Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Ukraine: Cold and Violated

How cold is it in Ukraine? I could see my breath in my hotel room here in Kyiv, it's that cold. And this is a hotel that is usually frequented by foreigners and costs $45 a night (Peace Corps is paying for me and other volunteers to stay there for our mid-service medicals). Then again, 50 people have died in Ukraine from the cold, so I need to shut the hell up.

And for the medical, it's full blown: I've had the testical exam, the rectal exam, the "turn your head and cough" exam and, of course, the all time favorite: the swab up my urethra exam to both test for chlamidia and prove that boys do cry. If you take the toughest motherfucker in the world: big biker dude that breaks bricks on his head and chews glass to win free beers and then shove a swab up his urethra, I garuntee what will happen. Tears. Big, gloopy tears.

In any case, I feel violated.

Dental exam, too. Those are always fun. That's outsourced so I took my camera, expecting something like when I had an EKG: an office right out of the 1950s. Instead it was all modern and very sterile. You even had to put these disposable bootie thingies on your shoes so you didn't track mud into the dental area. When I go full blow Obsessive Compulsive, I'm getting those for my house. I ate before the dental exam, which the dentist noted, but I'm with Tim Allen on this: why brush your teeth right before the exam to pretend your dental care is better than it is? Give him a challenge: some raw meat preferably, popcorn up in the gums and maybe chew some crackers for texture.

I get to go home tomorrow. Normally I'm excited about coming to Kyiv because Kyiv=Party, but I'm ready to get out of here. It's not just the cold and the probing, but also the expense.

A nine inch pizza cost 24 hrivna. I went and had a cappachino with a friend and didn't see how much it cost. Got the bill. Little cup of cappachino: 13 hrivna (to get a sense of it, imagine a bill of $13 for a cup of coffee).

Now I really feel violated.

Monday, January 23, 2006

Ukraine: Skinny No More

*In Kyiv for my mid-service medical. I weighed 153 pounds! Admittedly, that was with many layers of clothes on, but even discounting those, this is the first time in my life I have ever broke 150 pounds. I usually range closer to 145 and have never quite needed to move that big square weight another notch over to the right. But today I did! Quite proud actually. I'll say it's extra muscle from climbing, although I know it's probably from too many Cheetos in America.

*The pics for the "No-Electricy Social" post are up, if you want to scroll down to see them.

*A rant about Russia is forthcoming in a day or two.

*I'm honored that Ukraine Group 30 (still in America) has linked my video to their Yahoo Group website. But could someone please tell the moderator that my name is DANIEL Reynolds and not DAVID? And I generally perfer my mother's maiden name: Riveiro to be tacked on the end, being Cuban tradition and all. I'd do it myself but you have to have a yahoo account and join the group to do it.

Sunday, January 22, 2006

Ukraine: Brrr

NOTE: Carrie left to return to the United States today, after more than three years of working in Ukraine. Our friendship is woven into my entire Zhytomyr experience, so much so that when she asked for copies of photographs I had taken from events she had been to with me, they took up a CD and my entire 1 GB thumb drive. I will greatly miss her, but she'll be back in August. Zhytomyr volunteers can't seem to stay away from this country. It's something in the water... Which, of course, we never drink. Bye for now, Carrie. And thanks for everything!

***

Well that was a cold snap.

A little over a week ago I was in Florida, swimming in the ocean in only a bathing suit. Now...

The temperature wasn't too bad when I got back, hovering between -02 and -05. But today it plummeted, to -25 C (-14 F), the coldest temperature I've ever experienced. I had to take off my glasses outside because the metal was painfully conducting the cold to my face. They cancelled school because of the temperature drop. Mind you, it's a clear sky outside, very pretty. No hurricanes, rains, blizzards, earthquakes, none of that. Rather, UKRANIANS cancelled SCHOOL because it's THAT COLD!

Of course, everytime a co-worker mentions the temperature, invariably someone says back to that person "but it's -40 in Moscow". Do you know what they're saying in Mocow? "But it's -60 in Siberia!" And do you know what they're saying in Siberia? "I'm going to find the ancestor who thought it be a good idea to disagree with Stalin or listen to Western music or be, you know, a Pole or a Tartar or a Lithuanian and kick him in the nuts because I'm f-ing cold!"

In all honesty, it's not that bad. I can barely feel the cold, but that's because when I'm outside I look like an obese ninja (black slacks, black jacket, black scarf around my face, black ski cap pulled down so only my eyes show, and black hood pulled up and cinched tight; oh yeah, and there's four layers beneath all that). An obese ninja whose lethal martial arts skills will never be fully realized because he has yet to learn how to walk on ice.

Save the cold, it's been good to be back, see my friends and slide back into my work schedule. Good as it's been, though, weird things keep happening lately. Today in class a teacher in her 60s said she didn't want to do the activities: she was feeling ill and had only come to hear the lesson. Fair enough. But during an activity when I was working with the teachers near her, she stopped me to ask me questions about Florida. "My sister-in-law lives in Florida," she said. "My brother lived in Vermont and was in the legislature. He was re-elected many times. But then his son drowned in a lake and he went in after him." And at this point she started crying. Middle of class. Old woman crying.

I tried to comfort her and still keep the class going. Later, near the end, she asked for my number "in case I ever need to get a hold of you." Peace Corps is a 24/7 job, so of course I gave it to her.

Night is falling outside and I've just been informed that it's now -30. I'm about to leave in a few minutes. Sigh. Once outside, it'll again be a new personal record.

Welcome to Ukraine.

Friday, January 20, 2006

Ukraine: The No-Electricity Social (Pics)

So I’m drunk as I type this, on two shots of homemade vodka. I hadn’t planned on drinking tonight. In fact, the only thing I had planned on doing was sitting and watching an episode of “Six Feet Under” with my friend Diana, which is what we were doing when the lights went out. They did so right during a surprise/scary moment of the episode, enough to make Diana jump and me wonder: when our homes and media systems become interconnected, could we have the lights flash when lighting flashes and the air conditioning go full-blast-cold when the hero steps onto the icy surface of Mars?

Anyway.

I go onto the landing to check the fuse (this is fairly common), but discover it’s fine. Neighbors begin to come out of their doors to the landing and from up above and down below. Everyone is wondering how the apartments all have no power, but the landing light is on.

One of my upstairs neighbors (the uncle of one of my students who happens to live below me—all of Zhytomyr is interconnected) comes down, sees me and cries, drunkenly, “I will get a translator!” I try to explain to him that I can understand him and, baring that, I have a translator in my apartment named Diana. He doesn’t listen to me and runs upstairs, coming back down with Igor, my student. Igor’s father comes up from his apartment and soon there is nine of us on the landing, with a tenth (my neighbor’s eight year-old son) poking his head out periodically.

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The No-Electricity Social. Volva is on the stairs.

This gathering prompts me to get my video camera, in order to tape this Ukrainian event: the no-electricity social. It also prompts the upstairs-neighbor-uncle-of-Igor, Volva, to go back to his apartment and come back with a one quart jar of homemade vodka and a 5 quart jar of moonshine. Borrowing a stool from my next door neighbor (who is the sister of the head of the NGO I built the wall with, Kolia; Kolia is also Volva’s co-worker), Volva turns it into an impromptu table, setting up four shot glasses and beside them putting a loaf of bread, a jar of salo and a pack of sausages.

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Volva pouring the vodka. Note the jar of moonshine on the left

It is a Ukrainian holiday, he says (today is the day, hundreds of years ago, that the residents of Kyiv were—most not of their own will and at sword point—baptized in the Dnepr river) and so, he also says, without power all we can do is drink and sleep.

Igor, embarrassed at his drunken father and uncle, leaves. The wives go back into their darkened apartments as well, leaving only two of the men from my floor, Igor’s uncle and father, and me. We’re all set to drink when Volva starts spouting off on all things esoteric. He does this in broken English, asking me for a translation of this word or that word as he goes, all the other neighbors (who don’t know English) asking him to switch to Russian, but he insists on doing it in English.

Diana has the camera for this, handed to her simply to film the toast, but she will end up filming the next forty minutes. You see, with four glasses filled but before anyone has picked them up, Igor’s grandmother—Volva’s mother—suddenly comes from downstairs and begins yelling at her two sons. Volva, it should be pointed out, is 30 years old. His brother—Igor’s father—is older than he. This hunched old woman literally chases Volva upstairs to his apartment, yelling the whole way. Diana caught the whole thing on camera.

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Volva getting yelled at by his mother

Then she comes back down and begins yelling at her other son, chasing him downstairs to their shared home. Just as she’s going downstairs, Volva sneaks back from upstairs. Then, the lights come back on. The other men, having never picked up the glasses, excuse themselves and go back inside save the one who lives cattycorner to me (whose mother is the Jehovah’s Witness trying to convert me). He now says he will not drink. Mostly, Ukrainians are in for a dozen toasts or none at all—and we all have to work tomorrow. Volva also has to work tomorrow, but the number of lessons he will teach (he is an economics professor at one of the universities) changes by the minute. At one point he announces he will teach five lessons. Later he declares it to be three. Ten minutes after that, he says he has to teach six.

Still, four glasses are poured and it’s a grave sin to waste vodka in Ukraine. Glancing downstairs for his mother, Volva takes one glass and I take another; we toast; we drink. Diana has been taping for twenty-five minutes to get that shot.

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The drink

Volva and I each take another glass. Another old lady comes up on her way towards the landing above. Volva offers her a drink and she yells at him that it’s a holiday. “You should be drinking spirit water!” she yells.

“But of course!” says Volva. “We are!”

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The second old woman to yell at poor Volva

He’s very drunk now, so it takes the better part of fifteen minutes before he’s done talking so we can have the second toast. Diana gives up taping after this quote from Volva, in Russian:

“Gail used to live in your apartment. She used to make this pig for dinner with an apple. And I had to take the apple out of her butt. The pig’s butt. Not Gail’s butt.”

Diana was laughing too hard to keep the camera up, so she just went back inside to finish the episode without me. Volva was now trying to convince me to drink coffee with him, and I was having a hard time convincing him to go home.

Finally I have carried up the huge jar of moonshine (which, thankfully, was never offered), the vodka, the sausages, the salo, and the bread to his apartment, returned the stool to my neighbor, and Volva is still following me back down to the landing to get him to drink coffee with him. I promise him another day and finally have to close the door in his face.

Just in time, too. Five minutes later, the homemade vodka hits me and I’m fucking drunk.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Ukraine: Who am I to Blow Against the Wind?

Been back in Ukraine for a week now, but obviously it's been a bit of a rush getting everything back in order, getting the larder stocked, seeing friends and getting back to work. That, and the weather change and jet-lag took me off my feet for two days with a cold.

An interesting thing happened at the airport when I arrived. Kyiv doesn't have the walkway thingys like in America. You deboard the plane onto the tarmac and then a bus takes you to the airport. On the bus, I saw a guy collapse, one hand holding his back, to the floor of the bus.

I went to him and asked, in Russian: "Are you all right? Can I help you?"

Noticing my accent, he replied, in Russian: "Where are you from?"

"America."

Then he switched to English and, from his accent, was obviously from America. "I broke a rib," he said. "I can feel it. Right here."

He was obviously in intense pain, his vision periodically clouding over. The following conversation was with prolonged pauses on his part, and very surreal.

He focused on me and said: "Why do you even care?"

"Because you're on the floor in pain."

After a moment: "Are you Jewish?" he asked.

"No," I said.

He looked at me for another moment, then said: "Who am I to blow against the wind?"

I nodded, not knowing what to say. "How can I help you?" I asked.

"Do you have any pain killers?"

I shook my head. "Do you want me to call a doctor at the airport?"

"I have a doctor," he said. "I have a driver. Been in Kyiv since 1993. Fourteen years."

Then he looked me in the eyes as if trying to deeply impart the meaning to me and said again: "Who am I to blow against the wind?"

Another Ukranian came over, seeing me squatting beside this man sitting on the floor and asked: "Can I help?"

I shrugged. It was apparent that I couldn't help.

"Do you want me to carry your bags for you?" I asked the guy, as we were now almost to the airport. "No," he said. "I have a driver."

Then the bus doors opened and he quickly stood, grabbed his bags and moved towards the airport doors, one hand still on his back as he quickly moved in a limping gait.

I saw him later in customs, two lines over, still holding his back and eyes periodically squeezing shut in pain. A Ukranian in a suit came over and although I could barely hear the conversation, I could tell that the American was speaking in flawless Russian. He was explaining how he broke a rib. Something about a train, but that was all I heard. The suit called a uniformed Ukranian over, who escorted the man through customs.

I never saw the American again, but those words--"Who am I to blow against the wind?"--have periodically flitted through my mind this week, not in response to any situation, but unbidden and in his voice: full of pain and trying to get me to understand.

There's one other thing I realized in this past week and only when I started to type this blog did the two connect. I have largely adapted to Ukranian custom. It took more than a year, one that taught me that my notion that I easily adapted to other cultures was very, very wrong.

I thought it was largely the suspicions and poor health care of Ukranians that had my host mothers nagging me to wear house slippers, not drink cold liquids or to keep my throat covered. I spent a lot of my stipend each month and put a lot of effort into grinding meat or making tortillas so I could have hamburgers or quesedillas. I was, in short, an American, and planned on staying one.

Now, though, it's just second nature to wear my version of the house slippers: my foam sandles, which are a lot more comfortable. And I wear them because I realized, yes, it really is better for your body if you keep your feet warm and insulated. I do keep my throat covered outside. Lunch is cabbage soup and bread and a snack is an apple and a slice of cheese and--most tellingly--I didn't bring back a single American food item from my Christmas break (unlike my April trip, when I was loaded down with jars of Peanut Butter, popcorn and other things). For some reason, it just doesn't make sense to have those things here. It's almost more stressful to keep trying to eat American. It just feels natural to eat Ukranian. It's not that I've gone native; my mom had trouble keeping the cupboard and fridge stocked in the face of my never-ending eating of American food. But I came back and didn't think twice about going back to Ukranian food, simply switched. I used to think all the homeopathic remedies were kind of silly, but two days ago when I was told a good remedy for my running nose was inhaling the smoke from a burning garlic stem, I did it, no hesitation.

It took a long time, but I'm finally adapted.

After wall, who am I to blow against the wind?

Saturday, January 14, 2006

America: Miami and South Beach

So, pumped from our excursions in the Everglades, Sarah and I headed to Miami Beach (this is all the same day, mind you).

When one is on the go from early morning to late night, one needs coffee, and none is stronger than Cuban coffee, which is sold in small cups to make sure you don't drink so much that your heart explodes.

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Cuban Coffee

We met our couchsurfing host, Meagan. My mom was opposed to me doing couchsurfing (out to protect me from people who would slit my throat in my sleep), but after meeting Meagan and realizing it would be not only Meagan, but her sister and her friend staying the night with her as well, I realized that A)I was about to spend Friday night hanging out with four cool girls or B)I would have my throat slit in my sleep by a cult of cool girls. Neither seemed like a particularly poor option.

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A horrible picture of Sarah, Megan's friend, Megan's sister and Megan (didn't get permission from the other two to use names)

I was hyped to go salsa dancing, and we went straight to my favorite salsa club in South Beach, Mangos, but all we got to see of it was the front door:
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This was because yours truly left his passport in Orlando, forgetting that in America they ID at the door. I felt slightly better that Megan had lost her driver's licence and they wouldn't let her in either.

So we spent the rest of the evening walking around South Beach. The picture of the four girls was taken in Tantra, a restaurant billed as "the best place to see celebrities". Only celebreties could afford it. A steak and lobster tail dinner was $95. An ounce of Russian caviar was $250. Designed, according to the front of the menu, to "enhance the senses", it had grass (as in actual sod) on the floor, incence burning in the air, new wave music on the speakers and various soft-porn movies on flat screen televisions. My senses were enhanced enough by the bartender, whose chest had also been enhanced. Drop-dead-supermodel-gorgeous and she was working as a bartender. That's Miami for you. At the bar, the girls each had $15 martinis before we headed back out into the night.

Meagan stopped us in front of another restaurant and said: "that place has the coolest bathrooms ever." I went to check it out. Maybe she didn't mean coolest literally, but the urinals in the men's bathroom were full of ice:

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Now, I used the one on the left, and confirmed the suspicion that urine rapidly melts ice. This means it is, in fact, someone's job to continually refill these urinals all night. That is also Miami for you.

We tried, unsuccesfully, to get into a few other clubs before we went to a party at the University of Miami that Meagan knew about. It was pretty low-key, but I did get to learn about beer pong. This is a picture of beer pong:

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Cups full of beer are placed on either side of the table. If you get a ping-pong ball into one of the opposing team's cups, they have to drink the cup. Much inebrity ensues.

We crashed after the party, but did get up early the next morning to take a walk on the beach and getting into the car to drive back to Orlando. After all, it was Saturday, and I had promised to take Sarah to some Orlando clubs.

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South Beach

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

America: Ukraine Videos!

Go to *here*...

...to see the 25 minute video (or other, shorter videos) that I put together about Ukraine and what I've been doing there!

Sunday, January 08, 2006

America: The Everglades (pics)

So last I left off, Sarah and I had just gotten back from snorkling in Biscayne Bay. We meant to get to be early as we had been running on four hours of sleep each, but then they started a campfire behind the hostel and since Sarah and I had brought our guitars...

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Sarah on guitar

We awoke the next day exhausted but with too many plans to rest. We rented a canoe from the hostel, strapped it to the top of Sarah's car and drove into the Everglades.

I grew up in Florida, but had never been to the Everglades, an oversight I felt needed to be corrected. They are beautiful: a peaceful, waterlogged wonderland that we sought to see close up by launching the canoe at 9 mile lake for a 5.5 mile looped "trail" of following marked poles.

They took us through tunnels of mangroves, through shallow (less than two-feet deep) rivers and past wide, sprawling rivers of grass. The birds were the most beautiful, especially the huge white herons that would take the the sky at our approach. We were alone on that trail, a peaceful few hours of paddling and just being out in what was for me, a completely new, visually-rich, environment.

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Paddling through a tunnel of mangroves

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Sarah paddling

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Paddling on a river

Despite seeing lots of fish and birds, we went the whole trail without seeing a single alligator. It was only when we had finished, strapped the canoe to the car and were driving off that we saw a huge one--at least 12 feet--in the water we had just been in. Sarah stopped the car and we got out. A man with a camera was standing at water's edge focusing on the alligator and I walked up beside him.

Noticing me watching the gator, he says "I thought you two were going to hit that one over there." Following his indicating finger, I saw the snout of a four foot long gator sticking out of the water, not three feet from where we had beached the canoe. Past it, another gator, this one nearly ten feet, was lying in the water as well.

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The gator we had brought our canoe up beside

It turns out that the gators spent the cold morning on the bottom of the lakes and rivers, and since we hadn't seen one in hours of paddling, we gave up looking for them. It turns out they had been beneath us much of the time, and were now just surfacing in the afternoon heat.

After the canoing, we decided to do a "swamp slog". We drove along the roads, looking for a close looking cypress dome. These are cypresses:

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For reasons unknown to me (but probably known to botanists), the cypresses will sometimes grow together in tight clumps that form dome shapes. Spotting one, we parked the car on the side of the road, took paddles to ward of possible gators and jumped into the swamp.

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Here, you can see Sarah walking towards a cypress dome

Walking in the swamp was cool for a little bit, legs pushing through the dead heads of cat o' nine tails and the hundreds of shells from what appeared to be a snail genocide. But then we hit thick patches of saw grass that cut at our hands and faces as we pushed through it.

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Some of the hundreds of snail shells floating in the swamp. I don't know what killed them

Finally, though, we arrived at the cypress dome. Inside, it was like a little tropical jungle. Mosquitos, which had not bothered us on the canoe trip or up till that point in the slog, descended on us. It was winter, so they were few, but I have read that they are massive swarms in the swamp in the summer, and that some early settlers of Florida were driven mad by the constant attacks.


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Me, hiking in the swamp


Inside the dome, we found beautiful purple and red flowers, and hundreds of bromiliads. The bromiliads are not part of the trees, but grow on them.

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Bromeliads

Tired as we were from paddling and slogging, that was not the end of the day, though. We returned the canoe, washed up, packed our things and took off for Miami Beach. After all, it was a Friday night.

But that is another post...

Thursday, January 05, 2006

America: Underwater Mooning (Pics)

Finally! On the road and things worth writing about!

(By the way, you'll get the title when you get to the last pic)

Sarah and I came down to South Florida today, intent on seeing Biscayne National Park, Everglades National Park, and party a little in Miami before we and head back to Orlando to party Saturday night.

We checked into the Everglades Hostel this morning, which would certainly be on my top ten hostel list, if I ever had gotten around to making one. 1930s Art Deco buildings, the most stocked and organized kitchen I've ever seen, free internet, thick mattresses, big screen television with two shelves of DVDs, and a huge, beautiful landscaped backyard with a camp fire, grill and hammocks. Nice bit of paradise here in the tip of Florida.

We got in just under the wire for a snorkling trip in Biscayne National Park. If you were unaware, Biscayne National Park is 90% water: protected coral reefs, islands, ship wrecks and the largest mangrove forest in the nation (the trees rise out of the water on their roots, which look like stilts made of sausages). We snorkled a decent size reef (if Sarah were scuba certified, we definitely would have done the wrecks), but let me point out something: we were snorkling--in nothing but swimwear--in JANUARY!

I LOVE FLORIDA!

Admitedly, the water was a little brisk, in the mid 70s, and maybe chucking out $6 more dollars for the wetsuits would have been a good idea, but we're poor Corps volunteers and, well, we got to go snorkling--in swimwear--in JANUARY! IN JANUARY! I also got a bit of a tan, just to rub it in when I get back to Ukraine.

In any case, tomorrow we're going to do a 5.5 mile trail in the Everglades, except the "trail" is water and we'll be in a canoe. Can't wait. It's so good to be on the road again!

Here's pics taken with a cheap-o underwater camera and then one-hour developed with scan to disk at Wal-Mart. I not only love Florida, but I love America. Knock it all you want, it's damn convienent to live in. Since I'm just uploading at the hostel, no editing can be done, so the pictures are too dark and blue (you really need special filters and a flash to take good pics underwater) but hopefully you'll get a sense of what we got to see.

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Purple fan coral

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Sarah above the waves

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Sarah below the waves

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Fish and coral

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Pretty coral shot

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Me and Sarah underwater

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Yes, this is me giving the camera an underwater mooning

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

America: Sarah's Here!

Sarah's here! Sarah's my travel buddy and original climbing partner I haven't seen her since I left for Peace Corps: more than 14 months.

She's spent the past year doing Americorps, leading trail crews in Oregon and Washington state and will be starting another job leading a trail crew here in Florida. So she came down a week early and, well, ROAD TRIP!

It'll be short because of time constraints, but we'll be off to the Everglades and then Miami tomorrow. Canoing! Aligators! Salsa dancing! Oh my. But finally I'll again be doing things worth writing about!

Monday, January 02, 2006

Misc: How to Repair an Overheating Toshiba Satellite A75-S2112 (Pics)

About 0.7 people will find this post interesting, but hopefully it will help some people.

I purchased my Toshiba in April and by September (FIVE MONTHS LATER!) it was shutting down with increasing regularity: not a power down, but a complete, instant shut off. As this always happened during heavy processing loads and that lifting the machine off the desk with books (what moron designed a laptop with the fans UNDERNEATH the machine?!?) stopped the problem, it was obviously thermal in nature. A friend who owns the exact same laptop had the exact same problem and an online search revealed that this problem is common in new Toshibas. Between September and December, the problem got progressively worse to where playing a DVD for 20 minutes would prompt a shut down.

Apparently Toshiba had started using desktop processors to get more power in their notebooks, but because of the heat they put off, they had to design an air-flow cooling system. Fans drag air through heatsinks, but suck in dust, too, which becomes trapped in the heatsink, blocking airflow and resulting in the processors getting too hot and shutting down.

Toshiba's fix was a bios upgrade that, according to their website, "better regulates thermal management". This is bullshit. The problem isn't a software one, but a hardware one, but rather than recall the laptops, Toshiba put out a fix that essentially slows down the processor so that it doesn't overheat, but cutting performance. When this was pointed out to Toshiba, the company said that it only "looked like" the processors had slowed when bench tests showed they had.

I didn't want to use this fix because I do a lot of intensive video editing on my laptop. I don't want a slower machine.

So the only real solution was to have the heat sink cleaned. My Toshiba is still under warranty, but the best return time they could give me was "3-5 weeks"; unacceptable as I needed to take it back to Ukraine with me.

This left me with the option of cleaning it myself. I didn't think this would be overly hard: most laptops have an access panel for the CPU for upgrades. I was very, very wrong. As my mom's fiancee and I found out when we got down to it, the CPU is completely inaccesible without dissasembling the entire laptop. But we got it done and cleaned and now it's up and working great again (although I will be duct-taping dust filters over the vents to prevent the problem from reoccuring).

If you don't want to take apart your laptop, I suggest putting a vacuume up to the exhaust port and blowing air into the intake port. Not a complete fix, but it may help. On mine, as I found when we got it apart, it was so clogged with dust that this solution would not have worked for me.

If you want to perform the same operation yourself, here's the process:

1)Remove the battery and power supply and touch something grounded to remove static electricity from yourself. NEVER touch the motherboard, even if you've discharged the static electricity.

2) Remove all the screws from the bottom of the laptop. You will have to remove the access panel for the hard drive, remove the hard drive, and then remove the DVD drive to get to the last of the screws.

3) Turn the laptop back over. GENTLY lift up and remove the thin plastic panel above the keyboard. Use a flat-tip screw driver to do this. Unscrew the monitor. There are two screws on top and two going in the back of the laptop. Unplug the cable attaching it to the motherboard and unscrew the grounding screw. The information cables for the monitor are permanantly attached and, unfortunately, you'll have to work around them. Lay the monitor down and put a tee-shirt on top of it to keep it from getting scratched.

4) Unscrew the keyboard and gently lift it towards you. Pull out the ribbon cable that attaches it to the motherboard and set it aside.

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Here you can see the monitor detached and the keyboard detached.

5) Through the access holes underneath the keyboard, unplug everything going into the motherboard. These cables are for LEDs and speakers.

6) Slide a flat-tip screwdriver around the edge of the laptop (between the black and grey plastic) to detach the upper housing from the lower. Flip the housing (the gray plastic) onto the monitor, taking care not to pull out the monitor info cable.

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This is with the grey, upper housing removed, before removing the motherboard.

7)Now you can see the motherboard. The grey square in the upper right is the CPU, which the technicians at Toshiba have put underneath the motherboard, just to make things interesting for you. Reflect that you are now in the guts of your laptop and a simple access panel at the bottom of the laptop could have saved you all this risky grief.

8) Unscrew the screws on the motherboard and gently lift it out. You'll have to work it a bit as the USB, volume control and other bits stick out of access ports in the bottom housing, but if you take your time pulling back on the housing, the board will come out.

9) Turn the board over. There's the fans, the heatsink and the CPU. Remove the fans and the heatsink (the heatsink pulls up, but it may stick because of the heatsink compound on the CPU) and throughly clean them with canned air and/or cleaning solution.

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With the fans removed, you can see how much dust has built up in the heatsink. The airflow through the heatsink over the CPU (on the left) had been completely blocked with dust, which is what caused the overheating

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Cleaned heatsink and fans

10)Put heatsink compound onto the CPU and reverse the process, making sure the right sized screws go into the right sized holes (the holes are marked F8, F5, F3, etc. for the size of screw. F8s are the biggest, F3s are the smallest).

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The CPU (lower left) with new heatsink compound on it

There. Simple.

Ironically, going through the laptop, I kept marvelling at the engineering. The packed a lot in onto one motherboard. Unfortunately, it was an oversight on the heart of it all: not allowing easy access to the one part that, in this laptop, obviously needs routine maintance, that made this such a process.

Good luck!

Sunday, January 01, 2006

America: New Year Memories

Oh, irony.

This time last year I had just moved to Zhytmyr and everyone spoke a language (Russian) that I didn't understand (having been trained in Ukranian). My host parents went to bed and my host brothers went out without me and I had never felt more alone. I wanted nothing more than to be in America.

Since then I have made lots of friends, learned much of the language and feel very comfortable in Ukraine, but this time this year I was with my family while it seemed that everyone was at a blow-out bash for Ukraine's biggest holiday. My mom was in bed at 10:00 PM and I was ringing in the New Year watching a movie with her fiancee. I wanted nothing more than to be in Ukraine.

It's not that I can't be satisfied, it's just that my world has changed a lot in this year and while I'm not "more" at home in Ukraine, for now it is my home and save for my going-to-bed early family, I know few people here in Florida.

But I did have dinner this evening with my mom, her fiancee, my sister and my niece and I was reminded of an oft-written Vonnegut quote that I once had the honor of hearing from him in person: "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

But yeah, making the phone calls to people in Ukraine to wish them happy New Year and hearing the raucous cheering in the background did make me miss it.

I am reminded of some very good prior New Years, though:

*16 years-old, working at Universal Studios as a skipper on the Jaws ride. My job was to yell a lot and shoot at a mechanical shark. Most of the park was in position to watch the fireworks display as midnight approached on New Years Eve, but a group of teens kept getting back on my boat and so instead of acting out the spiel, we did a live Mystery Science Theatre 3000 while things exploded, the shark attacked, the boat shook and the clock turned midnight.

*21 years-old: not New Years Eve but the evening of New Years Day, my friend Robin took me to see some of Orlando's illegal street races. Think Fast and the Furious with Forty Year-olds. There were a couple fights, getting chased off (twice) by the cops (not high-speed chases, just chased off--which did mean piling into cars and clearing out like roaches), a lot of really nice cars and, of course, races, which are over in seconds as opposed to movie slow-mo, lots of angles, the-lights-begin-to-streek races.

*25 years-old: in Times Square, although unwilling to wait the 12 hours necessary to be in Times Square, my five hour wait had me locked in the paddock at 56th street (every block is ringed with barriers; if you leave, you're not let back in) while the action was up on 42nd. Played guitar with some guys from North Carolina, watched a guy without his shirt of running around in the sub-zero cold screaming "97 more minutes! 96 more minutes!", and basically held back a fierce need to go to the bathroom while we wondered what all the cheering near the epicenter was about. Had a clear view of the ball, though, and the boredom of the evening did give way to intense elation when the ball dropped, it hit midnight and I was one of half a million watched by billions singing "Aulde Lang Syne".

Memories keep one company on lonely nights.