Ted Altenberg

We took a day trip to Athens to see the city, the new Acropolis Museum, and the Acropolis itself. Athens is “New York without sidewalks,” a huge urban city with loud busy traffic and lots of people rushing around. Modern skyscrapers intermingled with thousand – two thousand year old buildings.

We walked around the Plaka, a main shopping district for tourists. Kevin bought a bouzouki, a traditional Greek instrument with 4 pairs of strings similar to a mandolin, but a long fretted neck similar to a guitar; tuning is similar to lower 4 strings of a guitar as well. He is enjoying playing it.

The new Acropolis Museum is quite stunning, a well deserved and long-awaited addition to the cultural life and heritage of Greece. It’s a beautiful modern building at the foot of the Acropolis, and provides large open well-lighted space for the amazing antiquities on display. It opened just a few days before we arrived, so we are among the first 100,000 people to see it! (A museum staff person told us around 11,000 people a day are coming to the museum.)

One of the hotly debated political issues is whether the British Museum is going to return to Greece the so-called “Elgen marbles” — the parts of the Parthenon stolen and taken to UK by British explorer Thomas Bruce (7th Earl of Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799-1803). Apparently, Britain used to say, “But you have no adequate place to display them, or protect them… More people will be able to see them here in our museum.” Now that this museum has been completed (after 20+ years in the planning… but that’s another story), Britain has intimated that it may return them, but will they…?

We spent around an hour walking around the Acroplois itself. “Acropolis” means “high city,” for it is the section of Ancient Athens that is built high a top a hill in the center of Athens, where’s found the remains of the Parthenon, the MMMMM and other artifacts of Ancient Greece. Our afternoon visit was hours into a long hot day in the city, and Kevin and Zoe were losing patience for viewing “a bunch of old rocks,” getting a bit crabby… But we trust that in hindsight they will be happy to have seen it.

by Zoe

This is the second day of being in Greece and already I’ve had some adventures. Yesterday, we arrived after 13 or so hours of flight and I could barely stay awake. We went on a walk to keep from falling asleep, which would mess up our sleeping pattern or something. So we went to a little plaza-like place and saw the Aegean sea which was very pretty. When we were walking there, we saw a bunch of police hanging out. Apparently they were “guarding” the Prime Minister of Greece’s house. They all had big, black machine guns and wouldn’t let anyone walk by. Kevin was playing his guitar, though, and they looked really confused, so I guess they assumed we were harmless and let us walk by!

It has been really hot compared to what I’m used to, but not too bad. We went swimming today, the water was SUPER warm compared to the ocean I’m used to, and it was crystal clear. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of cats, Fred says it’s becuase people feed them. They are so cute! For lunch we had dakos (sounds just like “tacos”) which is bread soaked in water with olive oil, salt with fresh tomato on top. It was really good. Almost everything we have eaten has tomatos in it. Mom says they grow well in this climate.

Much fun already, but I’m positive they are many more adventures to come!

Waiting at SFO	Finally the stress of getting ready, getting packed, getting the house cleaned and packed away (in prep for house trade), and getting to the airport on time is all behind us, and now we wait to board the plane…
6 hours into the flight... 4 more to go...	9½ hours on a plane… ugh. But KLM takes good care of its passengers: good food, free beverages (including beer, wine, cordials, cognac), 3 movies + TV, and courteous friendly flight attendants… A refreshing change from US carriers!
Landing in Athens	We arrived in Athens around 4:20 pm, and my cousin Fred met us at the airport. He and Anastasia live in Rafina, about an hour outside of Athens, right on the Aegean. their home is a 15-minute walk from the beach, and 5–10 minute walk to town and to the Pharmacy which Anastasia owns and operates.

San Fran non-stop to Amsterdam, then on to Athens, Greece. 20th anniversary in Greece–yee hah!

With more than a little help from my friend and web mentor John Govsky, I’ve made a few subtle changes to this blog (which is WordPress):

• Reduced the height of the header image; and more importantly:
• Added my website menu! This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. Now that I’ve figured out how to do so, I can replicate this on other people’s sites. Yeah, John!

This mostly involved tweaks to the CSS, but I also reduced the background image size, using PhotoShop of course. As John and I were discussing while working through this, anyone who wants to be able to build and maintain a website-especially if they want to use tools such as WordPress or other PHP-MySQL-based apps-should learn enough HTML, CSS and PHP to be able to hand code their site! (If this interests you, and you’re in the Santa Cruz area, I highly recommend you take John’s classes at Cabrillo: Web Publishing 1 (DM60A), Web Pub 2 (DM 160B) and Web Pub 3 (DM 160C)!)

June 11, with 28 days and counting until we take off for Europe! I created a Europe 2009 page at this very blog, and have created author accounts for Jody, Kevin and Zoe. It is my hope that we all post travelogue entries-along with lots of pictures-as we travel through Greece, Italy and France.

I am typing this entry on our new “Hackintosh” netbook computer! “The Mac nano that Apple should make-but doesn’t!” It’s a 10″ MSI Wind U100 netbook laptop. Only 2.3 lbs, small and compact, perfect for traveling. It comes with Windows XP, but the “hackintosh” project is a bunch of folks that have figured out how to successfully install Mac OS X onto “Wintel” hardware. I’m working in OS X 10.5.7 right now! Sweet! Strictly speaking I’m breaking the Apple Mac OS X EULA by installing it on non-Apple hardware, but… (If you’re interested in such a machine, contact me. The guy from whom I purchased it doesn’t want his name and contact info posted publicly, but you can ask me…)

On Friday the 13th (of March), I received a pink slip, along with ~250 other teachers in PVUSD and nearly 27,000 across California. In May, when the District rescinded over 100 of those pink slips, mine was not one of those rescinded. The $14M of cuts they’ve made to PVUSD schools are “to the bone,” so it was looking rather grim regarding the likelihood that my GATE TOSA position would be saved…

Then, on Monday June 1, the Assistant Superintendent for HR called me to inform me that my position is secure for SY ’09-’10! To paraphrase him, “We don’t know how we’re going to fund your position, but we understand how important GATE Services are, and we don’t want to lose you, so your position is assured.”

Thank goodness. Now I can finish out the school year and go on to summer vacation, knowing I have a position to return to. And what a summer it’s going to be: Europe!

Mom passed away 30 years ago today. Wow, time passes… quickly? I don’t know; an awful lot has happened in those 30 years… Indeed, I was just 19 when Mom died. Now I’m approaching 50. Then I was a high school graduate working as a waiter, looking at colleges for the coming fall. Now I’m a dad, a husband, a homeowner, a teacher for 22 years…

Yep, it’s a doozy of a Friday the 13^th. I am one of approximately 26,000 teachers in California that received a pink slip today. PVUSD has made $13.8M in budget cuts for the end of 08-09 and 09-10, and those budget cuts include the elimination of my position. The budget deal reached last month in Sacramento included “flexibility” with how districts can spend categorical funding, including GATE grants. PVUSD has voted to exercise that right and appropriate the entire GATE grant and “roll it over” to general funds. This might mean the complete elimination of services to GATE students, and the elimination of our 2 FTEs—mine and my boss, GATE Coordinator Lyn Olson.

50 years ago today (2/3/1959), Buddy Holly, along with J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson and Ritchie Valens, died in a plane crash while touring the Midwest. NPR had a nice story about this, and of course there’s Don McLean’s 1971 song, “American Pie.”

200 years ago yesterday (2/2/1809), Felix Mendelssohn was born. He went on to be one of the greatest 19th century composers. NPR had a story on him today, which said in part, “He certainly ranks among the greatest 19th-century composers: Mendelssohn’s peers wanted to sound like him, and his was considered the style in which to write romantic music.” They had another interesting story about a huge library (270 pieces) of previously unpublished works by Mendelssohn that are now “coming to light through The Mendelssohn Project.”

Yes, it is the dawn of a new era, a dawn for new hope, new direction, renewal.

Read the full text of his inaugural address at the New York Times website, www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20text-obama.html.