A swan joke, and our 2nd COVID vaccination

 We have been in Maribor for almost a year and we are absolutely fascinated by the swans.  They are always here, doing their graceful thing.  Last year I was sitting on a bench along the riverbank when a couple of them were mating.  At first I didn't realize it.  It happened out in the middle of the wide river.  The male climbed on the back of the female and bit her neck.  "That's odd!"  I thought.  He kept biting her unmercifully and it dawned on me then what was happening.  I was amazed she put up with it.  Finally he got the grip on her neck that he wanted, and he pushed her head under water until his head went under too.  That's when it became obvious what he was doing because both their tails were sticking up.  A couple of human girls along the riverbank started crying because the swan was "killing her" - as they thought.

This year the sister missionaries have the apartment we used to have with its magnificent views of the river.  They told us about a mating they witnessed and they were visibly upset by how violent it looked.  I totally agree.

The swans mated early this year (at least some of them) due to a very warm spell we had in  April, and there are now little swan chicks in the nest by the Jack & Joe's restaurant.  They are good-sized compared to other birds, but they're just fluff balls, with two big, black feet underneath, and a bluish bill sticking out the front.  It is hard to see them under Momma's wings.

So, yesterday, Liz and the sisters went down to the church together and they stopped to look at the baby swans.  Sister C. and Liz were cooing, "Oh!  Look at the cute little babies.  Aren't they just the sweetest things?!"  And then Sister H. pipes up, "I wonder how far I could throw one.  Maybe it would fly."

So, maybe that shows how different people are.  Sister C. is very tender and empathetic.  Sister H. is more butch.  Her approach to things reminds me of my brother Jim.

Sister H., Sister C., and a local member

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This morning, Liz and I went down and got our 2nd COVID shot.  I am feeling SO immune - even though I realize we have to wait for full immunity.  Last time I reacted to the vaccine with a couple of days of headache, fever and a general weird head feeling.  They warned me that the 2nd dose is usually worse than the first.  Can't wait.

Traveling about - doing good.

 We went down to Celje yesterday with the Maribor sisters in tow, for a district  council meeting.  Afterwards, we went out to get some lunch at a little food stand named "Kabobj".  They have a beef loaf and one in chicken&bacon on rotary grills.  They slice off the cooked outer layer continuously.  The technique was invented in Greece and is called a Gyro by them.  They put the little slices of meat into a hot pita bread or tortilla and add veges and a couple of secret sauces.  It is marvelous.  

I was waiting for the missionaries after I got my order, and noticed this unusual tree.

The plaque says "She stood (lived?) in this place where the house stood.  She was born Alma Karlin  1889 - 1950   World Traveler and Writer".  You can read about her here:  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_Karlin

So, that is cool, but what interested me is how the trees are growing out of the stones.  The one in front has already plucked a stone out of the wall, and if the tree dies and decays, I suspect the wall will come apart.  You can bet that all the roots are pulling stones apart.  This is only a corner of the old house.  The wall extends 15 feet or so beyond this corner and dissolves into rubble.  The rest of the house is gone and the food shop where we bought lunch is about in the center of where it stood.  If you remember a photo I took last year of a bronze statue of a photographer sitting on a bicycle, with bulky cameras and equipment, that statue is kitty-corner from here.  She was here at the same time he was.

COVID is keeping Liz busy.  The missionaries are supposed to keep her updated on their symptoms so she can make entries in the church's medical records.  We have 10 confirmed cases still, so that is good that it isn't spreading any further.  About half of them are very sick, but none of them have life-threatening symptoms, so far.

Unfortunately, the medical help brought us to the attention of the government and the missionaries are being observed by the Minister of Health.  There might be a € fine € for not maintaining social distancing.  Worse, this could impact our ability to bring more missionaries into Croatia.

We have been back and forth between here and Celje &/or Ljubljana many times lately, so we've noticed changes as spring comes.  We saw green just beginning to peak out at the beginning, and now the fields are green, while most of the trees have at least some sign of new growth and most have emerging leaves.  It is a beautiful time of year.  We do love that drive - it is so very pretty.  The mountains with last vestiges of snow looking down on the little valley with church spires and castles standing above the little villages.  Vines and fields are looking good.

We are very impressed by the quality of the Slovene highways.  We take the A1 back and forth, which is a toll-way.  We have an annual pass for the tolls.  The trucks have wide tires, and they don't tear up the pavement like American trucks do.  They also seldom interrupt traffic like American trucks do.  They rarely pass each other, partly because their speed limit is slower than in America, and cars are always flashing by.  The truck top speed is 90, while cars can go 130, and lots of cars (mostly German-built ones) go far faster.

   There are some highway standards that bug me.  Like there are lots of times when there is a painted arrow on the highway indicating that the lane can continue straight or turn.  Immediately after these, the lane splits into two and quite a way farther along are arrows indicating that one is for turns only while the other is only for straight ahead.  Many times I end up in the wrong lane and don't realize until the last moment that I have to move over.  Why?

  We do love the rest areas.  A few of them are just a parking area by a pit toilet, but most are nice areas with a gas station and good restrooms.  They are seldom more than 15 minutes apart.  What a nice way to travel!

Yesterday we were in Celje to clean out the church.  People here don't horde TP, but they are just like everybody else when it comes to hording church materials.  I tackled a storage closet and threw out all the out-of-date church materials.  We filled up the trash cans outside and only removed about a third of the old books.  The remainder are still piled in the hall, waiting for space in the trash cans.  I found instructions manuals as old as 1952, and we were instructed by the church to throw out all manuals printed before 2014.  I also threw out hundreds of old DVDs, video tapes, and cassette tapes.  People just hate to see them go, especially the DVDs which were precious a few years ago, but are now obsolete.  All this stuff is readily available on the church web site.  We worked very hard for two hours and that was all my old joints were up to.  The sisters, too.  They fell asleep on the ride home.

Sad news.  My brother-in-law, Jess Stevens died Sunday.  He grew up in Hinckley and attended Delta H.S..  He married Liz's next younger sister, Susan, and we have naturally been very close.  When Liz's family gathers, Jess and I were the outsiders - not that they made us feel that way, but when we talked about fishing and hunting everybody else drifted away.  We enjoyed each others' company and were just fine having a private talk.

  He developed chronic arthritis when he was still young and it got so bad he couldn't shake hands or pick things up.  They gave him a medication that made the arthritis tolerable, but with warnings that it causes liver disease and other dreadful things.  He took it for 30 years and in the end it was his liver that gave out, but his kidneys and some other organs were right behind and contributing.  Sue has been great about it, appreciating that the meds gave them 30 years of good quality of life.

  I will miss him, and he owes me a fishing excursion on his pontoon boat.

We still love being here on our missions.  We will go back to Celje Sunday because I will conduct the worship meetings.

COVID strikes

 Well, we had a good. long run with none of our missionaries afflicted with COVID-19.  A week or two ago, we had one who came down with it.  Sadly, symptoms manifested the day after transfers.  For those who don't know how transfer days work in missions, it is a day at a regularly scheduled time when the mission president and his helpers re-arrange assignments for the missionaries.  Same stay at their same location, and some move to another one.  They have to stay together two-by-two, so all the missionaries who are involved gather at one location and go home in their new pairs.  Often, the missionaries who aren't involved come too, so they can have a social gathering, say goodby or hello, and be friends.

The implication of a missionary declaring COVID symptoms the day after transfers, is that the missionary was already shedding virus, but nobody was aware of it and they naturally relaxed their guard, didn't wear masks, ate together, hugged each other, etc.  The Mission President's wife hugged all of them, of course.  As soon as we realized one of them had COVID (at that time it wasn't confirmed but the first symptom was loss of taste and smell, which is pretty specific to COVID) we had every pair of missionaries involved in that transfer isolate and go into quarantine.  And now, we have several cases of active COVID amongst them, in two countries, and including the mission president's wife.  A few of them are very sick, but most are not greatly affected other than by being isolated.

We have a first injection of Pfizer vaccine, which isn't proof against it, but is supposed to prevent the strongest symptoms if you get it in between shots.  I wasn't feeling great last Wednesday and took my temperature.  I had a temperature 4 degrees above my normal.  I had headache, which isn't normal for me, and they persisted in spite of Tylenol.  Yesterday I was only 2 degrees above normal, but still had headaches and general malaise.  Today I feel a little better, but have some congestion in my lungs which seems more like bronchitis starting up than something exotic like COVID.  Nonetheless, I feel like I should isolate until I'm better, but the mission nurse disagrees.

Yesterday we had a baptism for a young man in our Celje Branch.  We worked with the family to give him a nice program and celebration.  Churches are still restricted, so only family were there, along with the branch president, and Sister Ashurst.  I sat in the car outside the church and watched it on Zoom, while wearing a mask.

Earlier this week, Liz walked over and took this photo of our sister missionaries sunning themselves on the 30-inch window sills above the fountain at our old apartment.  Cute.

The days are warming up and we have our flower boxes out hanging on our balcony.  The swans are on their nests, and these birds are still here, although they will leave soon to go to nesting areas.

They look kind of like seagulls, but they are something else, entirely.  I never paid much attention to my birds while studying zoology.

Restaurants opened for outdoor seating this week.  We have lived here for many months and keep telling ourselves that someday we will go to the fancy restaurant on the balcony of the hotel next door.  The one in whose parking garage we pay to park our car.  Tuesday, the weather was nice and we went over for lunch.

This is a panorama photo going from east to west.

The restaurant is called City Teresa, which means City Terrace.  The hotel is the City Hotel.  So there you go.  I am sorry we didn't photograph the dishes we were served.  We had lobster and shrimp soup that was yummy.  I had steak, which turned out to be fried prime rib.  They served it still in a frying pan with lots of juice, and a plate with the veges.  It was truly wonderful.  Liz had salmon and it too was perfectly cooked and served.  It was very, very nice, and not cheap.  As we ate, a cloud moved in and it started to rain.  Before the government shut down restaurants entirely (last Fall) this space on the Terrace had no roof.  Now it is covered and there are sliding doors so they were able to close it for us when the wind picked up.

Today, as I hung our flower trays on our balcony railings, our waiter came onto the stairway between our buildings and complimented us on our flowers.

Missionaries

 Yesterday I woke up remembering a dream about the young missionaries.  I seldom remember my dreams, and don't put much stock in them when I do.   In this case, I don't so much remember the specifics of my dream - I just remember that I woke up with a very happy set of thoughts about them.  We work directly with the dozen or so young missionaries in Slovenia.  We are isolated from the rest of the mission because of travel restrictions and isolation due to COVID-19, so we are quite involved with their work and daily lives.  As a consequence, we have come to love them very much as if they were our own grandchildren.  They live by some strict rules, and along with isolation they need more social interaction than they sometimes get.  We try to fill in the gap.  One of the things we do is always invite them to dinner at our apartment on Sunday evenings.  Of course the ones assigned to Maribor get the most benefit from dinners at our house, but all of them hear about it and occasionally participate.

  Yesterday, we had to go to Ljubljana for a medical appointment (travel restrictions allow travel if you have proof of a need, such as medical appointments) and took advantage of our permit to stop at the new Ikea store that just recently opened there.  We were looking at couches as Liz plans for our return next December, and she wanted to measure, try the cushions, check colors, etc.  It took a very short time for me to see everything I needed to see, so I was just waiting for her.  As I did so, I noticed a little display with a tall stack of small blocks of wood with cutouts on the ends.  Then I realized they were cell phone holders.

One of the slots is for thick cell phones like this one in its case.  On the opposite side is a thinner slot for thinner phones.

I have been looking for cell phone holders ever since we lived in Zagreb a year ago.  I used one there to hold my phone while reading as I ate breakfast.  It's a simple thing, but very nice.

When Liz came over we decided to get one for each missionary in Slovenia, as well as one for each of us and one for a sister who arrives this coming weekend.  I happily passed them out as we did apartment inspections that afternoon, and the missionaries were very happy to get them.  I imagine some of them will be neglected and become one of the "dead missionary" pieces of junk that accumulate in missionary apartments, but I think most of them will be very welcome.  They are especially nice when trying to participate in a Zoom call over the phone.  We've noticed in meetings that propping the phone against a book works for a while, then suddenly their picture on the call is of the ceiling or floor and then they have to re-position it again.  This little device solves that small problem.

It gave me a lot of happiness to deliver these and the chocolate chip cookies I baked for them as we visited them.  I am saying this in an effort to describe how my feelings for these young people are very tender.  I LIKE doing little things for them.

The work here is hard.  They are doing a great job of finding people to teach, but they don't teach very many who see the need to join the church.  There are several reasons, among them that the people are culturally Catholic.  The Catholic church is their heritage and they don't want to abandon it, even though the Catholic Church is very much in disfavor and few people attend it.  Their families often oppose them joining another church, and joining ours sometimes severs familial and friendship bonds.

Also, they were in a Communist country for a long time (1945 to 1991) and the communist schools taught them to abhor churches.  Communism in Yugoslavia wasn't violently anti-church like some other places, but it taught the kids anti-religion for generations.  Sometimes, people accept the church when the missionaries teach them, but don't like to make the commitment of baptism because they are afraid of getting their name on a list, which the communists used to use to select people for special attention.

So, the biggest hurdle for people here to join the church is that they don't see a need for a church in their lives.  They've lived without for so long that they don't have an instinctive need for it.  They are happy to see us, and happy to listen to what we have to say, but see no reason for it to go any further than that.  We have people who have been visiting with the missionaries for 3, 4 or 5 years, and are no nearer baptism than when they first started.  And that means the missionaries can get discouraged.  I am very impressed at how our young people carry on, in spite of all the discouragement.  They do their best, and they do have successes.  And I love them for their diligence, and their creative ways of finding people without going out and meeting them first, and for their cheery, positive attitudes.  They are wonderful young people.

Buying eggs

 Sometimes the metric system rises up and grabs you by surprise.  Here in the EU eggs are metric.  Not that the eggs are any different in themselves, but when you go buy a dozen eggs there are only 10 eggs in the carton.  They invented the baker's dozen over here, but now they are making up for it with a vengeance!

We actually noticed this phenomenon pretty quickly after we arrived here, but I recently learned another interesting egg fact.  In Europe, it is illegal for commercial egg producers to wash the eggs.

Back in the olden days when I was an actual, practicing biologist, I was a certified egg inspector.  We would go into stores, check with the manager, then retire to his cold storage room and candle several dozen of his eggs to see if there were any bad eggs in there.  Usually there were not, except down in Mexicali - but that is another story.  One of the things we down-graded on was any sign of a feather or little poopie on any eggs.  You see, in the USA it is illegal for commercial egg producers NOT to wash their eggs.  In the USA, they wash off any feathers, poopies, and the protective wax coating naturally found on fresh eggs.  Consequently, in the USA, fresh eggs are always found in cold storage.  They have a tendency to spoil if left at room temperature.

But in Europe we open our egg carton and regularly find a feather or two, a little poopie here and there, and nice fresh eggs with their natural waxy layer intact.  They don't bother to refrigerate eggs, and the eggs don't spoil if you leave them on the kitchen counter for a week or three, because the waxy layer protects them from infection.  So, both approaches work.  I prefer the EU system, personally.

Also, the eggs are quite frequently fertilized here, another thing we would downgrade them for in the USA.    It doesn't make any real difference, but there is usually a tiny little red spot inside a fertilized egg, and I used to downgrade eggs for them.  Now I enjoy eating them.

So, that's about all for now.  We are under quarantine again.  We actually have our visas now, but they still reside in Ljubljana at the immigration office and we aren't allowed to go there, yet.  So I am back to my branch and Auditing duties.

News from around the World

 There is a new Tom Hanks movie out called, "News from Around the World".  We liked it.

The best news we've had in a long time is that we were able to get our COVID vaccinations, yesterday!  And it was Pfizer vaccination, which was our first choice (not that anybody has any choice in the matter - they just give you what they have.)   We feel very good about that.  Now, maybe we can visit other places in the mission before we go home.  We get our second injection in 4 weeks.

The Slovenia missionaries were all here in Maribor to meet the mission president a couple of weeks ago.  At that time we were cleared to meet in the church, but the government has since clamped down on meetings again.  But we met in the church and after a good visit with President and Mrs., they all took off on a hike to climb the little mountain behind town.  I opted out because of my knee, but offered to order the food for lunch.  

The most-famous hamburger joint in Slovenia is just a block from the church and the young missionaries (I include President and his wife in this) were excited to have some.  The only time we  have restaurant American food is when we are with somebody else, but we enjoy it when are led into situations like this.

The restaurant has a catchy name, but only for English-speakers - such as Americans and students (who have to learn English in school.)  The church and restaurant are also very near the university, so there you go.

Jack & Joe   Steak and Burger Club

One of the missionaries called me when they started back down the mountain, so I walked to Jack & Joe's and ordered the food they'd told me they wanted.  The most exciting menu item is a burger with five  1/4-kilo meat patties!  A quarter kilo is a bit over 1/2 lbs of lean meat, each, and each has cheese, plus there is bacon on top.  I encouraged a couple of the guys who hadn't had them before to try it, and four of them accepted the challenge.

The "Bud Spencer" burger.

The four contestants.

The rest of us had a lot of fun encouraging them and teasing them as they dug in.  Who would you think would conquer it first?  The guy second from left, Elder Goldman, is leaning forward in the photo so you can't see that he is actually about 6'7" tall.  Everybody thought he would wolf it down first.  The guys on either side of him, Elder Handly and Elder Christiansen, had experience with these big burgers or at least had heard the stories.  The guy on the right, Elder Taylor, is quiet and didn't say much, so nobody paid him much attention.  Somebody started a timer when they took their first bites.

  In case you don't recognize Bud Spencer's name, he was a famous swimmer and later in a lot of spaghetti westerns with Terence Hill.  A big man.

The rest of us started eating at the same time as the contestants (they just ordered burgers, but by the time we started they were in a contest they hadn't agreed to.)  After a while, one of them noticed Elder Poulos was done with his burger.  That was at 13:24.  None of the rest were even close, and nobody was entirely sure when he actually finished - they only saw that he was done.  Elder Handly finished at about a half hour, Elder Goldman, about 10 minutes after that, and Elder Christiansen took his time, helping with other things and coming back, finally finishing as we were taking out the trash and getting ready to go - long after the timer was put away.  Altogether, it was a very fun lunch with the entertainment.  Elder Goldman very nearly got sick and for a while we thought he was going to pop, but he settled down and was able to finish without disgrace.

SWANS

The swans are nesting again and one pair chose a patch of grass between Jack & Joe's and the sidewalk as their nesting sight.  As always, the city put up barriers to keep people from stumbling over them (and protect the walkers from angry swans.)

The swan hen is turning her eggs

As we walked along the sidewalk, we decided the barriers need to be out in the street.  She did not like us to get close!

Mrs. President Field and the Maribor sisters before lunch.

We like to have the young missionaries come to our apartment for meals, so we invite them often and always on Sunday afternoon.

Preparing a lunch after District Council meeting.

We celebrated Liz's birthday by having the sisters over for roast beest.

One day, several weeks ago, we were walking in Maribor and went into a jewelry store.  Liz has not really liked the custom engagement ring she had made a few years ago, so she asked about remaking it again.  She has the diamond I gave her, and she has her mother's diamond, and a few smaller stones.  It turned out that she got it back nearly on her birthday, so she got two pieces of jewelry for her birthday.

I got her this crystal swan necklace for her birthday.  We love the swans in the river here, and it is also is the Swarovski symbol.

This is her new ring set.  She is very happy with it.