polish paintings. Many of these I recognized from ilustrations in periodicals, children’s literature, and even reproductions that adorned my pre-school walls in Poland. These paintings of other children or of the Polish countryside with Polish people working the land burned themselves in my mind and it was a great feeling of happiness to look at them again.

By the time we left the museum, we could feel the toll of waking up as early as we did. After walking around Old Town and eating lunch at the “Under the Goats” (that is what the restaurant was called since it was under the city hall tower on which 2 mechanical wooden goats come out evey hour to butt heads much to the tourists’ amusement) we made it to only one other museum before heading back to the hotel and dropping dead on our very hard matresses for the afternoon nap.

In the evening we walked back to Uncle Mietek’s place with a Wisnowka (Sour Cherry Vodka), which we could not bring back due to the recent developments at the London airports, then ‘by golly’ we would drink it with family. Nazdrowie/Salut. Uncle Mietek, who is the older brother of my Mom, worked in a steel mill and is now retired. He and his wife Crystyna, have three children (all adults, oldest one is few days younger than I) in order of age from oldest to youngest 2 girls and a boy: Malgosia, Kasia, and Andzej. Uncle Mietek has a great interest and talent for building his own house, garage, plastic green house, pond, and gardening. Jason bombarded him with questions on all aspects of building and gardening. It was a great evening filled with food, Wisniowka, and conversation. My mouth and head hurt at the end of the evening from all the translation back and fourth and I still had Sunday ahead of me. Tomorrow, we are spending the day with Grandpa and Uncle Piotrek’s family on the farm in Gaj Wielki and once again I am going to be the translator. For now we are going to sleep very well.

–Marzena

We are now in London with an hour to go before our last flight to Amsterdam.

We just ate at a great place called Giraffe. It turns out the waiter is Polish, which we didn’t find out until Marzena was paying the bill and he asked after seeing here name. They chated for a bit in Polish and found out that he and wife are here for a while to save money. He said in Poland you make enough to get by, but not enough to save.

We are both really tired and can’t wait to get to the bed and breakfast. I’m pretty sure we will both be sleeping like the dead. I got about 30 minutes sleep. Also, I don’t think we will be taking British Airways again.

-Begin Rant
The folks and the food are very nice at ba, but the size is way too small. American Airlines had much more room. I truely felt like a sardine in a can. The other thing that really sucked was the entertainment system. One of the best parts of taking long international flight is that you get to see a couple of movies. I was trying to watch what was listed in the magazine as “Thank you for smoking” and turned out to be some funny movie about the faked alien autopsy. It wasn’t bad, but I was annoyed that I watched a movie I didn’t really want to. The reason I kept watching is because one of the characters in the movie was the same one that is in “Thank you for smoking”. By the time I realized that it really wasn’t the right movie, I figured it was too late to start another movie. Beyond that there was a really loud background clicking in the audio system and every once in a while the a really loud static that would be louder than all the movie audio. So, after I put with enough of that to get through the wrong movie, I listened to my audiobook on my iPod. I sounded so good after listening to total crap audio. I was not the ony one having the issue, I know that Marzena was. She tolorated it a bit better than I, plus she got lucky and got a movie that was not listed in the magazine that she wanted to see. “Kinky Boots”
-End Rant

We are in Vancouver now waiting for our flight here and I’m having a hard time staying awake. We have a four hour layover here. We are down to one hour before our 18:10 flight. Can’t wait to get on board and sleep. I think I’m running on five hours of sleep now after a long hard week. Marzena seems to be doing ok though.

Marzena and I just got on the plane to Vancouver. Then it is off to London and then Amsterdam!

It been a crazy week trying to get everything done in time. We finally got everything moved off the first floor Thursday and Friday the crew ripped up all the old floors in a day!

Last night, we went to visit my grandpa Bruns in the hospital. We wanted to see him before we left, so we drive up at like 9 pm and got to see him. So much of the family was still there to visit I was amazed. It was good to see everyone and to see grandpa is his usual joking high spirts. He did look a little pale, overall pretty good. I thinks he is getting out today which is great!

After visiting, we spent most of the night finishing up packing and then the morning putting all the stuff on the counters away and tweaking the timer for the soakers hoses that will hopefully keep our garden alive. We are looking forward to having the hardwoods and tile work done when we get back. We are also replacing most of the doors are the first floor. For those of our friends that have not seen the place since we remodeled the kitchen, I think it will really look like a new house.

Anyway, I’ll stop my rambling on now, but we just wanted to say thank you to Marzena’s dad, Gerard, for coming this morning from Tacoma and giving us a ride to the airport and seeing us off.

Really just testing the email post thing.
Sent via BlackBerry from Cingular Wireless

I was looking from something that I wouldn’t notice much while in my pocket.  Whcih means small size and low weight.  I like my sister’s new Olympus Stylus 810, however it was lacking two things I wanted. That being an optical viewfinder and good video.  Since video has come a long way on these kind of cameras, I wanted something would be useful in making family dvds and so I can hold off on buying a read video camera until the HD stuff drops in price.  Anyway, I did a ton of reading online with reviews on all the cameras in this size.  I finally came to the concusion to buy an Canon SD450 It is a great camera, can do 640×480 at 30fps and is only limited to 1G files. So I get about 9 minutes per clip. With the 4G hard I got I can take over a half an hour of footage in an amazing small package. Since the camera is almost a year in old in design it can me had for around $260. I bought ming at newegg.com,which had a combo deal to get a discount on a nice size SD card.I looked at some of the new model, but the add both weight and size for things like more megapixels and higher iso, which really aren’t worth it for me.  The top of the line Canon SD700 IS does had to sweet feature, Image Stabilzation and 4x optical instead of 3x.  The Canon software and processing has come a long way since my Canon S30.  It takes a picture at just over a second from power on.  It also has this great feature, no matter how you have the camera tilted when you take the picture, when you review pictures it knows which way you have the camera tilted and shows that picture right-side up.  Anyway, I highly recommend it and you can check some review here.  Steve’s DigiCams dpreview Image-Resource

Check out the Tour below of the new flock browser. I giving it a whirl right now. Looks real nice and has sweet intergration of blogging, photos and bookmarks.  I’m posting with it now.



Tour

Well, for now this is just place to put the geeky or cool stuff I find and use in the world.
——
A quick way to get a movie onto your ipod or psp, as if handbrake by itself wasn’t fast enough.

http://handbrake.m0k.org/

Got a good tip forwarded from Dan today.
http://www.apple.com/pro/tips/spotlighthint.html

I recently got a question about ogg and itunes. Looks like there is a couple of options.
http://www.nouturn.com/oggdrop/index.php
http://www.illadvised.com/~jordy/

Also, for the quicksilver users, and nice quick way to send a gmail or add to gcal.
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/05/04/quicksilver-plug-ins-for-google-calendar-and-gmail/

Some very cool desktop setups

http://www.tuaw.com/2006/05/02/rig-of-the-day-many-macs/
http://flickr.com/photos/interceptor/138871552/in/photostream/

One last thing,
Some good basic docs for iLife if you know anyone the might need a little help with it.
http://www.wellesley.edu/Computing/Idocs/index.html