“Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary”, “Up the Yantze”, first video posted

(posted from home)
(This post covers 21-24 December, 2008)

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Wednesday, 24 December –

We had an icy and rainy day today. I had promised Labashi I’d start moving books and computer stuff out of the guest room in the basement and into my new office. I find I just can’t part with some of my collections of books and I still kid myself that I’ll sell some of the computer stuff on Ebay. (“Yeah, right!”, she says) But I did manage to get two large bookcases moved up and I’ve made a large discard-some-each-week pile.
I signed on to the laptop mid-day and immediately had an incoming Skype call. This was a great one. Orat called using his Skype-enabled webcam and he had the grandkids on his lap. We had our own little video conference. The kids didn’t take long to turn it into a chaotic exchange but I just loved seeing them again.
That evening we watched more ‘Dexter- Season One’.

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Tuesday, 23 December –

I worked in the office most of today, generally handling estate tasks. I do tend to get a late start on my work, however. I like to browse through my email and now a whoe series of news sites… like CNN, DailyBeast, Slate, Salon, NewsMax, CBC (Saskatchewan, Manitoba, BC, and The North), Anchorage Daily News, Fairbanks News Miner, NPS MorningReport, York Daily News and York Dispatch, The Economist. I don’t look at all of them every day but hit each a time or two during the week.
In mid-afternoon I took my regular walk and that evening we watched ‘Up the Yangtze’, an award-winning documentary about the effect of the rapidly-filling Three Gorges Dam on a family and their neighbors. The family is cash-poor but lives fairly well on their garden. But the family has no money for school so the daughter must go to work on a cruise ship—one of many taking tourists to see the last views of the river before the dam fills. This is the kind of documentary Labashi just loves— it’s another world. Highly recommended.

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Monday, 22 December-

Today I worked for an hour or two on estate stuff, then spent an inordinate amount of time uploading a video clip to the blog. I kept getting errors until I finally figured out that Blogger video doesn’t like the Opera browser I generally use. The clip is from our Alaska/Yukon/NWT trip this past summer, a driving shot as we approached the Arctic Circle on the Yukon’s Dempster Highway.
We’ve had cold and wet weather for the last week or so and I’m starting to think of Florida. Thank goodness yesterday was the winter solstice and our days will now start getting longer. Our day here in south-central PA is a little over 9 hours long now. In Florida the day is about an hour longer now. But in Fairbanks, the days are under four hours long right now! Holy frijoles!

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Sunday, 21 December –

Correction: when I posted last night, we were planning to watch ‘Dexter’. Instead we watched ‘Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary’, an interesting documentary about a German woman who had served on the secretarial staff for Hitler right up to his suicide. Cinematically, the movie is quite boring since it’s merely a static interview with the woman—in German, with subtitles. But if, in your mind’s eye, you see what’s happening as she describes it, it’s incredible. Recommended.
I spent most of the day on the web. Labashi would like to have some travel documentaries so I was poking around. I wanted to check out the instant-movie viewer so viewed a documentary about Glacier National Park. Borrrr—inngggg. Looks like travel videos aren’t a strong category for Netflix.
I had a long Skype conversation with Orat today, mostly about estate stuff. Late in the day I took my regular walk. Labashi and I watched a Dexter, Season One episode that evening.

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