It is getting chillier, everyone is wondering when the first snow will come. It is still drizzling on and off every few days.
Well happy Thanksgiving world. It is really nice here, with your good friends who you are with by choice. All the repatriates participate in one Thanksgiving dinner or another, whether they are American, Canadian, English, Australian, Iranian, etc, if they have any American connection at all. I think they all really love it secretly, certainly the traditional Thanksgiving feast is not far from the ideal evening for any Armenian gathering -- stuffing your face with the people close to you. Alex was the host this year, which was impressive since he did not have the day off. So we really had a great time and sadly return to work today. No four day weekend for any of us.
At work last week I submitted my newly redesigned USAID/Armenia website to Washington to be put online. It is not online yet, so maybe there were some problems, but I am quite happy with how it looks and will let you know when it is up. I used Dreamweaver for the work site, rather than notepad like I use for Cilicia.com, and although I have some issues with Dreamweaver, I must say I am tempted to use it at home too. We'll see, I am not in a massively productive stage on the site, so it is not so important just now. Maybe if I hire someone to work on the site full time then it would be worthwhile. Currently I need to concentrate on reprinting Rediscovering Armenia if anything. It is out of print as of this month.
What else, it really was a crazy, hectic week in my life, too much even to write about. Probably my most eventful week since I started this job. In the middle of all the excitement I saw a movie at the British Movie Week about the Irish "homes" for girls run by nuns up to recent times which was so incredibly disturbing I could not believe it. Based on true stories, it showed the horrible treatment girls were subjected to in these prisons, with no say in their lives at all. It must have broken all kinds of human rights laws, and UN Charters, and was heartbreaking to watch. Perfectly innocent girls put there because society did not want them. Wow. "Magdalena Sisters" or something like that, I definitely recommend it. It reminds you what can happen when society has a twisted mentality. In Irelands case it was a very severe, fundamentalist Catholicism, and in Turkeys case today it is a sick nationalism and imagined persecution which manifests itself in similiarly sick ways.
Well I have to get ready for work, but one last quick note is that I am excited that my cousin is about to have a new baby boy in Australia! (She may have had it already). His middle name will probably be Raffi -- too bad it is not the first name (hint hint :-))
Well happy Thanksgiving world. It is really nice here, with your good friends who you are with by choice. All the repatriates participate in one Thanksgiving dinner or another, whether they are American, Canadian, English, Australian, Iranian, etc, if they have any American connection at all. I think they all really love it secretly, certainly the traditional Thanksgiving feast is not far from the ideal evening for any Armenian gathering -- stuffing your face with the people close to you. Alex was the host this year, which was impressive since he did not have the day off. So we really had a great time and sadly return to work today. No four day weekend for any of us.
At work last week I submitted my newly redesigned USAID/Armenia website to Washington to be put online. It is not online yet, so maybe there were some problems, but I am quite happy with how it looks and will let you know when it is up. I used Dreamweaver for the work site, rather than notepad like I use for Cilicia.com, and although I have some issues with Dreamweaver, I must say I am tempted to use it at home too. We'll see, I am not in a massively productive stage on the site, so it is not so important just now. Maybe if I hire someone to work on the site full time then it would be worthwhile. Currently I need to concentrate on reprinting Rediscovering Armenia if anything. It is out of print as of this month.
What else, it really was a crazy, hectic week in my life, too much even to write about. Probably my most eventful week since I started this job. In the middle of all the excitement I saw a movie at the British Movie Week about the Irish "homes" for girls run by nuns up to recent times which was so incredibly disturbing I could not believe it. Based on true stories, it showed the horrible treatment girls were subjected to in these prisons, with no say in their lives at all. It must have broken all kinds of human rights laws, and UN Charters, and was heartbreaking to watch. Perfectly innocent girls put there because society did not want them. Wow. "Magdalena Sisters" or something like that, I definitely recommend it. It reminds you what can happen when society has a twisted mentality. In Irelands case it was a very severe, fundamentalist Catholicism, and in Turkeys case today it is a sick nationalism and imagined persecution which manifests itself in similiarly sick ways.
Well I have to get ready for work, but one last quick note is that I am excited that my cousin is about to have a new baby boy in Australia! (She may have had it already). His middle name will probably be Raffi -- too bad it is not the first name (hint hint :-))
posted by Raffi K. at 8:25 AM
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