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This was taken about a month ago, she’s taller now.

[Ro and me playing at the park while Joshua juggled.]

Many things have been going on around here lately that I can list as excuses for not updating the site in a million years. One is apathy (brought on by sleep deprivation, hopefully), another is the molars (GAH!), and still another is that our house got burglarized and our laptops stolen (lame!)

[A couple more photos from the camera card that didn’t get stolen. We were at the park for another Pedalpalooza thing. Note the orange band Ronin is wearing on her wrist: it’s to make sure Ronin doesn’t buy beer. Because she is underage.]

So yeah, Ronin is getting molars. She has been a total mess for the past six weeks with only minimal progress: first top molars just poking through, one bottom fully in, and the other has just surfaced in all its gory splendor. Then when she’s done growing all these, there are eight more.

Possibly it is just a developmental stage but I feel it is related to the teething; Ronin’s latest thing is a sudden and singular obsession to one random item, like for example, a Kid-Z bar wrapper. Take the other day when we were at the park playing; I’d slip bites into Ronin’s mouth as she ran by me en route from slide to stair (she generally refuses to eat while standing still, or god forbid, SITTING in her high chair) until finally the bar was done and I put the wrapper in my pocket. Then later when we passed a trash can, Ronin saw me unearth this holy treasure and (gasp) discard it. And she completely lost her shit. At first it didn’t occur to me what she wanted and I carried her away twisting and screaming and reaching desperately for the discarded wrapper. Unphased by Look! a bird! a ball! swings! trees! squirrels! firetrucks! babies! or any of the other park’s many distractions, Ronin continued to pitch a fit of epic proportion until I finally walked back and fished the wrapper out of the garbage can. Now all the staring parents were thinking, not only am I a mean mother for upsetting my precious child, I am an unhygienic one too who gives her poor kid pieces of trash to play with. Ronin, however, was immediately pacified and happily waved the wrapper in our wake as I took her home.

Yesterday’s drama was Weetabix. We walked to the store for our sample fix, from which a significant portion of Ronin’s daily caloric intake comes, and upon arrival, I fixed her a little paper cup of mini Weetabix to munch on as I wandered in a daze about the store. She spent the time taking the pieces out of the cup and putting them back in the cup, chewing on the edges of the cup, sucking on the Weetabix making a little shuuck shuuck sound, but not actually eating any of it. No biggie—she was happy and she lives on air anyway. We strolled home and as I tried to disentangle her from the straps of the stroller, (cue ominous music) I took the cup of Weetabix out of her hand. Bad move on my part. Her previously happy mood was shattered right then into a million bits and she started EH-EH-EHing hysterically. I got her out of the stroller and quickly shoved the cup back into her hand. She quieted but was a bit stressed out from those moments she had just spent wondering if she would never see her beloved Weetabix ever again.

Whatever kid. We got in the house and she continued to just play with the Weetabix, sucking on them and rattling them around in the cup. She spent a considerable amount of time taking the Weetabix pieces out and putting them various places in the house, on the chair, on the couch, in her shoes, and in her dump truck. Then she pooped.

Because I am a mean mother and Ender of All Things Fun, I scooped her up and took her into the bedroom to change. Yes, the Weetabix came along (I’m not that mean) though I was starting to plot the demise of the soggy things. Have you ever seen Weetabix? It looks like little fibrous bricks, sort of styrofoamy and rather unappetizing. Anyway, it was a big tragedy for Ronin to be so callously torn from Weetabix In The Front Room and she hollered loudly, struggling and twisting to get me to, presumably, drop her onto the hard floor. I removed the Weetabix cup from her hands while she screamed hysterically and set it on the bed next to her so I could lie her down. She carried on so tragically that I handed the cup back to her to hold while I changed her and she reigned in her mood. She laid there sniffling and clutching the cup on her chest but then she tipped it up to peek in at the Weetabix, which promptly fell down onto her face and around her neck. TRAGEDY! Oh the sobbing! I picked up the three sodden bricks and put them back in her cup, righting it in her hands on top of her chest. She slowly peeked inside to see the Weetabix and again it tumbled back out onto her face and around her neck. Again the sobbing and the restoration of the Weetabix cup; again another look in the cup and the disastrous outcome. Eventually I carried the sobbing mess back out into the living room.

She was so torn apart by the changing incident that I had to hold her on my lap with Nigel (and the cup of Weetabix) for a few minutes while she sucked on a pacifier and rested her head on my chest. Once recovered, she returned to games with the (now dirty and raggedy) cup of (now utterly disgusting, sodden and covered in rug fuzz) Weetabix. Eventually she lost interest and I was able to sneak it away and chuck it, but it took a while.

I always give her samples at the store and she usually eats them, or doesn’t eat them and chucks the paper cup on the floor for me to pick up (sometimes over and over again—a fun game!). I suppose I must be more selective when choosing things for Ronin to play with lest she develop an unnatural preoccupation with it. What it was about the Weetabix that triggered her obsession I’ll never know but one sample was enough to convince me to never buy the stuff ever as long as I live.

It’s pedalpalooza and there are dozens of rides and gatherings every day. We haven’t been on a bike with Ronin yet, but I finally ordered a kid carrier and helmet for her so we should be on the road by the end of the week. She’s still pretty small so we decided to start with the ibert and move on to a trailer or maybe an extracycle when she gets too big for it.

Anyway not having a way to transport Ronin, we drove to Cirque du Cycling, which is pretty lame I know. We watched the parade, met with friends, juggled a little, and left when Ronin started to get grumpy.

1 candle power



This trike is pedaled with a running motion. A few other bikes in the parade were built by the same person including the wolf bike below.






Wolf Bike.



There are lots of home built tall bikes in this town.






Whenever bikers gather in Portland on a sunny day you can bet it won’t be long before a bunch of naked riders show up.



Aphex Twin?



The parade was followed by Criterium races. We watched the warm up laps but had to leave before the start because Ronin just couldn’t take it anymore. I liked watching this guy on the rollers. Going full speed on that looks pretty scary.

[To read Part I, click here.]

[All images can be clicked to view a larger version.]

The crown jewel of the Chernobyl tour is of course Pripyat, the abandoned Soviet city. Of course this is not the first large abandoned site ever but it is probably the largest modern-era city standing empty. This is what the tourists come to see, what a city looks like after it has been sitting idle for twenty years.

And it looks… abandoned. Run down. The city is quiet—aside from the dizzying buzz of insects and birds twittering like mad. It is amazingly fascinating and I wish we had a lot more time to explore. Unfortunately, we all had to be out of the zone by 5pm and were on a tight schedule. I want to go back someday though.

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[You can click any of the images to see the larger version.]

In June of 2005, Joshua and I spent a month and a half in Ukraine and Russia, during which time we visited Chernobyl. I’m a little late with the write-up. Um, sorry about that.

I have always been fascinated with abandoned places. In Spain we were obsessed with Las Abandonadas—ancient rock houses in deserted villages that were sprinkled all over the country, their former inhabitants having either moved to the city or died. In Mexico, we searched out old towns that had emptied after the mines went bust or the money went elsewhere. In the US there are ghost towns (hanta virus! Gak), or more frequently, abandoned factories or warehouses, like those that used to be near my studio in San Francisco (inhabited only by bums and street kids). The places are mysterious, eerie, and very photogenic. A glimpse of post-apocalyptic, science fiction-style doom I suppose. Your imagination tends to run wild when in such places.

The Grandaddy of all the places we ever sought out was Chernobyl (Chornobyl in Ukrainian), the reactor meltdown site and surrounding 30-kilometer radius of no-man’s-land, the “zone.” The reactor itself was interesting and all but what is most fascinating to me is the history and politics surrounding the disaster, and the so-called “ghost town,” Pripyat along with hundreds of small villages that used to exist inside the perimeter but that no longer do.

Getting to the Chornobyl site, in our experience, was actually pretty easy and took but a quick phone call to check our names against a watchlist of International Abandoned Nuclear Reactor Site Spies (or whatever it was they checked). There are a number of agencies in Kiev that arrange tours and they all compete with each other citing this and that difference—of course the prices vary wildly—and they make it sound like it is actually a very difficult and complicated process to get cleared to visit the zone. In addition, they all implied that they themselves did the tours. In the end however, they are all selling you the same thing because all tours within the zone are actually handled from within by a single state agency, Chernobyl InterInform. CII has one set price for everything and in our experience, they were efficient and expedient about processing requests. They pick you up wherever are, take you into the zone, provide a guide, give you a tour, feed you an amazing lunch, and drive you back home at the end of the day. So basically you can skip the Kiev agencies and arrange a visit directly through them. Our guide laughed when she heard the varying amounts we all paid our various agencies to come on the tour and the lines of bullshit we were fed. She said the Kiev Chernobyl Tour agencies are a total racket and I agree. But we did it because we only had one day in which we could fit the trip into our schedule and since that day had been reserved completely by the agency, through the agency we went.

We met up with the CII van outside a bank in Independence Square in Kiev. There were six of us tourists and a driver who spoke only Russian. The guy we sat next to in the van was a Scottish comedian from Serbia who had spent his entire vacation in the far eastern town of Dneprpetrovsk, a large dingy industrial city in the east that holds absolutely no interest for your average tourist. We of course thought he was crazy but then we had just spent a month living in Kharkiv, another large industrial city in the east that has no interest for the average tourist, and we had rather enjoyed ourselves. He had an incredibly high opinion of Bill Clinton (every Eastern European with whom we spoke politics, which is to say nearly everyone we spoke with, did) and an equally low opinion of our then current president, George Bush (as did every other Eastern European—and Western European for that matter). He told us that the purpose of his vacation was to gather material for his comedy act. I always wondered what he took away with him from the Chornobyl tour.

We got to the 30-kilometer checkpoint and stopped. Our driver chatted briefly with the guards. They looked over our passports (like, no big whoop), gave them back, and one told us something in some language that was not Russian or Ukrainian. We stared blankly at him until it was determined that he told us (in English, it turned out) not to take any souvenirs. We were all, OH OF COURSE NOT HA HA all smiles and waves, and then we went on.

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