ISO

Identified Sleeping Object

It is not a cold winter, and yet I was kind enough to hang some fat balls for those in need. Only rarely are they visited by birds, probably because there is ample food in this neighbourhood. It is not a cold winter, after all.

However, despite the absence of manifest visitors, the ball mounted to the wall is obviously getting smaller and smaller, so I wondered who enjoyed it so much? I had considered the possibility of rodents getting to it, but ruled this out, as the ball is 1.5m from the pavement.

Last night, when I went to sleep and took a final look out of the window, the riddle was solved. Something was sitting on top of the fat ball, and as it was not moving, I suspected it was a dead leaf. A dead leaf, indeed, as it did not answer my knocking the window. When I took a closer look, I realised it was a mouse, or even a rat?

The photographer in me woke up to get his rusty old DSLR, which was no mean feat around midnight, only to find it was too dark to get anything done. The window was dirty enough to reduce my flash light to an ugly mist, so I set up my tripod for a really long exposure time, but I was still hampered by not being able to automatically focus, and I trialed and errored it manually. Note to the self: when working from tripod, switch off image stabilisation, as its mechanism interferes with the absence of perceivable movement. I spent about 30 minutes trying to get my best shot, and all this time my model was not moving a hair. I guess is it was asleep, having enjoyed a good snack.

This was not going to work, so I decided to step outside to take a closer shot. I planned to close the door right behind me, to avoid the Tom & Jerry-style gag of the mouse sneaking in and locking me out, shooting me with my own camera. However, right when I returned with the keys, the fat ball was empty. I will keep an eye on it for the next few nights, hoping that sooner or later, I will get a prize-winning picture of this Identified Sleeping Object.

Ablatio retinae - post scriptum

As Van Langevelde's Law dictates: things get better until they get worse. My eyesight had improved until it reached a plateau, and from there I had more and more problems seeing, and reading in particular. The optometrist concluded this was not a simple case of prescribing a different contact lens, and he sent me back to the oculist, who concluded this was a complication of my surgery of last summer: cataract.

Cataract is a well-understood phenomenon, basically the eye lens getting murky, typically a matter of time, but there are other causes, like, you guessed it retinal surgery. Nowadays, an eye lens can be easily replaced by a crystal-clear artifact, but it is not a simple do-it-yourself effort, so I had to go back into surgery.

From my point of view, the procedure was the same as last summer: my eye was anesthetised through a nasty injection in the eye, which was in turn masked by a light intravenous sedation, the sting of which was masked by an numbing ointment. Last summer, the injection into eye went by unnoticed, possibly because the eye was partly blind, but this time I saw it coming, although I did not feel any pain.

From there, the eye went blind, and I did not feel anything, other than water running across my skin, and things ran smoothly as they are supposed to be. After surgery, a cap was taped over my eye to protect it from outside violence, and I need to wear this cap during sleep for a week. Also, I need to take eye drops for a couple of weeks, and if the eye heals properly, in six weeks or so I can have a new contact lens prescribed. Looks like I survived this one.

Accio... erm... ablatio retinae!

It started with a little 'dead spot' in my right eye, big enough to make it hard for me to see my own nose. I thought I could deal with that, but the day after, the little spot grew bigger and bigger, until it consumed almost half of my field of vision. I had already decided to contact my family doctor the next day, when my brother in law, a retired doctor himself, urged me to contact the Emergency Ward immediately, as I might have been hit by something nasty.

Things did not look that bad, as the emergency doctor tentatively concluded the symptoms were caused by a minor bleeding in the eye, causing a little cloud of blood in the jelly vitreous humor of the eye to obscure my nose and more. This was going to disappear all by itself, like all bruises do, but he told me to contact my own doctor the day after, just to be sure. This was where things started to derail.

My family doctor hides behind a phone wall to guard himself from Hypochondriacs In All Sizes And Flavors, but is professional enough to provide a phone number for Real Emergencies. You know, anything on the brink of life and death. Modest as ever, I had categorized myself as HIASAF, so I decided to try again next next day to get an appointment. All in all, the blind spot looked like it had started to shrink, the edges were getting transparent and its color had changed from deep red through purple through blue though green, the way all bruises do.

I had more or less expected my doctor to tell me to call back if I could not see my nose in a week or so, but he wanted to see me there and then. Without further ado, he declared me a medical emergency, contacted an eye doctor in a hospital half an hour away, and told me to report there that same morning.

My other brother-in-law was kind enough to drive me there, and we found the hospital was currently in a state of decay. Because of the Corona state of affairs, it had been rearranged  to keep apart patients as much as possible, which worked like a charm, but it made it next to impossible for me to try and find the eye doctor: we had to try a good four desks.

It went fast from there. The eye doctor needed no more than a few minutes to conclude this was no bleeding. It was a full blown case of my retina having come loose, or 'ablatio retinae' for friends.  In my case, the ceiling of my eye had come down and was now obscuring my view on my nose and everything else. In order to keep things from getting worse, I had to undergo surgery as soon as possible, that is the same day.

I had hoped to return home for a moment to inform the rest of the family, but the highway was thoroughly jammed in a car accident, so after two hours we returned to the hospital unsuccessfully, and I was prepared for surgery.

Preparations opened with a sticker on my right cheek, that is the left one for you, with an arrow pointing to my right eye: this one, please. Over the course of the afternoon they asked me repeatedly for my name, birth date and eye, to make sure they were not going to kill anyone innocent.

My biggest worry for surgery was anything needle. My eye was to be anesthetized by injection (Needle 1) so nasty that I myself had to be anesthetized myself lightly through a roesje, i.e. a light intravenous sedation (Needle 2) which does not really put you asleep. I was given no less than 3 hours to worry about the two, and every now and then a nurse put some drops of something iodine into my right eye, which bites so badly the iodine is precluded by drops that numb the eye.

Needle 1 was camouflaged as much as possible with a ointment to numb the skin, which was applied to both hands, as they had not decided yet where to infuse me. Anyways, it took away most of the sting. I did not really notice the roesje, did not black out, and while I discussed this with the nurse, she smilingly told me that Needle 2 had already been applied. Looks like the anesthetist there is a black-belt Needle Ninja!

With all needles over, I was finally able to relax, and the operation was over in half an hour. An air bubble was inserted in my eye to keep the retina in position, and I was given instruction to sleep on my back to make the bubble do its work. A quick check up the day after confirmed that all is looking good, so far.

For the next weeks I need to apply eye drops thrice a day, sleep on my left side, wear an eye cap during the night and be really careful with my right eye. For you, things may look horrible, as my eye looks like it was butchered, and it was. For me, things look good, and I hope vision in my right eye will return when the air bubble dissolves in the next week. I'll keep you updated.

Mighty oaks

When I pruned some bushes in my mother's garden last year, I realized I knew next to nothing about how green things grow. The victims survived, though, and I managed to do a little better this year.

To further my knowledge in this area, I decided to pick up bonsai, starting from ground zero. So, last September, I gathered thirty-ish acorns to have them germinate. I put some in a bag with moist soil, some went directly in the garden, some in little plastic jars in the shed, and some in jars on the flat kitchen roof.

Some acorns in the bag germinated within weeks, developed centimeters of root , so I planted these in plastic jars, and kept them in the shed. The kitchen roof experiment was abandoned early, as the acorns planted there were stolen by birds, I suspect magpies (if they are reading this: I hope the acorns will rot in your belly).

Not much happened during winter. Every now and then I checked the plastic bag, and planted the acorns that had germinated. As soon as the temperatures started to rise above 15℃, the little jars exploded, and this week I moved the most promising candidates outside, to give them room to develop.

The Dutch have a saying "Boompje groot, plantertje dood", which implies I will probably not live to see these little oaks reaching maturity. However, I might see these growing to bonsaiable proportions in the next fifteen years or so. To be ready when the time is ripe, I will buy some cheap practice material, like Juniperus, from a nursery, to find out how not to approach this.

Looks like I am not the first one to travel the road from acorn to oak. George Bernard Shaw did this before me, and he expressed his experience better than I can:

I took an acorn and put it in a pot.
I then covered it with earth, not a lot.
Great pleasure was mine watching it grow.
The first budding green came ever so slow.
I watered my plant twice a week
I knew I would transplant it down by the creek.
One day it will be a giant oak,
To shield me from the sun a sheltering cloak.
Lovers will carve their initials in the bark,
An arrow through a heart they will leave their mark.
It will shelter those caught in a fine summers rain,
Under its leafy bows joy will be again.
Creatures of the wilds will claim it for their own,
Squirrels will reside here in their own home.
Birds will build nests and raise their young,
They will sing melodies a chorus well sung.
Under it’s branches grass will grow,
Here and there a wild flower it’s head will show.
My oak tree for hundreds of years will live.
Perhaps the most important thing I had to give.

Shoot!

I don't consider myself an photography aficionado, but I cannot deny I find pleasure in shooting family and whatever crosses my path. In the more than ten years that I own a Canon 350D DSLR I have gathered quite a library of pictures of family, martial arts training and the occasional holiday. So far, there are four pictures precious to me.

A concert of klezmer band Di Gojim, in the Houtmansplantsoen, Gouda (2006).

This one captured the mood of the performance quite well. I was awarded 3rd prize in the photography contest of local newspaper Goudse Post.

Miko of Hisaizu Shrine, Koshigaya, Japan (2006)

Training in the Miko Dojo, when visiting Japan I was determined to shoot a shrine maid, or miko. Tracking the girl with my camera, I had forgotten to switch off my camera's image stabilisation, with disastrous effect. Technically, this one is a failure, but I really like the swirly effect here.

Buddhist temple, Koshigaya, Japan (2006)

 This cat caught my attention, and acted like a model, willing to pose for me.

 Chapel of Marie, Udenhout (2017)

Shot with a long exposure time, this picture froze the interior, leaving the visitors as ghostly passengers. For me, it has a strong association of Mother Marie as a rock in the tide of time, with mortal humans coming and going like waves on the beach.

Floris!

I was in kindergarten "De Speeldoos" and Floris was my hero. The Dutch Ivanhoe, played by Rutger Hauer, was broadcast on Sunday evenings, and while my mother frowned upon watching television on The Day of The Lord, I was allowed to see it, because my father loved it himself.

I had always thought Floris had returned from the crusades, but when I recently re-watched the show, I found he had traveled the seas with the Portuguese. Anyways, when he returned, he found himself involved in a clash between the duke of Burgundy and Guelders, aka the good guys vs. the bad guys. The bad guys had taken his castle, and it takes more than one season to get it back. Fortunately, Floris is not alone, as he is accompanied by Sindala (or 'Sindelaar', as I heard it as a child), a fakir from India, adept in alchemy, magic and medicine.

Like Floris, I rode a horse, and with my friends, a galloped through the streets, making the 'hooperdehooperdehoop' sounds that real television horses made. And, like Floris, I dreamed of having a castle, and whenever I discovered how a real castle looks like, with diagonally painted shutters, thick walls and, of course, a secret tunnel, I updated my plans of the great castle, to be realized in our garden. My parents must have appreciated my lack of initiative back then, as I don't think a medieval castle, with secret tunnel and everything, in our backyard would have been a good fit.

I will never forget the day that the mistress of our kindergarten came to tell me something bad had happened: she dropped a vase of flowers over my shield, and although it was going to dry, for now it looked like a wet rag. Imagine, for a moment, you are Floris, ready to fight in an important tournament? And then you have to resign because the motherfucking mistress of kindergarten "De Speeldoos" spoils a vase with water over your shield? I admit, the word 'motherfucking' hadn't enriched the Dutch language yet, but you get the idea.

What still fascinates me is how I still remember certain scenes of the show, while I have forgotten most of the story. I do remember a man stretched on the rack, being interrogated by someone pointing a finger saying "Where is the seal", a scary devil in a bottle screaming "Alruin!", a knight concealing his identity by painting his shield, Sindala's alchemy lab and his clever use of a soaked rag as suction cup. I will leave the analysis to a licensed psychiatrist, but I definitely suspect that my early interest in science and magic stems from Floris.

Catweazle has left the game

I must have been 5 or 6 years old when I was introduced to Catweazle, a medieval sorcerer who managed to escape the evil Normans by conjuring himself into our 20th century. That is, he ends up in 20th century Great Britain, where he is charmed by modern magic, like electrickery, until he finally finds a way to return to the good old days.

I definitely was too young to follow the plot in detail, but a few years later I found the books by Richard Carpenter in the library around the corner, and I read them over and over again, and when later the two series were rebroadcast, I loved to watch them again, this time fully appreciating the humor and peculiarities of the Wizard of Saburac (and of Great Britain). This series was built to last! Chances are not very good, but I promise if I ever get a pet toad I will call it Ticker. Or Touchwood. Mayhap.

Yesterday I read the news that Geoffrey Bayldon, the actor who had played Catweazle and without doubt contributed to his popularity, passed at the age of 93. The creator of the series, Richard Carpenter, died in 2012. It must be a sign of the times now I feel this turns a page in history, and their league of creative minds have become extinct. With Catweazle, a curious young boy who loved to dream of magic (and Great Britain) has passed. As Catweazle used to say: nothing works!