How to Organize My Books

 

I have books.  There are books in pretty much every room in the house, though we don't keep books in the bathrooms.   

The other day I wanted to show someone a book, but I couldn't find it. (Bob, if you're reading this I did find it just now when I went down to take these pictures.)  I'm also looking for some of my old journals in hopes they can ground me as I write vignettes about my Peace Corps experiences.  This is spurred on by my writing group.  Basically, I took a class through OLÉ - the lifelong education program through the University of Alaska Anchorage.  

I thought signing up for a writing class would help me write the book for my youngest grandchild.  The other two grandkids got their own books already.  This one was going to be about her great grandmother, whom she is named after.  And it worked.  I wrote parts each week and I have the basic text done.  Now I have to work on the illustrations and mesh them with the text.  

But when the class was about over, the convener said that the weekly meetings would continue and that some of the members had been in the class for several years already.  About that time I got an email from the National Peace Corps Association that gave a step by step how-to booklet on writing about your Peace Corps experience - from the writing to finding an agent and a publisher.  

So I started writing.  But while I could find a couple of old journals that covered my Peace Corps time, others were missing.  

So tackling the biggest bookshelf seemed like a good project.  

Organizing books sounds easy.  Do it by topic.  Or should it be by genre - fiction or non-fiction or poetry or travel books?  What about books that span different topics or genres?

I started with topics.  I pulled out the bird books and the ones that help to identify insects and plants, and mushrooms.  This was going fine until I had books that fit the topic, but not the shelf.  Too big.

There's another problem with sorting books - it's hard not to start reading them.  The Shape of Thought is a book about writing - which is relevant to the writing class. 

 Maybe I can add some ideas to the group. (People are invited to read other writing than their own on occasion.) The book says writing has three basic purposes:

1. entertainment
2. explanation
3. convince

Really, is that all?  I have to think about it.  But then the book offers  ten patterns with which to do those things:

1. Basic Structures:  Introduction, Body and Conclusions
2. Narration
3. Description
4. Definition
5. Process Analysis
6. Classification
7. Comparison/Contrast
8. Judgment
9. Cause and Effect
10. Problem and Solution

Each pattern is a chapter with writings of famous and not so famous writers.  I jumped to the last one in the book, written by Art Buchwald that advocated for gun stamps for the poor, because "no American citizen, no matter what his financial status, would be deprived of his right to bear arms."  And "Many of the poor are to blame for this condition [not owning a gun].  They would rather buy food with their money than guns,"   [If it's not obvious, Buchwald was a satirist.]

And I also got distracted by The Iliad of Homer, translated by Richmond Latimore..  I read, and, thanks to a great instructor - Dr. Pasinetti - enjoyed The Odyssey in college.  But I never read The Iliad.  And having toured the remains of the ancient city of Troy last October while we were in Turkey, I had lots of questions.  So I read a few pages of the Iliad but mostly I read the introduction which is 55 pages long.  

The intro covers a number of topics - the plot, questions about Homer and when and where he lived, the Greek Gods' roles in all this, etc.  I just wanted a better sense of the plot.  

"The essential story may be summarized as follows:  Paris, also called Alexandros, was the son of Priam, who was King of Troy, a city in the north-west corner of Asia Mior.  Paris on an overseas voyage was entertained by Menelaos in Sparta, and from there carried away, with her full consent, Helen, the wife of Menelaos.  He took her back with him to Troy, where she lived with him as his wife.  The princes of Greece thereupon raised a force of a thousand or more ships, manned by fighters, with a view to forcing the return of Helen.  The armada was led by Agamemnon, elder brother of Menelaos, the King of Mykenai . . .The fleet assembled in Aulis in Boiotia and made for Troy.  There the Greeks landed after a fight, but were unable to take the city.  For nine years they remained before Troy, keeping the Trojans on the defensive, and storming and plundering various places in the vicinity.  In the tenth year, Agamemnon the most powerful chief, quarreled with Achilleus, his most powerful fighting man.  Achilleus withdrew from the fighting, and kept his followers idle as well.  In his absence, the Trojans, led by Hector (a son of Priam and brother of Paris), temporarily got the better of their enemies and threatened to destroy the ships.  Achilleus returned to the fighting, killed Hector and routed the Trojans."

 

But why did Achilleus and Agamemnon quarrel?  That's revealed later.  

"Chryses, priest of Apollo in Chris, a small place near Troy, comes to the camp of the Greeks to ask for the return of his daughter, Chryseis, who has been captured and allotted to Agamemnon as his concubine.  Agamemnon refuses, and Chryses prays to Apollo to avenge him.  Apollo inflicts a plague upon the Greeks.  When there is no end in sight and the people are dying, Achilles calls an assembly of the chiefs to consider what can be done.  With the support and encouragement of Achilleus, Kalchas the soothsayer explains the wrath of Apollo.  Agamemnon, though angry, agrees to give the girl back and propitiate the god, but demands that some other leader give up his mistress to him, in place of Chryseis.  When Achilleus opposes this demand, Agamemnon takes away Briseis, the concubine of Achilleus. . ." 

Of course, we all know that Troy was sacked to recover the kidnapped Helen.  But from the description it would appear that every 'leader' in Agamemnon's fleet had his own concubine, and Agamemnon appropriates his best fighter's concubine as his own, leading Achilleus to withdraw from fighting which leads to Hector's initial victory.  

In light of the Epstein scandals today, one (at least this writer) can't help but think that men's need for sex objects plays an oversized  role in society and in the suffering of humankind.  After all, they did battle for ten years over a stolen woman!  The Greeks almost had their ships destroyed by Hector, again over a stolen woman (Agamemnon's taking of Achilleus' concubine.).  

In the case of Troy and Greece, there were two powerful entities who fought it out.  And Achilleus had leverage to use against Agamemnon.  But today we seem to have a class of rich men who have found a way to exploit women with little or no counterforce.  (Along with not so rich men who have some other skill that allows them inclusion in the club.)

To be clear, I'm exploring this idea here rather than making firm conclusions.  And while the men of Ancient Greece and Troy may have done battle over specific women, what seems clear from the discussion is that the women had no say in any of this.  Homer translator Latimore tells us that all the leaders of Agamemnon's army had mistresses.  

I'm leaning toward some sort of conclusion that for at least the last 3000 years (the sacking of Troy as related by Homer, whether history, historical fiction, or fiction happened about 1300 BC and women have only gotten the right to vote, the right to an education, to spend money without their husbands' permission, to compete for 'men's' jobs in the last 100 years or so.  (I'm assuming there were some brief periods in isolated locations where women had, for a time, some of these rights.)

Not to mention dragging thousands of others into suffering the wars of the egocentric 'leaders - the soldiers and sailers, the citizens of Troy and surrounding areas, and today the Ukrainians still being bombarded without mercy by Putin's military.  Not to mention the people of Gaza and Lebanon and Iran and elsewhere around the world.  

And in the United States, we now have a president whose treatment of women is not different from the ancient Greeks and that seems to have brought the misogynists out of the woodworks.  This is a more universal problem than USians realize.  Is it built in to men's genes?  Some men's genes?  Is it nurtured by parents, by society?  Is it curable?  

All this from trying to bring order to my book cases.  And that's just a tiny fraction of how I spend my time.  The garden beckons.  Fighting the corruption of the GOP beckons.  My bike and the bike trails beckon.  

Of course, I don't raise questions here, without checking online after I've done my own brainstorming.  Here's a list a ways to organize one's books from WikiHow

1. by genre
2. alphabetically 
3. by color
4. by subject
5. chronologically
6. put rare or valuable books in a noticeable spot
7. by how much you like them
8. by how much you use them
9. by size
10. by date you got them

To a certain extent I use the following:  1, 4, 6, 7, and 9.  It seems to me that organizing by color is for someone who sees books as decoration rather than reading material, but that's just my first reaction and I'm willing to be corrected.  

More Reading/Listening Tips: AI, Iran, Surveillance Self-Defense

This is a followup to a March 21 post "Navigating Social Media - Just Find And Read The Good Stuff"

1.  "They have not seen truth, they have created fairy tales"

Listen to this view of Iran and the war on Soft Power from someone who knows Iran better than most USians.  

"Less than 24 hours after he graduated from college, Paul Barker was on a plane, en route to Iran, where he would spend the next five years as a Peace Corps volunteer, immersed in Iranian culture and history. And though he followed that with three decades of international work, he remained--remains!--in the thrall of Iran. And he understands, more so than almost anyone, the scope of the cataclysm unfolding there. (Recorded on March 12, 2026.)

2.  AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage by Cory Doctorow 

"AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots"

I checked with my son - who knows a lot more about computers and the internet than I do - and he vouched for Doctorow's insights.  This is a must read.   

3.  From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

"SURVEILLANCE SELF-DEFENSE

TIPS, TOOLS, AND HOW-TOS FOR SAFER ONLINE COMMUNICATIONS

A PROJECT OF THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION

We’re the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a member-supported non-profit working to protect online privacy for over thirty-five years. This is Surveillance Self-Defense: our expert guide to protecting you and your friends from online spying.

Read the BASICS to find out how online surveillance works. Dive into our TOOL GUIDES for instructions to installing our pick of the best, most secure applications. We have more detailed information in our FURTHER LEARNING sections. If you’d like a guided tour, look for our list of common SECURITY SCENARIOS."

EFF is one of the leading organizations in the world defending electronic privacy.  See comments from the World Economic Forum or Wikipedia

Don't be overwhelmed.  Start with BASICS and make a list of things you can do to improve your personal digital privacy.  

LA - Skateboarding, Googie, Bernie's, And More

 

If you walk the path along Venice Beach, you'll come across the skateboard park.  

Skateboards first appeared along the beaches of Southern California, particularly Venice.  As a junior high student back then, I joined the others nailing half a roller skate to one end of a 2x4 and the other half to the other end.  We didn't have a lot of control. My street was one of the better hills.  One block to the south wasn't steep enough.  One block to the north was too steep for most.  I survived the steep one a couple of times. This was in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  You can read more about the history of skateboards from the Hermoso Beach Museum site.

Skate boarding has come a long way since then as have the places people ride them.  

Tuesday it got up to 75˚F and we spent a couple of hours at Venice Beach near the end of Rose Avenue.

Friday, when I biked down there, the fog blocked the view of the ocean from the bike trail.

 We went to the LA County Museum of Art on Thursday.  And passed this bit of graffiti on the way.  We also passed an Indian grocery store.  

This is just a part of the loooooooong spice shelf.  One of the reasons that Indian food is so good - lots of spices and thousands of years experimenting how to prepare them.  

We also passed Johnie's Coffee Shop.  It's an example of Googie architecture - but I didn't know that when I took the picture or I would have taken a better picture of the whole place.  My interest was that this coffee shop had been turned into Bernie's Coffee Shop. LAist has a January 31, 2019 story by Jessica P. Ogilvie about this transformation:

"Johnie's Coffee Shop was built in 1956 by architects Louis Armet and Eldon Davis, masters of the space-age Googie style. The restaurant came to be known for its striking design and by the 1980s, began making appearances in films like Miracle Mile, The Big Lebowski, American History X, Reservoir Dogs and City of Angels. In 1994, it was purchased by the Gold family, an entrepreneurial L.A. clan whose patriarch, David Gold, founded the 99 Cents Only Stores.

In 2013, Johnie's was designated an historic cultural monument, and for a short while, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority debated turning it into a Metro stop for the purple line."

That Metro stop is still being built kitty-corner from Johnie's/Bernie's.  The article goes on to tell the history of how it became Bernie's.  

This is at Fairfax and Wilshire.  Across the street is the old May Company department store - about 

2 1/2 blocks from where I lived as a kid.  Now it's the Academy of Motion Pictures Museum.  Fortunately the kept the historic facade of the building.  They used to have elaborate Christmas display windows right at that corner.  

We ended up checking out the Motion Picture Museum, but passing for now.  Instead we went to the Art Museum that is on the (now, there used to be a street between them) adjoining block.  But I'll save the museum for another post.  

Some of the apartment buildings on the street where I used to live.  Ours didn't have such fancy entrances.  

It was a hazy day which gave these buildings in Century City a surreal look as we drove home.  (None of the pictures in this post were edited except cropping.)

And I'm adding on this picture (below) of the LA airport.  I commented in an earlier post about the unsatisfactory taxi/Uber/Lyft parking lot that's a distance from the terminals.  The whole terminal traffic situation is beyond awful.  There are places where you can pick up arriving passengers.  But during Christmas vacation the three to four lanes are jammed.  You aren't supposed to be stopped unless you are actively picking up a passenger.  But it's near impossible to time when the car gets to the terminal to match when the passenger gets to the curb.  I pulled over at Terminal 5 with the expectation I'd move up to Terminal 6 when my daughter and family got out.  If a cop told me to move on, I could stop again at Terminal 6.  (I have been told to move on at LAX in the past, but no cops were sighted Saturday.)  If I got told to move on at Terminal 6, I'd have to go around the whole airport again.  I'm not sure what the solution is.  They're building a skytrain (which i assume will be similar to what they have in San Francisco) to get passengers out of terminal area.  I'm not sure it's just bad design.  More, just that LA's population grew so much.  They do have a target date to do something - the 2028 Olympics will be in LA.  The Metro line is also supposed to be all the way out to the airport.  The problem has been the taxis and other interests didn't want the Metro to get to the airport, I'm told.  

The airport was much easier to navigate back in 1967 when I drove a Yellow Cab out of the airport for several months between graduating from UCLA and returning to the second summer of Peace Corps training.  Those were good times - mornings at the beach playing volley ball and body surfing, evenings driving a cab.  I learned a lot about LA.  I'd never realized how many bars there were until I drove a cab.  

To the left us at this spot is the Los Angeles Airport (LAX) 'theme building."

"To truly immerse oneself in the world of Googie, a visit to the "Theme Building" at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is an absolute must. Completed in 1961, this architectural marvel resembles a futuristic flying saucer perched upon four curving legs. With its observation deck, it was once a popular spot for locals and travelers to admire the planes taking off and landing at LAX. The Theme Building perfectly encapsulates Googie's out-of-this-world charm and stands as a testament to an era when the skies were no longer the limit."  from LA Explained Blog

I had a high school graduation dinner there with a dozen or more friends.  The restaurant is long gone.  

Erkek or Adam?

Bear with me for a bit. (Or don't and just scroll down to JUMP TO HERE below.) I've been learning Turkish on Duolingo for a while.  It's good for vocabulary and some grammar.  There is a listening component that is helpful.  But this is language learning like I had in Jr. high and high school.  It's aimed at teaching through vocabulary and grammar.  For Peace Corps training (and later with the Confucius Institute) we were taught by memorizing dialogues.  

This latter method was much more effective for learning to speak.  We just repeated the dialogues, over and over and over, mimicking native speakers until the sentences were imbedded in our heads. This is how children learn a language.  By mimicking what they hear.  And only later when they instinctively know the grammar, do they learn the rules that explain why they say it the way they do.  There were also substitution drills - where the instructor would say a word and we had to use it to replace a word in the sentence.  For example:

I am going to the store.  

"office"

I am going to the office.  

When I arrived in my town, I had lots of useful sentences that I would roll off my tongue without thinking.  But when I learn the Duolingo way, with grammar and vocabulary memorization, I struggle to remember the rules so I can put a sentence together correctly. 

Today as I was doing my Turkish lesson, I was wondering why they sometimes used the word üzürinde to mean 'on' and sometimes used üstünde.  Googling got me to a Quora page which had several explanations.  Basically they are used interchangeably said one responder.  Another agreed that practically, that is the case, though üstünde means more 'above'.

JUMP TO HERE

Below the explanation of two Turkish words that mean 'on' there was another explanation of two words for 'man' - erkek and adam.  These are also words I've learned and never asked why one or the other. One is longer and uses a story.  One is short and to the point.  

Emre Sermutlu

Knows TurkishAuthor has 613 answers and 1.6M answer views5y

Related

What is the difference between adam and erkek in the Turkish language?

Let me put it that way, only a small percentage of all “erkek”s are also “adam”s.

Here's a famous story about the concept of “adam”ness. Once there was a boy who was good for nothing. His father, after seeing his attempts for reforming the youth frustrated, said finally “You will never be adam! “

(This is the part that is difficult to translate. The father means “upright man” when he says “adam”, but the boy in his ignorance perceives it as “great man”)

Later, the boy leaves his village and after a lot of adventures, becomes the grand vizier of the Sultan. One day he remembers his father (whom he never visited) and his harsh words. He sends a group of soldiers to fetch him, without ever telling them he is his father. So they bring the old guy in terrible condition, as if he is a criminal.

In the palace, the son proclaims “You said I would never be a man. As you can see, I am the vizier now! “

Which the father responds:

“But I never said you will not be vizier. I said you will not be “adam”. Seeing how you treat your father, I can say you still haven't become an adam!”

Serkan Narin

Bachelor in Language, Marmara University (Graduated 2010)3y

Related

What is the difference between adam and erkek in the Turkish language?

Erkek is how you are called when you are born with a dick while adam is how you are called when you are not a dick. 

The second answer cleverly gets right to the point.  Though I'm sure having read the first explanation, helped me appreciate the second.  

And I immediately thought that this would be a great way to differentiate between Kamala Harris' newly announced vice presidential running mate and Trump's.  

Now I need someone who knows Yiddish and Turkish to tell me whether my guess that adam is akin to mensch. 

My Body Knows I've Been Shoveling Snow and Peace Corps Recruiter

So, this is what it looked like Tuesday after the clouds cleared after Anchorage's first snow of the year.  A bit late, but it's here.  I'd gotten the driveway and the deck cleared of snow.

Then it started snowing again Wednesday and by Thursday there was over a foot of new snow in the driveway.  Wet, heavy snow.  In this picture I've got some of the driveway shoveled.  

I was going to leave the rest for the next day, but I remembered I'd said I'd go to a Returned Peace Corps Dinner to meet with Alan Yuen, a South African national who works in the Peace Corps office in Pretoria.  The Peace Corps has contracted him and about 15 other foreign nationals to come to the US to recruit Peace Corps volunteers.  The idea, as I understand it, is to let people from countries that have volunteers give their perspective on how their countries benefit.  

So I kept on shoveling.  Got to talk to a couple of neighbors doing the same.  

And the sun even pinked the sky as I was shoveling.  

While I got the driveway cleared, the roads were something else again.  Lake Otis was awful.  Parts of Northern Lights were ok, but parts were a mess.  From Mike Garvey's Twitter account

Garages gonna be repairing a lot of broken axles pic.twitter.com/SS3mZsCVe2

— Mike Garvey (@mpg167) November 11, 2023

 But we made it safely, if bumpily, to the gathering.  

Here's Alan listening to a couple of the RPCVs talking about their experiences and asking how they can help Alan out.  

Then this morning I looked outside and the snow was coming down just as heavily as it did yesterday.  

But it didn't last as long, but it dressed the trees in back in a dreamy white.  

Here's what the deck looked like this morning.  But first I took care of the few more inches that had accumulated overnight on the driveway.

I did part of the deck in the afternoon.  The weather app says there will be some partial sun tomorrow, so I'll finish it then.  

My daughter and a good friend constantly remind me that shoveling snow is one of the best ways to get a heart attack.  Normally I don't pay them much attention.  But we had lots of wet, heavy snow, so I scooped the first six inches or so first and then the other 10 to 12 inches below.  And I took lots of breaks.  And I'm doing fine, though my body is pleasantly tired, no real aches or pains.  

Despite Blog Post Supply Chain Problems - Here's Hamilton and Irma Vep

Blog post are backed up waiting to get through the Panama Canal equivalent of from my brain to my fingertips.  Floating out there are posts on the Unhoused (not a local issue), Nature as a science based replacement for more supernatural gods, and some words about the Fifth Circuit.  All those posts are fairly heavy and need me to think and edit and research more and so they just float there waiting their turn. Unlike the Panama Canal delay, this one is not water related.  The worker is just distracted.  

This week, for instance, my Peace Corps training roommate from 1966 in DeKalb, Illinois and his wife visitor and we're kept  them busy understanding why we still live in Anchorage.  But it's not like we haven't seen each other since 1966.  We've been in each others lives as much as people separated by a six hour plane ride can be.  But it's been a while since they've been in Anchorage.  Their kids were just a bit older than their grandkids are now when they were last here.  

Besides taking advantage of the sunshine on various outdoor adventures their urban bodies could handle, we went to see Hamilton Tuesday night and Thursday night we saw The Mystery of Irma Vep at Cyrano's.  [I'd note this post got partly written and when I tried to upload these pictures, the Air Drop didn't work again - after being fine for several weeks.  This time rebooting the computer fixed things.]

Hamilton was the first time we've been to a big entertainment event since COVID restrictions.  We've been to a few movies, but at times when we were the only ones, or almost the only ones, in the theater.  We were all masked Tuesday as were some of the ushers and a small number of other patrons.  But we learned a family member (out of town) just had COVID and a 50th wedding event in Anchorage was cancelled because two people had COVID.  While I realize that for fully vaccinated people it's not likely to be fatal, a mask is still much less disruptive than being sick for a week.  

I'd found the soundtrack of Hamilton at the Internet Archive and listened casually for the previous week on the assumption that musicals are more enjoyable if you know the music.  And that rap is easier to understand if you hear it more than once and can read the lyrics.  

The ADN had a letter this week noting that a number of Hamilton viewers said they sat next to someone who had memorized the Hamilton sound track and sang along with each song.  One member of our group at one end sat next to such a person.  As the ADN letter writer wrote, "We didn't pay to listen to you."  Maybe they should have a sound proof section for those who want a sing-along experience.  You know, like the churches that have glassed off space for people with crying babies.

But we did have a good time and enjoyed the spectacle.  While there were four empty seats near us, the place was packed on a Tuesday night. (And I suspect the four empty seats were sold, but the people weren't able to attend.)  

The Atwood holds 2056 people.  Our seats were not the most expensive at a bit over $100 each.  So, just to make the math easier, let's assume an average of 

$100 per ticket X 2000  seats X 17 performances = $3,400,000.  

So, 34,000 people will have spent $3.4 million for a couple of hours of entertainment in Anchorage. Most of that money, I assume, will go to the actors, stage people, and the touring company, and various ticket sales agencies.  Not much of it will stay in Anchorage.  Some of the people attending will go more than once.  And some will be tourists, like our friends who were here from Chicago.  

The other theater event we went to this week was The Mystery of Irma Vep at the relatively tiny Cyrano's.   But this is very local theater with local actors and production.  And the price was less than one-third of Hamilton.  

This was a bit disorienting because Cyrano's has moved from its long time downtown location to the old Out North location which also presented performing artists almost always with an LGBTQ link.  I still think I'm at Out North, even though all the plays listed on the wall are Cyrano productions that were presented at the downtown location.  It was sort of like being at a friend's house, except they've moved and another friend has moved in with all their furniture.

The play was a little silly - a British murder mystery romp with two actors playing six, maybe seven parts, including a werewolf and a mummy. The Dramaturg's* note in the program said, among other things:

"The script of The Mystery of Irma Web - A Penny Dreadful  requires that both actors who are cast be the same sex and is a licensure requirement.  Insead of two men, Director Krista M. Schwarting believed that two women could successfully accomplish the same goal."

She also mentioned that the play involves those two actors to make 35 costume changes.  

The opening scene takes place in an English manor.  For the second scene, the stage was transformed with folding doors into an Egyptian tomb. 

While the play itself didn't hold much deep meaning for me, the two actors were excellent, deftly staying in accented character through all those costume changes.  

*I didn't really know what a dramaturg was either.  The program says she was professionally trained in Dramaturgy.  Merriam Webster online says a Dramaturg is a specialist in Dramaturgy.  And that Dramaturgy is:

"the art or technique of dramatic composition and theatrical representation"

That's not terribly helpful.  So I went to Wikipedia:

"A dramaturge or dramaturg (from Ancient Greek δραματουργός dramatourgós) is a literary adviser or editor in a theatre, opera, or film company who researches, selects, adapts, edits, and interprets scripts, libretti, texts, and printed programmes (or helps others with these tasks), consults authors, and does public relations work.[1][2][3] Its modern-day function was originated by the innovations of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, an 18th-century German playwright, philosopher, and theatre theorist.[4]"

OK, so that's one post through the canal.  

Made It To Kamphaengphet Saturday In My Summer Anchorage Biking Trek

Back in May I described my itinerary - Chiangmai to Bangkok - 745 kilometers.  I'm doing this on the bike trails of Anchorage.  The original post gives a bit of background to this  way of giving me a reason  - beyond the sheer joy of being on a bike whizzing through the woods - for this technique.  Knowing how many kilometers I have to cover gets me out on days my body would rather not.  But once my feet are pushing pedals, I'm glad I'm out riding.  There's also a map showing the distances between key points.  

Kamphaengphet is kilometer 445, so I'm over half way.  That's good, because biking season  is also half over.   ( I have an old bike with studded tires for winter, but I don't do long bike rides when there is snow and ice)

This stop is particularly special because I spent two years in Kamphaengphet teaching English as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1960s.  Below are some pictures from that time - a world much more closely connected to the past than it's connected to the present.  

These are from an album I put together while I was there.  Black and white photos I could get developed at the local photographer shop. The place where people could get portraits done.  But Kodak and Fuji slides had to be sent to Hong Kong or Australia to be developed.  That was minimally a two week process.  I think of my grandkids who probably don't even know about film and are used to seeing the picture the instant it's taken.  (I checked with my oldest and she did not know.)

This picture seems appropriate - me on a bike on the road in front of the school with the temple ruins and the water buffaloes in the background.  My house was on the school grounds, up on stilts, with two other 'apartments'  for teachers in the same building. The soccer field was between my house and this road.  So I had a view of the old temple chedis.  Here's a great link that explains the names of the different parts of Thai temples. My bike was my main form of transportation, though my colleagues had motorcycles too.  Peace Corps didn't let us have motorcycles but at that time the current ban on even riding on the back of a cycle didn't exist.  Peace Corps says the ban came after they figured out that most Peace Corps deaths came from motorcycle accidents.  My experience would have been significantly different had I not been able to ride on the back of motorcycles.  (Sorry for the blur, I didn't take this picture.)

This was one of my students.  Soccer was a big part of school life and since the best soccer field was directly in front of my house, a big part of my life.  It was out on this field that I set up the portable record player/radio that I'd bought when we stopped in Hong Kong on the way and played records in the moonlight when my trunk finally arrived.  I also played soccer there and started my love of jogging running around the field.  And the chedi was always there in the background.  At that time you could walk over and climb up on it and sit and contemplate the world.  Now it's part of a National Historic Park and has a fence and admission fee.

A short distance from the school in the forest were several more impressive temples (also now part of the National Historic Park).  I used to walk or bike over to be alone with these ancient structures - about 600 or 700 years old.  The Buddha on the left was part of a temple called The Temple of the Four Positions.  This was the sitting position.  There was a standing Buddha, a reclining Buddha, and a less common walking Buddha.

The elephants surrounded the top of another temple more hidden in the woods, up on a bluff overlooking the River Bing. [Mae Nam literally means mother water, or river and usually proceeds the name of the river.  So sometimes you see names like Mae Nam Bing River.  Which is sort of redundant.]  I'm not sure how many elephants there were all around the temple (It was called something like Temple With Elephant Around it) but there were a lot.  The English book we used to teach had stories in every lesson - stories from British history, US history, and Thai history - so I learned about Thai heroes of various wars against Burma, Laos, and Cambodia.  This temple looked out toward the mountains over which the Burmese army would have had to come.  

There was no television reception in my town.  So 'commercials' were live.  Here's the medicine salesman gathering a crowd with his microphone and cobra.  When enough people showed up, he'd get the mongoose out of the box and have a battle between the leashed mongoose and the well drugged cobra. And then he'd sell all sorts of medicine.  

And this is why I was here.  To teach English to MS 3 students at the boys' school.  MS 3 translates to about 8th grade.  They were fantastic students and we generally had a great time.  Our teacher training back in DeKalb, Illinois had been excellent.  We had 50 minute lessons for each chapter.  Each class would start with about five minutes of pronunciation drills.  There are lots of sounds in English that don't exist in Thai.  There are only about nine final consonant sounds in Thai.  Most English consonant clusters (st, nd, etc.) are real challenges for Thais because they don't exist in Thai.   Steve became Sateeb. (There's no v sound in Thai, let alone a final v.  The closest Thai has is a final b.  Other v's become w.)  Then ten minutes of vocabulary - lots of creative activities to get across the meanings without using Thai.  Then we had grammar drills, ideally using the sounds from the pronunciation drills and the vocabulary from that drill.  Then we'd read from the story (which had the sounds, vocabulary, and grammar we'd just worked on) and ask questions about the story.  Everything in English.  Thai not allowed.  Some of the things they learned best were classroom instructions that got used every day.  Stand up.  Sit down.  Louder please.  Stop talking.  Who wants to read first?   Open your books.  Repeat after me. 

About the kid with the bare feet.  No, it wasn't that he didn't have shoes.  Thais just take their shoes off before they go inside.  So outside the classroom would be lots of shoes.  

This is the old Burmese stupa and temple across the river.  On Buddha's birthday everyone went there and in the full moon, carried candles around the stupa.  It was a connection they had to their ancestors who had done the same thing for hundreds of years.  

So it was exciting Saturday knowing that I'd made it to Kamphaengphet on my summer biking adventure.  While I rode through cool birch and spruce forests in Anchorage, I was imagining the dusty roads, the wonderful people and their smiles, the delicious food, and the temples as they were back in 1967-69.  

This is just the tiniest peek at my three years living with Thais.  Three years that dramatically rewired my brain.  The temple pictures are here because Buddhism wasn't really a religion, it was a way of life and permeated everything.  A good Buddhist doesn't even kill a mosquito.  And there was a tolerance for everyone.  There were, of course, economic differences among people, but even the king prostrated himself before the great Buddha statues.  I'm using the past tense here because I'm writing about that Thailand back then.  I've been able to spend time in Thailand since then and while the basics are still the same, the gap between the US and Thailand technologically has gotten very small.  Back in the 60s, Thailand was a different world, a different time, from the US.  No longer.  

Today I did another 16.5 km so I'm on my way to Nakorn Sawan.  This is the longest between stops and I remember the dusty red dirt road in the last three hours of my trips back from Bangkok.  Lots of rice paddies and mountains that looked like growths on the mostly flat landscape.  I'd note that all these roads have long since been paved.