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Happy 4th of July!

For the last few years, we have gone to the Richmond Crane Pavilion on July 3 for their “early July 4th” fireworks. Various music groups play for a couple hours, then the Oakland Symphony plays for an hour leading up to the fireworks, following with more music while the sky lights up.  The area is extremely windy, which means the weather is usually clear, and the smoke never lingers over the fireworks target area. The celebration is not well advertised, and the crowds are pretty small, with (my guess) a thousand or so people, so it is always easy to get front row seating.

I decided to try some “artsy” photos this year.  The top image shows three of the fireworks, composited onto the San Francisco Legion of Honor.  While the fireworks in Richmond are great to view, there is no usable foreground to make the photographs more interesting, so I have to fake it…

A straight example of what I was experimenting with this year — no editing done at all, other than cropping the final image.

We sat on our deck and sipped wine while watching the fireworks tonight (the actual 4th). We could see lots of fireworks shows from our vantage point. Legal shows were seen at (right-to-left from our field of view) Golden Gate Fields, Berkeley Marina, Sausalito, Emeryville, San Francisco (Wow!), Oakland and San Leandro.  We could also see more than a dozen illegal fireworks in the Oakland-Berkeley neighborhoods below us.  When we turned on the 11:00 News later, they showed a camera pointed to the Oakland Hills, and commented on the numerous illegal fireworks shows going on there.  As we were turning off the news, we heard that there is a fire in the Oakland Hills.  We assume it was related to one of those illegal shows, which is the very reason they are illegal…

Here are some fireworks from last year’s Crane Pavilion, shot with a more standard photographic technique:

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Super Moon and Porch Sunset

This post is really just to show off a couple of photographs I took from our deck this weekend.  Sunday was the official “Super Moon”, which means the full moon was at its closest to earth. This happens once every 14 months, so is not completely rare.  However, it is a bit more unusual to occur on a completely cloudless night in Berkeley…  I shot 137 images of the moon (yes, it sounds like overkill, but was needed because…) and put it through some astrophotography software I have been wanting to try.  The results are rather spectacular if I do say so myself.  I have shot images of the moon before, but never got anywhere near this level of quality and detail.

137 images shot with Canon 5D MK III and 400mm lens, combined with astrophotography software


The next night was overcast and dreary, right until almost sunset.  Then it became moody and dramatic.  I grabbed my camera (after a kick in the rear from Evelyn…) and captured images for the next few hours, watching as the light changed.  Here is one of my favorites from the series:

 

View from our back deck June 24, 2013 near sunset

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Home For Sale!

Wow… This has been a much longer process than I ever imagined, getting our Berkeley home ready for sale.  After more than 4 months of giving away most of what we owned (65″ HDTV? Hey, you, painting the inside of our house? You want that? It’s yours!), and putting a few thngs into storage to ship with us to Ecuador, our home went up for sale today.  Now the waiting begins as we find out how buyers react to the place we have loved for the past 25 years.

You can see the official Multiple Listing here.

Open House is being held this coming Sunday (yep, Father’s Day) June 16.  Feel free to come by and maybe buy yourself a new home… 🙂

Our broker had the following line drawing made of the entrance to our house, which is used in the flyers:

Here are some other photos taken by the broker:

View from the deck outside our dining room

Front Entrance is on the street level, with other two floors below.

Entrance hall and main floor living room. Windows look out over bay.

Main level dining room plus two more views from the main level deck

Kitchen is also on the main (street) level. Stove is gas with 6 burners and 2 ovens.

 Upper left photo is main floor sitting room. Next two are master bedroom on 2nd floor, then last is extra bedroom also on 2nd floor.

3rd (bottom) floor is a full “in-laws quarters” with kitchenette, living room, bedroom, bathroom.

Top two images show our office while last two show bottom deck and backyard.

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Blind Success!

In January 2012, I was told that I have cataracts forming in both eyes.  They were not bad enough to get insurance to pay for LASIC, but might be so in a year or two.  Come back in a year and I might get LASIC in both eyes pretty cheaply.  I have considered, and then chickened out, on vision improvement surgery for decades, and figured now was the time I would have to pull the switch and go ahead.

In the summer of 2012, I started noticing a wierd visual phenomenon.  When I looked at a horizontal line that I knew was straight, it would have a bump in the middle.  I figured it was my developing cataracts, and decided to wait to do anything about it, since we were going to Ecuador for 3 months shortly.

When I was in Ecuador, I realized that my glasses no longer helped. I saw the same blurry image with or without them.  I left the glasses at home for the first time in 30 years, and relied on my “seeing eye Evelyn” for anything far away, or for something like a street sign across the street.

When we got home, I went to an opthamologist, and he said “LASIC won’t do you any good because you have a hole in the center of your retina.”  Oops, that bump in straight lines was me seeing the line pass through the hole and distort.  By this time though, trying to use my left eye made everything look like a funhouse mirror.

My vision had gone from “20/60 correctable to 20/30” a year ago to 20/400 now, non-correctable.  I was told that there was so much scar tissue due to the time since the damage, that the chance of success was only 85%, and that they would consider it a success if my vision doubled — meaning going to 20/200, which is still legally blind… 🙁

I went ahead with the surgery (seeing a knife going for you eye is not something I recommend for the squimish…), which included a recovery period of 7 days during which I was required to be “face down” 24 hours per day.  (Basically they cut the retina around the damaged area, put a gas bubble in the eye, then the face-plant encourages the eye to repair the damage tightly to the back of the eye, with no wrinkles or raised scar regions.)

7 absolutely, stunning, amazingly boring days later…

I went back to the surgeon yesterday. Among other magic, he took another photograph of my retina, and then showed me the comparison.  My left (damaged) eye now looked as good as my right (undamaged) eye. The doctor said that the level of success was amazing and that I would probably get my vision back to what it was a year ago!  It will take about 6 months for my vision to stabilize at that level though.

I’m still nearly blind, have a gas bubble that fills up most of my left-eye vison, must still be face-down 2 hours per day (just enough for a movie on my iPad), can’t drive, and can’t use the computer more than an hour at a time.  But I am ON THE MEND!

I really feared that I had lost vision in that left eye. Though I live my life with a primary mantra of “I refuse to live in fear,” I have to admit that I feared losing that eye.  Looks like all will be well though.  One side effect of this surgery is that it will create a cataract, but since I knew that was coming anyway, I consider that a small price to pay.

I am blind, but this was a success — Blind Success!  🙂

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Coming Home, Buying Home, Selling Home…

We returned home to California last week.  Seems strange to be back in The States again, and strange to be going into an office for a thing called a “job” again.  It is amazing how quickly we were able to adapt to life in Ecuador.

Which brings up a bit of news.  We decided around the first of the year that we do want to retire, and we want to do it in Cuenca. For the prior month, we had been asking everyone we knew to let us visit their apartment, and then grilled them on what they paid and how they liked the area.  From this, we had developed a rough map of the region we wanted to rent in when we returned to Cuenca.

One interesting young pair of Americans we met (Jesse and Nancy Lopez) had a beautiful penthouse condo right on the edge of old-town, right smack in the middle of the area we had decided on.  While we toured their place an praised it, Jesse mentioned that their neighbor was a British couple that wanted to return to England to care for a sick relative and were selling.

You can see their condo, which they are rening out at https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/758967?fb_login=1

We suggested having a look at it, and went next door.  The place was very nice.  The couple was going to the Amazon early the next morning, so we couldn’t talk to them again for a week.  During that week, Evelyn and I talked it over and decided we would love to live there.  They returned 2 days before we were to leave to come home.

We called and arranged to have another look at the condo.  Yes, it was as good as we first thought — actually better since it included some amenities we were not aware of the first time. We sat down at their dining room table to discuss selling, and 15 minutes had a handshake agreement. We spent the next day with a lawyer and notary, giving him Power of Attorney to sign the sales document for us, just before we got on a plane and headed home.

The sale closed today. We are now happy owners of a penthouse condo in Cuenca on the edge of Old Town. It is a 3 bedroom unit (for us that means bedroom, office and photo studio) with about 1800 sq ft. It also includes a rooftop workshop, a rooftop gazebo, a rooftop washer-dryer room, and a locked parking spot.  Oh yes, it also comes fully furnished, as the sellers decided they didn’t need any of the furniture or contents when they return to England.  We therefore have a turn-key penthouse ready to move into.

I will be staying at LeapFrog through the current product cycle, so we have until October to sell our Berkeley house and head South to the equator.  Adventure awaits!

By the way, if you happen to know of someone that is looking for a 3500 sq ft, 5 bedroom, 3 story house in the Berkeley Hills with an amazing view covering 4 bridges, drop me a line.  We are just now starting to get rid of a massive amount of “stuff” that has accumulated over the 24 years we have lived here, but this is an absolute fabulous house that we have loved for decades.  Now time to empty it and start the next major adventure of our life.

Talk about joys and fears, all mixed up into one… 🙂

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Don’t Rain On My Parade

or

Halloween In January??

[Note: I haven’t posted for a few days because I have been sick with a bad head cold, and have been staying mostly indoor for the past couple days.  This will probably be our last post before returning home Tuesday.]

Today marks the end of Santos Inocentes, and includes the second largest parade of Cuenca’s year (Christmas Eve Pase de Nino Viejo is the largest). This event originated as a remembrance of Herod slaying all newborn males after the birth of Jesus, but is now a free-for-all, and much closer to a Halloween parade, with lots of outlandish costumes and masks,

The morning started with us hearing a band in the street out front again.  I went out front and grabbed a few shots of a standard small parish religious parade, as we have seen come by before.  We assumed they were headed for the main parade, though it later appeared not to be the case.

The main parade was scheduled to begin at 4:00, so we took a bus across town (for 25 cents) to photograph the staging area. On the bus, Evelyn played peek-a-boo with a girl in the seat in front of us.

We arrived at the staging area… but found no evidence of staging?  We did see a different view of San Blas church than we had seen before, along with plenty of masks for sale and lots of police getting organized, so we knew we were in the right place.

We never did find a staging area.  This entire parade evolved somewhat differently than the Christmas Eve parade.  Of course that parade had 60,000 participants while this one was estimated at 1,000 which may account for some of the change. While waiting for the main event to start, we had fun looking at the audience.  The kids in particular were mostly in costumes or wearing masks, while some of the adults joined in the Halloween atmosphere too.

Notice the kid in the lower left seems to have confused Superman with Spider Man…:)

4:00 came and went with no parade.  4:30, still nada.  5:00 it started to rain and out came umbrellas (see top photo).  The umbrella vendors went wild and sold out in about 5 minutes… after which the rain passed and the rest of the evening was dry… At 5:30, the first of the parade started to come down the street.  One very common theme was a huge foam mask.  I never did quite understand what that was all about or what it is supposed to represent…

There were a couple dozen clowns in the parade.  They led things off, then wandered back through the parade length.  After awhile it became clear that they were actually aiding the police (perhaps they were police?) in trying to control the crowd — which was a lost cause, as the audience kept pushing further and further into the streets.

That clown in the lower left is doing high kicks, trying to push the crowd back to allow room for the parade to pass. The audience moved back from his kicks, then moved forward into the street again as soon as he passed…

Can you tell where the parade ends and the audience starts?  They were completely intertwined most of the time.

As with every parade, there were a few dancing groups

There were also a few religious themes groups

Most of the Halloween costumes didn’t appear to have anything to do with Herod and killing of infants…

Everyone seemed in a happy mood at the party / parade

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Mas Agua, Poco Color

[Note: This post by Evelyn] I had my last watercolor lesson with Alberto Soriano, a world class Ecuadorian painter, today. It was an honor and privilege  for me to learn from such a talented artist, and be so welcomed into his world. Alberto is quite passionate, warm, with a positive energy, that is absolutely inspiring.

One of the biggest challenges is that Alberto speaks no English and I speak almost no Spanish. However we were able to communicate with visual demonstrations of the principles, as well as my learning a bit more Spanish along the way. To discuss concepts, we resorted to using the Google Translator via Alberto’s 16-year old daughter, who aspires to be a rock star.

The first  lesson was  the importance of “dibujo” and the value of a  “bosquejo“. Of course, it helps to spell the words correctly before it can be translated, so it took several iterations before I understood that I had to start with a good value sketch using different cross hatching marks to represent various planes. And, good drawing (“dibujo“) skills were essential to being a good painter.

The first few paintings included still life, plants, and sun flowers, in which Alberto kept emphasizing “mas agua..mas aqua.. poco color” to retain the transparency of a watercolor compared to an oil painting. Then, it was the emphasis on “sombra“, “luz“, “voluminous“, “fondo“, “primero plano” and  “manchas” — the latter of which, doesn’t translate properly in my Spanish dictionary. The dictionary translation for “mancha” is “stain or mark”. It wasn’t understood until later that the word really meant “layer“, so the lighter colors are applied “antes” (before), and dark layers “dispues” (later), completing the painting with “detalles“.

Toward the end of the lessons, it seemed so natural to talk and laugh together between student and teacher. I felt like a slow learner, though. Here are the final two paintings:

Near the end of my private lessons, Alberto had a show and sale of his works. I couldn’t help buying one for myself:

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Looks Like a War Zone Out There!

New Year’s Eve in Ecuador in unique, and Cuenca celebrates it larger than any other Ecuadorian city. For the week leading up to NYE, people make elaborate or simple effigies.  Some families manufacture them and sell them to those who don’t want to make their own.  On NYE, they write notes about things they want to forget from the old year, attach them to the effigies and then burn them at the stroke of midnight, banishing the old problems and allowing the New Year to start off fresh.

We headed out in the early afternoon to scout where effigies would be concentrated. We discovered a town getting ready for the Big Night. Another Ecuadorian custom is to wear yellow undergarments to bring you money in the New Year (yellow being close to gold), or to wear red to bring love. We saw several shops with red and yellow underwear and bras for sale. We also saw fireworks stands, and kids playing with their poppers. Masks were for sale, and lots of kids were wearing them.  We even found one family had blocked off a street and were playing musical chairs and laughing uproariously.

 Effigies came in size from infant sized to huge, and in the form of men, donkeys, spaceships, and even aliens.

 

There were even cartoon effigies, and the occasional full costume

There were a couple of tableaus of politicians, with loudspeakers denouncing the president, the mayor, and pretty much anyone in politics — except themselves of course…

This family got an early start by burning their effigy at 3:00 in the afternoon

While waiting for midnight to approach,we had a delicious shish kabob at this vendor.  Dinner costs us $1.50…

At the stroke of midnight, the effigies were piled in the street and fires started

Some of the bigger piles burned so hot you couldn’t get near them. Some lone effigies burned to a corpse-shaped pile of ash

As all the effigies were set fire, the place started to look like a war zone, with fires burning everywhere in the streets.  Brought back memories of the riots in Berkeley when we were in college in the late 60’s

As the fires burned, people started dancing — alone, in pairs, and in conga lines

As we headed home, fireworks broke out in various places around the city.  None were announced ahead of time, and none lasted more than a few minutes

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I Can Read Elven! (Plus Gualaceo Market)

We finally got into a local theater tonight to watch The Hobbit.  If you are fans of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, as we are, then you will love this movie.  We saw the 2D version, largely because it was in English with Spanish subtitles, while the 3D version was purely Spanish.  Our command of the language is nowhere near enough to let us enjoy a film like this yet.  Sigh… maybe someday…

However, when this film is seen in America, there are subtitles when the characters speak in Elven or Orcish.  Here in Ecuador, the subtitles continue in Spanish.  For a moment I thought I would have to miss that part of the movie… then… slowly… I realized I could read the subtitles well enough to understand what was being said!  I still can’t speak Spanish worth a darn, but I am starting to get so I can read it surprisingly well.  (We were at a local museum a few days ago and I found myself reading the Spanish description to Evelyn…)

We took the bus to Gualaceo this morning to see both the Sunday Animal Market and the daily food market. The ride took about an hour, but only cost us 60 cents each.  The bus was packed — the mass transit around Ecuador is heavily used…

 

The market was smaller than the one in Cuenca, which surprised us.  It consisted mostly of pigs, with only a few cows.

It was occasionally comical watching the farmers trying to get their pigs to go where they wanted

 After the animal market, we took a $2.50 taxi over to the farmers market, which runs every day.

The church dome was just visible over the awnings of the market

Fruit vendors were spread throughout the market area

Vegetables, eggs and even sugar cane were also plentiful

The interactions of vendors was interesting to watch

Many people just sat in small groups watching the world go by

There were plenty of interesting faces in the crowd too

We were getting hungry around 2:00 so decided to go find a lunch place.  Of course, I was ready to go into the first place we saw, but Evelyn was more choosy.  She went into a pharmacy, on the theory that pharmacists have more money and would be pickier about food.  The pharmacist behind the counter knew no English, but was glad to help and gave Evelyn two recommendations, saying one had good seafood. 

Off we went.  Should I eat my crow now or later?  She was right, of course. The recommendation was fabulous.

I had crab soup, which included a whole crab sitting in a delicious broth

After we ate and paid, we asked the restaurant owner where to pick up the bus for Cuenca. He said to just flag down the red & yellow bus outside the door.  We did so… and found it filled to overflowing. Standing room only.

So, what would you expect to happen in America in that case?  How about the conductor giving up his seat for Evelyn, and a young man offering me his seat a couple minutes later?  No, you say?  Yes, in Ecuador.  Not only that, but the driver noticed that Evelyn was shooting photographs of many of the effigies we passed.  He then actually stopped the bus and opened the door beside her, so that she could photograph some of the more interesting effigies we passed.

And remember, we are visitors to this country, and can barely answer the simplest of questions about where we come from, and how long we have been here.  The people here continue to amaze me in how welcoming they are.

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Yet Another Unexpected Parade

There are celebrations and parades all over Cuenca this time of year.  The trick is finding out where and when they will be ahead of time.  There have been many nights that we hear fireworks, step outside and see them glowing from one direction or another.  The times and locations vary all over the map, with fireworks being seen at 7:00, 8:00, 9:30, 10:30, midnight, and even 2:00AM once.  The shows are all over in 5 minutes or less, so no time to grab a camera and head that direction once they have started.

This morning we were eating breakfast and heard a brass band out front.  Sure enough, another unexpected small parade was rolling by our front door.  I put on some shoes, grabbed a camera, and went out for some quick grab shots.

This was another Pase de Nino parade again, with a small Christ doll carried in a car.  There were three cars covered with cloth for make-shift floats, and one motorcycle with a Santa sleigh cover.

The small parade consisted of roughly 50 people dressed in the usual angel and wise men costumes, along with a brass band.

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