The Rare Book Room

Well, darn.

I found a way to access my old LJ albums, but then discovered the pics I really wanted were stored on my personal website which...I think I relinquished access to back around 2012, and which was never archived...

DAMMIT.

I didn't think to download it before they went bye byes.

There's a part of me that wonders if I have the old HDs which contained photos from...oh, a decade ago, plus probably change.

Anyway, reading through my old LJ entries has been a blast. So many people, many of whom vanished from the intarwebs, some of whom may have renamed and just not kept up, some of whom I am vaguely in contact with...and some of who have migrated over to DW and are still here!

Amazing.

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So cousin will not be doing Christmas at his place this year - it's an 'off' year with his wife's family. So we are no-go for Christmas Day.

My options are:
1. Quietly do nothing.
2. Volunteer.
3. Offer to host for 'orphans'

I will most likely end up at #1.

It's a bit late to volunteer, and I asked a friend (birthday twin) who has no family here in Sydney if she and her family would like to come around for Christmas lunch, but she has guests and a lot of things are up in the air for her. I might put up an invite for a local 'host a sister' meet up, but I doubt that anyone will want to meet with a stranger on Christmas Day.

It might be time to accept that the 'relatives Christmas' will only be happening every second year from now on and to plan accordingly. *sigh*

I don't have social anxiety, I have acceptance anxiety. Like, even with friends and people I've known for years, there's a part of me that has major friendship imposter syndrome: "what if they discover that they don't really like me after all?"

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Tressie McMillan Cottom is a joy:

Behold the decade of mid tech!

That is what I want to say every time someone asks me, "WHat about A.I.?" with the breathless anticipation of a boy who thinks this is the summer he finally gets to touch a boob.

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I'm so so tired right now. Just in a permanent state of exhaustion.

Yesterday afternoon, I explained to my sister about 'climate change adaptation' and the phase that we're going into. She listened, but I don't think she really heard.

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I'm in a bit of a bodily self-hating stage right now after putting on about 5kg during my trip. Everything works fine, but the abdominal fat is frustrating me. So is the fact that all the Reformer Pilates classes are taught by women who might weigh 2/3 of me if they were dressed in heavy clothes and soaking wet.

"No, I can't do that move, my belly gets in the way."

Unfortunately, I suspect the only way to lose those kg is through food restriction, which I hate. It would involve removing sugary things entirely, probably for a long period. Ugh.

"Diet starts after new year"?

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A giant tree in my front yard may be dying. It doesn't seem to be re-leafing as smoothly as it usually does, particularly in the crown, and after a heatwave yesterday, it's dropped a whole lot more leaves, many of them green.

More than anything else, this is stressing me right now. I don't know how old the tree is, but it's been there since we moved in, a giant bulwark against the south and the west. Just on top of everything else, it's unnerving seeing the bare upper branches of it.

I'll get through Georgia by Christmas, I'm sure!

Leaving Sighnahi

Trying to remember how it all felt nearly two months later isn't easy. I'm going off the photos I took, the impression of memories. All a bit blurred by 'ordinary time'.

The bus trip from Signahi to the Mshketa region was a couple of hours long and we had one of those giant 'caterpillar' buses. Everyone had their own double seat and by the time we took the long trips it was fairly settled who was where. Some women wanted to be able to ride in the front and see where we were going, while others wanted this side or that side.

I had a woman from Alaska in front of me - there were three of them on the tour, and this one was probably the youngest of the three. She wasn't chatty, but we had a few great conversations about politics and society over the course of the next few days.

The (closed up and not used) toilet was behind me, and woman from California across from me, a woman from New York behind her, and another California woman in front of her - the photographer of the trip.

It was a pretty easygoing group of women, as I've said before. We were almost universally older, perhaps a little more jaded in our outlook than the women I met on the Naples tour, and more cosmopolite than the women of the Pride and Prejudice tour.

Out in the villages and towns, away from the cities, the country felt very different to the tourist spots. I don't know if this is typical in countries and areas where primary GDP is from tourism, or if it's just former USSR states.

We drove past spaces that felt very run-down, a lot of places and spaces were overgrown. Houses were abandoned, no glass in their windows. Gates and pergola frames were rusted and overgrown with...well, mostly grapevines, although occasionally there were other flowering vines. And the people working the spaces were all old. Almost all of them were forty and over. I didn't see any really young people until we got to the cities: Kutaisi, Tbilisi.

When we went to the markets, there was a lot of 'selling the same things'. Like, a dozen stalls are all selling the exact same thing, no difference. I feel like this happens less, even in the markets in Australia, like Melbourne's Queen Victoria Markets. Maybe in the tourist shops with the trinkets and whatnot - those are all the same, but I don't go into those. But I had the same feeling in Vietnam and in Naples and even a little in Porto. There's not enough differentiation of product, just everyone selling more or less the same thing. And, somewhat cynically, I suspect most of them come from China...

Mshketa and the history of Christianity in Georgia

In the morning, the bus took us towards Mshketa, which is in fact quite close to Tbilisi, where the tour had been on the weekend (while I recovered from COVID). The city is built at a kind of three-way intersection of various legs of the river, and overlooking it is the Jvari Monastery which was built in the 6th Century by the last vestiges of the Roman Empire.



In the 4th Century, the patron saint of Georgia, St Nino, brought Christianity to Georgia, converting the king at the time, and setting up Christianity as the main religion. Cue the churches, temples, and monasteries. Also, as later seen in the Uplistsikhe rock village, the conversion of old "pagan" temples into Christian worship spaces.

Anyway, the Jvari monastery dates back to the 6th Century and is magnificently still standing, all the stones firmly in place:





In comparison, the wall in the last photo - half-torn down, with only segments of it remaining - was built in the 17th Century. But why have the monastery and chapel survived a thousand years while the wall lies in ruins?

The 6th Century structures were built to Roman Standards. The worksmanship was precise and careful and everything was designed and put together just so. The wall? Was pretty much slapped together with some mortar and various stones. It's entirely possible to make really solid walls out of stones, it's just that the 17th Century builders (I think they were Templars, for some reason? Maybe? Don't quote me!) didn't bother with all that.



I would have liked to explore more inside the monastery, but I don't think there was much public access. It's not used as a monastery any more, obviously, but it still looked very solid. Anyway, we moved on after only about 30 minutes. It was a very brief stop, but interesting. I love histories and architectures, the movement of people across continents and lands... well, you know me!

On the way to Svetitskhoveli Cathedral, our guide talked a lot about St Nino, where she came from and what she did. I tried to pay attention, but got lost a few times because her accent was fairly thick.

Svetitskhoveli Cathedral

The Cathedral was really interesting, architecturally. The present version was built in the 11th Century, and the story I was told was that the architect got into trouble for not making the inside symmetrical. Outside, though, it's very imposing and the sky was suitably dramatic for it!





The church's significance is primarily attributable to the legend of the buried mantle of Christ, brought to the region in the 1st Century by a Georgian Jew. It's also allegedly a site of great miracles, and is a major pilgrimage site for the Georgian Orthodox Church. There were a lot of priests and members of religious orders there, as well as a number of pilgrims. They were decidedly distinct from the tourists.





Some beautiful stonework there, and beautiful historical murals.

One of the notable things about the church is that when the Soviets came in, they tried to eliminate all religion. So they plastered and whitewashed over a lot of the murals, which dated back hundreds of years and had some beautiful iconography and design. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as just peeling the plaster off; they've been able to get some of it off, but they had to stop because they were damaging what was underneath.

There was a small market through which we had to pass on our way up to the Cathedral from the carpark. A restaurant had a fig tree in full fruit and while I was tempted to pick and eat, I thought it might not be polite, so I passed. But I did buy a pair of very beautiful cloisonne earrings at the markets there!

Lunch, wineries, winemaking

Lunch (somewhat late) was at Ateni Vineyards. The property had been in the family for generations, and Nino had pictures of her grandfather and grandmother down in the cellar under the house, where wine had been produced for generations. Unfortunately, her paternal line were perpetrators of domestic violence, and she herself had escaped a domestic violence situation before deciding to return to the family property and renovate it from the ruin it had been.





The women she employed to assist in making the lunch are displaced women from Ossetia. My notes only have 'Ossetia' but some research shows that that Ossetia is considered an ethnolinguistic region (common ancestry and culture, and common language, I believe) and there's 'North Ossetia' and 'South Ossetia' which are more or less divided up by the Caucasus mountains. North Ossetia is under Russian control, or counted part of Russia, while South Ossetia lies within the current borders of Georgia. And takes quite a bite out of the middle of it.

For whatever reason or another, however, these women were 'internally displaced people', and they were working for Nino and assisting in cooking the feast that we ate:
- purslane and ajika brusquets
- cheese and georgian endemic wheat bread
- cucumber tomato salad with walnuts
- cornelian cherry soup
- black-eyed peas
- spinach and beet leaves pie
- squash
- cherry tarts

The cherry tarts were absolutely amazing. But, again, so much food and we simply couldn't do it justice!

We were each given a candle like the one below, and I ended up gifting this to alphaflyer's daughter in Canada, because I'm seriously not a candle person at all.

Nino's philosophy was very 'new agey' to me, not my style. She tended to rhapsodise about 'feminine power' and the uniqueness of women, which...yes, I am for women being people and respected, but not so much for gender essentialism.



The slightly blurry photo is of the winemaking cellar in the house - the sort of thing that every household once had: a buried qvervy (Georgian wine-making vessel) into which the juice from the grape pressings would go. Apparently she'd made a very traditional-style vintage a few years back, including the foot pressing - although we weren't served it! Also, those things are hellish to clean to modern standards...

Some of the women like the wine and the winemaker so much, they bought boxes of wine and got them shipped back to their homes in the USA!

It was a really long afternoon in the end, and by the time we left, we were more than ready to head to our stay at a retreat up in the mountains...with a 10 minute walk to get there!

39C today, 40C tomorrow.

A slightly cooler next week, but pretty warm (high 20s, early 30s) through to Jan.

Next week is supposed to be some rainfall here and there. We can hope. It will make things awfully sticky, but sticky I can manage.

The bit I'm nervous about is a handful of seedlings I planted out a few days ago - melons and pumpkins. Don't know if they're going to survive it - I've watered them morning, noon, and evening, covered them with shadecloth, but none of that is a guarantee when the temps hit 40C.

Oy.

My sister is worried about the chickens, who aren't coping real well with the heat - they never do, but it's particularly difficult in these super-hot days, and when there's not a lot of spaces where they can stay cool. I might have to let them back into the triangle garden, so they can take shelter in the thickets of the trees there.

I'm kind of wondering if I can set up a specific space for them during the middle of the day. They won't get to move around so much, and they might be at risk of dogs going by (although the owners around here are good and keep them on leashes...most of the time, except when Bev's dogs get out) but...it'll be cooler?

Anyway, I gotta go out and check that the chooks aren't overheating.