I’m on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) right now riding to San Francisco. I’m listening to Snow Patrol, but it can’t keep the rumble of the train out of my head. I feel like I’m listening to the soundtrack of my life. I know that people who commute every day must miss the movie show that passes in front of them outside these dirty windows. Couldn’t CALTRANS come up with a really long trainwash tunnel that the trains could run through every morning and/or night? Citizens deserve clean windows in order to see the green hills and red and yellow liquid amber trees that stream past like a fiesta.

I almost didn’t leave the house today. I had to convince myself to get outside. I haven’t been out by myself on a solitary adventure in such a long time that I feel a little out of practice. There’s a slight butterflies in the stomach effect going on. That’s excitement for what lies ahead. I have to remind myself that we all should remember how to be happy alone.

After shoving myself into the car, the next hurdle was buying my train ticket. Figuring out how to use the latest ticket machine at the BART station could have been an all day ordeal, but the kindly station man, in his tan trenchcoat and black beret, stepped right in to assist, making my life so much easier.

I’m just coming out of the Caldecott tunnel and into the light of Berkeley. How lucky I am to live in the Bay Area. I know there are lots of other wonderful places to live — San Diego; Portland, Oregon; or Barcelona, Spain; or Prague, Czech Republic. But since I don’t live in any of those places I’m glad that I live here. We citizens deserve to live in a place that we can say wholeheartedly “I love this place.” And clean windows. We deserve clean windows on all our mass transit– ferries, busses, trains. If we are making the sacrifice of foresaking a ride on our horse — I mean car — over the open range — I mean freeway — at least we should be able to expect see-through windows that let us admire the view.

Oakland is approaching. I heard on the news today that Oakland is now listed as the 4th most dangerous city in the United States. Should I clutch my purse when the Oakland station doors open?? It doesn’t look too bad from here, although I have to admit, it’s hard to judge from this speed and distance. There are some dilapidated Victorian style houses, trees, streets. Yards are overgrown with grass. Junky cars are in the front yard. Doesn’t look too scary. However, I would hate to live in a place where I had to unfurl miles of barbed wire and string it across my backyard fence for protection. No citizen should have to do that. And the windows . . . they can’t even be cleaned because of the bars on the outside. That’s no way to live. I wonder how many citizens of Oakland can say wholeheartedly “I love this place”?

It occurs to me as I write this that if I were a daily commuter, and had a smidgen of discipline, I might be able to write The Great American Novel during my commute hours. I wonder if anyone has tried it.

We’re out of another tunnel and into the light again. There’s a lot of graffiti out there. A sure sign of boredom or lack of art supplies. Or a checking account. If a person had a checking account with some money in it, he or she probably wouldn’t feel compelled to spray a signature across the side of a building. The person could just sign checks instead. But maybe the graffiti is a territory thing. Like a dog who lifts its leg a little on every bush in its neighborhood just to let every other dog know it’s been there.

We’re going under the bay now. It would have been sweet if they had designed the transbay tube with windows so we could look out of the train and see the ocean world. But it probably would be too dark and murky to see anything. How deep below the water are we traveling right now? It’s an amazing thought. Up above us is the Bay Bridge and maybe an oil tanker trying to dodge a bridge support. What the hell?? They still don’t require tankers to have double hulls?? How can we teach our children to learn from their mistakes if we don’t do it ourselves? Weren’t they talking about the need for double-hulled ships after the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989?

We’re pulling into the Powell Street station now, so it’s time for me to pack up. I am almost at my destination — the Joseph Cornell exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. More on that tomorrow!

Walking to the top of the castle in Molivos

Yesterday I was trying to organize some of my books which are sitting in piles all over my living room. (Too many books and not enough book shelves!) I came across a journal that was empty except for the first eight pages. I have to admit, I have a lot of half-filled notebooks scattered around my life. In fact, I suspect, if I perused each one, I’d find a lot more un-finished rather than finished journals. Actually, I knew myself so well when I started this particular one, that my first paragraph of writing ends with this line: “. . . I found this perfect notebook last night, and I bought it. So let’s see how much writing I actually do.” Not much, I’m afraid. But these eight pages are gems, if I do say so myself. They are not really about me (although what I chose to write about is definitely a reflection of who I am), but are a series of four little stories that were told to me about people from the town of Molivos, Greece.

Looking through the castle window at the harbor

Molivos is a tiny town on the island of Lesvos, Greece. It is in this town where my husband was born and raised. It’s the town I visited while on vacation when we were both in our mid-twenties. It’s where I met him and where we fell in love. I not only fell in love with him, but also with his home. The stories I am going to relate were written from my last visit there in 2001. I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I do.

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Story #1 – Letting Go

Last night was very nice. We [Michael and I] went to the home of Nikko and his wife, Yota. Nikko and Michael were childhood friends. I really liked Yota a lot. Maybe it’s becasue she talked to me in English and asked me questions about my job, which I could actually answer back in a comprehensible way since I didn’t have to speak Greek.

Yota is a vegetarian and a veterinarian. I suspect those two things are related somethow. She lived in Australia as a child which explains why her English is so good. She has beautiful big brown eyes and a perfect white simile — she must have the best teeth in Molivos. Michael tells me that her family is rich, so maybe she could afford to go to the dentist.

I don’t know how the conversation came to this, but she told me this story about her dog of sixteen years.

Her dog was pretty old and was ill and dying. Yota was going to be going to Athens for three weeks. She would be leaving in two days. She knew her dog was dying and should be put to sleep, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Yet she didn’t want the dog to die without her while she was gone.

One evening she was reading a story to Nikko and her sister, It was about a yogi who had been given a sick deer to heal. The yogi had become attached to the deer, and when its health had improved, he did not want the deer to leave. So the deer stayed. Somehow the yogi came to the understanding that he could not keep the deer because it was a wild thing and had to be set free. So the yogi told the deer that it could go, and it did.

After listening to the story, Nikko went out to the patio where Yota’s dog was lying. He stroked the dog’s fur and told him that it was all right, that Yota would be okay and that he was free to go. At the very moment he said those words, the dog died.

Yota believes that her dog was holding on to life because she couldn’t let him go, but that Nikko had the strength to set him free.

The next day they buried their beloved dog, and the day after that, Yota left for Athens.

Looking down towards Eftalou

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Story #2 – Good Intentions

When Nikko was a young boy, his father owned a huge garden on the outskirts of Molivos. One day as a joke, a neighbor lady told Nikko that he could help his father’s watermelons grow better if he stuck a hole in them and turned them upside down.

So one evening, hoping to help his father, Nikko took a stick and punched a hole through every single watermelon rind and then turned the fruit over.

Of course, when Nikko’s father found out he was furious — but not with Nikko. The angry farmer went over and yelled at the neighbor woman who had lied to his son.

Looking down along the coast

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Story #3 – The Evil School Teacher

Michael often mentions a school teacher that he had here in Molivos who was feared by all the students because he was so mean.

One day Michael was at school and he hadn’t done his lesson from the day before. His excuse was that the class had been on a field trip, and he hadn’t had time to get the assignment finished.

The teacher was going over the lesson while Michael sat in his seat nervously chewing on a pencil, afraid that he was going to be called on. Of course, he was.

The teacher asked Michael to go to the front of the room to give an answer for a problem they were reviewing. Unfortunately, Michael still had a big chunk of chewed-off pencil in his mouth. In an attempt to get rid of it on his way up to the front of the class, he spit it out. It landed right on his teacher’s arm. The angry teacher grabbed Michael by the skin right in front of his ears and dragged him to the back of the room with Michael howling the entire way.

Nikko also told us how once this same evil teacher hung Nikko upside down in the classroom [I was not clear on how this was accomplished], and then started paddling him to punish him for some purported crime.

A few minutes into this endeavor, another teacher came into the room and said, “Take him down! You have the wrong kid!” Apparently, Nikko had a cousin at the school with the exact same name, and he was the one who had commited the offense and was supposed to be punished.

Looking down at the town beach

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Story #4 – Costas and the Foreign Lady

There is an old man named Costas who lives a few houses down from the place where Michael grew up. Costas does not really live in a house — it is more like a hovel, with a corrugated tin roof and small square windows that are always covered. He has two or three junky cars in his yard that he can’t drive since he lost one of his legs a few years ago. They say he hurt himself, although they don’t say how, that the leg developed gangrene and had to be removed.

When we first arrived in Molivos, Costas asked Michael to drive him to a cafe so they could watch the women walk by.

Michael says Costas was married to a nice woman, but after she died, Costas started to go a bit crazy. He used to be one of the biggest land owners in Molivos. He owned most of the land at the top of the hill below the castle. Then he started dividing it and selling off the pieces. He would spend all the money or sometimes give it away. It seems that his daughter and her husband, didn’t appreciate Costas selling off their future inheritance, so one night they snuck up to Costas’ house and beat him up while he was sleeping. He almost died. I don’t know whether this caused him to stop selling his land.

Nikkos told us another story about Costas. Once there was a foreign woman who came to Molivos. She met Nikko and asked thim to introduce her to a real traditional Greek man, so Nikko took her to meet Costas.

The foreign lady and Costas were up in his yard, sitting under a tree talking and drinking coffee. There was a goat nearby in the yard. It was bleating and making a lot of noise. Costas threw a couple of stones at the goat to get it to shut up, but it contined to bellow. So Costas pulled out a long switch blade that he had in his pocket, snapped it open, walked past the foreign woman, and slit the goat’s throat from ear to ear. Then he wiped the blood from his knife on the dead goat’s coat, closed it up, put it back in his pocket, and sat down to finish his coffee. The foreign woman left rather quickly after that.

Molivos at sunset

I had a goal, a dream: transfer my PowerPoint slideshow to DVD so my dad and aunt could have a copy that could be easily viewed. It all started after I returned from a trip to Germany that I had taken with my dad. We had gone together to see the town where he grew up. I had about 130 pictures on my digital camera, so I decided to put them in a PowerPoint presentation and burn it on a DVD for him to watch on TV. My aunt wanted a copy too, and I knew PowerPoint to DVD would be the simpliest way for her to see the pictures. Little did I know what I was getting myself into.

Things were going along nicely as I made my PowerPoint presentation, although the process of enhancing and cropping each image and putting it in the slide show was extremely time consuming. When I was about 7/8’s of the way through I thought to myself, “You know, self, I’ve never put PowerPoint on a DVD to view on the TV. I wonder how one does that.” Much to my horror, my Google search turned up nothing but discouraging news. “It can’t be done,” they said on all the best forumns. “Use product X.” Oops, not made for a Mac. “Turn each slide into an image and put it into iMovie.” Crappy resolution, and I don’t know how to use iMove. Besides, I had just done all my image work– I didn’t want to have to do it again. When I tried to learn about iMovie, I got conflicting and convoluted advice about some mysterious Ken Burns process and the “jaggies” which, surprisingly enough, has nothing to do with the PBS special about the Civil War. I tried to use iDVD. How the heck do I switch to a template that doesn’t play circus music ad naseaum? I went to bed at three a.m., no closer to my goal.

The only glimmer of clairty I had found was from this website from Mr. Daniel Slagle: Importing a Powerpoint Presentation. But when I tried to follow his suggestions, I created a movie that stayed on my first slide until the one minute and twenty-three second midi file was done playing. Clearly not what I had in mind. So using Mr. Slagle’s advice as my starting point, I waded through the muck and finally produced a PowerPoint movie that plays music and can be seen on my DVD player. The steps I went through to make this masterpiece go from PowerPoint to DVD are given below. In addition, if you save things regularly as you go along, you’ll end up with a PowerPoint Presentation, a QuickTime movie, and a DVD movie. Remember, since a TV has a screen with a lower resolution than a computer monitor, you won’t see the same crisp images on your TV that you have on your computer. However, I think you’ll be very happy the results. This process worked for me. Hopefully it will work for you as well.

Software Used:

PowerPoint 2004

Photoshop Elements

iMovie

QuickTime Pro

Toast Titanium

I worked on an iMac G5, so all the software is for OS X. I’m sure you can use other versions of some of these software products to produce similar results in order to get your PowerPoint presentation to a DVD.

1. Set-up the PowerPoint Presentation [PowerPoint 2004]

Suggestions:

Use a black background.

Don’t use custom animations.

Don’t choose an effect for slide transitions.

Set slide transitions to advance after four to five seconds. Apply to all.

Don’t add music or sounds to individual slides. We’ll add a soundtrack later.

2. Prepare Photos [Photoshop Elements 4]

Crop and adjust jpegs from your digital camera or scans.

Change resolution to 150 dpi.

Resize pictures so that none are greater than 8″ in width or 7″ in height so they fit on the slides.

Select all, copy, and paste images into slides. Or you can save the images and use the Insert Pictures from File option.

3. Add text to PowerPoint

Suggestions:

Use a simple, sans-serif font.

Make text bold, size 30 – 32, and in white.

Adjust text and picture placement so that there is about 1/2″ of empty space all around the edge of the slide. If the text or photo gets too close to the edge, the curvature of the TV will cause images and text to be cut-off.

Time the slideshow to see how long it is when it runs by itself.

Save as a presentation.

5. Create wav file of your music [QuickTime Pro]

I tried to use the .mov soundtrack file in my presentation, but it didn’t work. I don’t know why. Also, a .wav file is smaller, but the quality of sound is still great, so my final product was smaller using a .wav file v.s. a .mov file for my soundtrack.

6. Make a Movie in PowerPoint

7. Create the file for your DVD

8. Burn your PowerPoint to DVD [Toast Titanium]

List of Links that Helped Me: