Office Photo Contest

One of the significant challenges about living away from home is keeping yourself occupied. It is amazing how many things you do at home that aren't part of your life when you step far away. Either they aren't needed when you're gone, or if they are important someone else takes them on (thank you Dana for picking up so much in my absence!!).

So when you relocated, suddenly you have time available, and different people handle that in different ways. Some folks I know here watch TV all the time - maybe that's also what they did at home for fun - but I get the feeling they aren't very satisfied with it.

Other people pick up hobbies - there are many offerings here, but most of them require driving or significant investment, neither of which are available to me. Some of us expand on a skill we already have and work to improve. Fortunately for me, I like photography.

I'm kind of an odd mix, really.  I love machinery and gadgets and figuring out how things work. I'm good with tools and wood, and love building things. I'm very effective as a technical writer to analyze and determine the precise steps required to complete a task or procedure. But I have a creative side that isn't satisfied with this work.

Before I came here I was advised not to bring a good camera, because the dust and desert would eat it up, and "there's nothing here to take pictures of anyway." Sadly, I believed this and just brought a simple camera that I've rarely used since figuring out it simply couldn't provide what I wanted to produce. So through effective perusing of the camp "For Sale" site I've pretty much recreated the camera kit I have at home. Fortunately no damage has occurred from the environment, and I have found no lack of terrific subjects to photograph!

There are four of us in my work group who are interested in photography and we have started a monthly contest, with a randomly drawn subject each time. We each have a month to come up with our four top images of the subject. In July, as Dana and I were planning on a European cruise, the subject of "water" was chosen for the next contest!

Sadly, nobody here gets me. I took and submitted images that I was confident clearly expressed "water," based on my understanding that the theme meant the subject was to be water! I didn't win. Sometimes I guess I'm just too clever for my own good, but clearly my "all water" images were too vague for the judges who didn't share my vision. The winning top three images are lovely, I don't intend to demean my co-workers, whose beautiful images of buildings, etc, with water as an element, CLEARLY CHEATED!! WATER. JUST WATER YOU GUYS!!!  OK, sorry, I'm better now. <sniff>

So here are my four entries, with a little description of what I was going for, although my lovely, wonderful, brilliant, perceptive, beautiful (I'm sure!) readers will doubtless see my purpose straightaway! You folks are fantastic!! :)

OK, you gotta get this one. Pretty obvious here, eh? Sun reflection on WATER. This was my most popular shot in the voting.

This one stumped people. One of the judges noted that the WATER was great - texture, color, motions - but that the water stopped and then there were just clouds.  <sigh> OK class, all together, what are clouds made of? What's that?? I couldn't hear you . . . Yes, that's right - WATER!!

They liked this one. Again, if you slap them hard enough they get it. This one has obvious WATER! Plus, it has texture, depth, and motion. One judge complained that if I was going to show something like this why didn't I show larger waves? <hand on forehead> Right, I guess I should've prayed harder for rougher seas and higher wind!

I am very proud of this one. I know you guys will see it right off, but nobody here understood. There's WATER everywhere - lake, clouds, snow, ice, blue glacier ice, and - although you can't tell it at this resolution - waterfalls coming off the glacier. Amazingly artistic and visionary, eh?

Well, those are my four contest entries, and I'm certain at least three of these should have been in the top three. All kidding aside, we had a great group of images in this month's contest! Next month, though, I'll keep it simple and OBVIOUS when shooting the next topic: landscapes.

BONUS IMAGE: I didn't submit this one, even though it was one of my faves.  I will title this "In Flight," and whichever brilliant, intelligent, delightful reader figures it out first will get a personalized congratulatory email from the artist!! :)

Best to all - more soon!! Mark

#North Atlantic  #cruise  #water photo

Product Tracking - Be careful what you talk about

Dana and I were fortunate enough to get to spend two weeks together earlier this month - a lovely trip that took us to Great Britain, a couple of North Atlantic islands, Iceland, and Norway, and gave us some much needed time together! More on the trip later.

My birthday was a month before we met at Heathrow Airport in London. I don't trust that things sent to me here are going to reach me here, so she brought my present and gave it to me in London.  I love watches, among other thing mechanical, and have quite a few. Sadly, my skin has changed over the last decade or so and the metal in the bands and/or case breaks me out pretty badly, so I rarely wear my watches any more.

Dana found a watch that is cased and banded with wood! How delightful is that? My new watch is enclosed in walnut, looks great, fits perfectly, and is light as a feather! The company, Jord Wood Watch, enclosed a nice little card that said, in effect, post pictures of your watch out in the world, tag it with #jordwoodwatch, and be eligible for monthly prizes.

Earlier this week I did just that on Facebook.  I do not Tweet, but I added the hashtag, as requested, at the end of my post showing my watch in Greenwich, England, at the marker for the prime meridian (we took pictures of this cool watch all through our trip!) Here's the shot:

Now, I've seen the effect on web pages I visit after I search for something on Amazon - the item I searched for will likely show up in a few places over the next few days.  Quite a different response with this - that hashtag thing must be powerful.  Almost any website I look at has an ad for Jord watches. On Facebook, on Youtube, on the weather site I prefer, all over the place. Little popup ads, great big banner ads, small sidebar ads, and they seem to be increasing!

So the moral of this is: they are out there, and they are watching your keystrokes. They are monitoring your searches, deciphering your wants, watching for your needs, predicting what you will wish for next, so they can SELL you something!! No, not Jord - they just sell wood watches (which I do highly recommend!!). I mean every marketer and website and manufacturer with a budget for social media marketing is aggressively tracking everything you do, see, search and shop for online.

To be honest, I can't decide if I feel more amused or threatened by this.  Is it a great opportunity for the great marketing machine in the web to do my shopping for me? Or is big brother standing right behind the marketing guys taking in a whole 'nother batch of information to keep track of everyone?  I just don't know.  

Just be aware. This is going on very quietly, without most people realizing every move they make is being tracked. And apparently Facebook's Messenger app for smart phones is the worst - but that's another tale.

For now, here's another watch shot! #jordwoodwatch #Geirangerfjord (more on this later!!)

More Heat!

Ok, this will be short and quick, just an update to yesterday's post. Today was even worse! Here's a look at today's temps. At 0700 when I walked to work the temp was 90 and the heat index was 115. Not too bad.  Through the day it went up and down as the humidity level changed. When I walked at lunch the heat index was 112, and at 1600 (4 p.m.) the heat index was 124:

Wow that felt HOT. But at 2130 (9 p.m.) it was truly sweltering! With temp of 99 and humidity of 63%, the heat index was 128.

The AC struggles to keep up with it, and they do AC on an industrial scale over here! When you walk out the door it doesn't just take your breath, it pretty much slams your whole body. It presses in on you because the air is so heavy! The ambient temp is supposed to reach 108 tomorrow with similar humidity - can't wait to see what happens!

Just thought I'd share.  How's your weather?  :)

Heat - it's all in my head

Here's another of the different kind of posts - not a travelogue or photo gallery, but delivery of some thoughts that have been rattling around in my head lately.  Be forewarned, these are gonna pop up her occasionally!

Living in Saudi Arabia certainly has built in challanges. Large among those is being, oh, 7500 or so miles from home. That is a major factor, and we're doing our best to deal with it.

Another big player is the heat. Yes, it does get toasty here in the summer! So far this summer we've seen 121 degrees F, in a week with 115+ every day, and it does get wearying. But it's doable, because for the first part of the summer it is dry - 10% humidity or less because the NW wind brings the air in after being baked by hundreds of miles of desert.

What's worse is the weather now. Today's high at noon was 109, but the humidity was almost 40%, so the heat index was 121. 121 degrees with no humidity is easily tolerable.  With high humidity it feels like you are walking through your dishwasher! It doesn't take your breath, but it does make it hard to breathe - like you just can't get enough into your lungs. 

If you walk outside with glasses on they are instantly frosted like a glass of iced tea outside on your porch in the summer.  Fire alarms go off from the high water content in the air. People go well out of their way to walk through adjacent buildings instead of around them, because every minute of being out in that soup means your clothes have more sweat in them that cannot evaporate until you go inside.  It can be pretty miserable, if you let it. I don't.

I grew up in a house with no air conditioning, traveling in cars with a similar lack of A/C. It wasn't tough, and it wasn't unbearable. It just was, and we dealt with it as best we could, lacking experience of anything different. We sat outside on the porch or under a shady tree.  We opened windows and hoped for any breathe of air to blow through the house. Lacking a breeze we used electric fans, which were a great source of entertainment - did you know you can make lots of cool noises with your voice by getting in close to the fan blade?

We sweated a lot, but we drank lots of tap water (or from the hose, or creek, or any source we happened across). We still played baseball and football and flew kites and rode our bikes and hiked and camped and climbed trees and had a great time! And we grew up pretty well not knowing at all what we were missing by not having air conditioning!

I know my family and friends think I'm crazy, but I still take a walk after lunch here every day (just under a mile today)! Tonight I walked to the gym and back, about 1.5 miles, with heat index about 115. I got back to my room soaked to the skin, but I drank water and cooled off and feel really good. 

After my lunch walk I came in at the same time as one of my good Arab friends. He's a little older than me, and told me of growing up in his grandmother's house with no electricity. He had pretty much the same experience as me, except no fan, no lights, and in Saudi Arabia! He said he did his homework and reading at night, outside on a table with a lamp. Just like us, all the windows would be open and everyone praying for a breeze. But that was just life - you dealt with it

So I will continue to exercise in the heat, just like I would do at home if I had to work outside all day in the hot, humid Arkansas summer, and I've done loads of that! Just get out there, get used to it, tell myself, "Yeah, it's not so bad - I can do this," and get after it without another thought. I've been doing this my whole life - no need to change now.

Stay cool everyone!

Visit to Al Ahsa Lake

I work in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. South of us is the Empty Quarter where there are mountains of sand and little else. Between here and there is the oasis of Al Ahsa, which contains the largest fresh water lake in the kingdom.

The lake and oasis are at the low end of a freshwater aquifer that starts several hundred miles away, and are surrounded by one of the largest date palm plantations in the world with hundreds of thousands of trees.

In May I went with a tour group to visit the lake, but it didn't go too smoothly and we never made it. So we tried again in June. We left Dhahran by bus, and when we were fairly close to the lake we piled into a group of Humvees to trek across the sand to the lake, which is half encircled by a giant dune.

Of course, I didn't realize this until we drove around the lake and up the flank of the dune and suddenly were parked at the top with a steep slope of sound just below my window! Heck of a surprise but quite a view!

The lake is beautiful, and extends for many kilometers. The tour guide had some snow boards, and some of the group took turns sliding down the slope - had to be quite an exciting ride for some of them.

 (click here to see more images from this trip!)

One young woman did something just right because she went down the hill like she'd been shot from a cannon, and kept going until she was in the lake at the bottom! One of the Saudi Hummer drivers took off running down the hill after her - I don't know how but he made it all the way to the bottom without tumbling. She was fine and laughing, and I was really surprised and impressed with his response. It took him quite a while to catch his breath and climb back up, but everyone was ok.

We stayed on the ridge until almost sunset and then planned to head to a desert bbq/cookout. It was a good plan, but you know how those things go, right?

We had driven in to the lake and dune from one direction, and went out a different way - across the dry lakebed. Things were fun until about a third of the way across when one of the Hummers was suddenly and with no warning buried in mud up to its axles! Turns out the dry lakebed was only dry for about the first half inch - below that was stinky, sticky mud! Within seconds all but 2 of the cars was buried in the stuff, and we spent the next 3 hours or so watching the Saudis try to extract the vehicles from the trap.

One car was finally pulled free, then another got stuck.  Eventually three small, lightweight Toyota pickup trucks showed up - local people - and we all piled in and left the giant Hummers and their drivers. We made it to an animal sanctuary in Al Ahsa for the bbq dinner, but by this time it was 10 p.m. and we were all feeling a little weary. The food was great, a traditional Arabic cookout - grilled chicken and lamb kabobs, along with a sausage kabob that was excellent. They had BBQ chicken quarters that were very well prepared, along with slaw, grilled vegetables (onion, tomato, peppers and mushrooms), green salad, beans, and more. Of course there was Arabic flat bread which comes with most every meal. All of this surrounded by giant date palms!

We all wolfed down some food, piled back into the bus, and headed back to the city 2 hours away. I got back to my room about 0130 feeling quite worn out, but at the same time I'd had quite an adventure! I saw a place very few people ever get to visit. I had 3 hours out on a lake bed in the absolute middle of nowhere watching a fabulous night sky open up overhead, and saw satellites, meteorites, planets, and the Milky Way galaxy.  And how many people can say they've been stuck in the mud on a lake in Saudi Arabia?! All in all it was a pretty cool outing!





Click here or on the wide lake picture above to see more images from this outing on Flickr!