Author: billkralovec

I am back to work as we are going through the new teacher orientation this week. My family is still on holiday, with Nadia returning to work next Monday and the kids to school the following Tuesday.

I strained my lower back muscle on my right side on Saturday using the rowing machine. I did a power yoga workout on Sunday that further aggravated it, so I am taking it easy this week. I am not in pain, but am still a bit still, especially when I bend over. I’ll give it a couple more days before getting back to heavier exercise. In the meantime, I can still walk the dog, and ride my bike and I might even try to go for a run on Thursday. I learned when I feel something in my back, not to do a strenuous back workout. I need to be more careful at my age.

We are all still battling jet lag. I have a harder time going east than west. I have been doing OK working through the day and getting sleep at night, but I still am sleepy from time to time. I also have an irritating slight cold that is not helping. I have a scratchy throat, lightly runny nose and irritated eyes. Enough of my health issues this week.

I am enjoying getting back into the routines of daily life in Tashkent. Nadia and I went shopping at the Mirabad market on Sunday. Plenty of delicious fruits and veggies, and we bought some pork cuts from the Russian butchers. We went looking for a natural gas grill and only found imported grills for $700+. We are looking for a smaller grill for a much cheaper price. I am cycling again in Tashkent, and on Monday rode along one of the side canals in the city to avoid traffic. The Russians made canals through Tashkent and today they are good places for walking. I noticed the ropes hanging off the bridge (below) into the water. The current is very strong and if someone is in trouble, they could save themselves by grabbing onto the ropes. A good idea.

I love exploring the city by walking my dog Obi. We always find interesting things for me to look at and for him to sniff.

It is nice to be back in Tashkent after a restful summer holiday. I am getting used to the higher temperatures (high of 102 F today) and lower humidity (43%). Tashkent has a Mediterranean climate with hot, dry summers.

City officials improved Furqat Park in our neighborhood. I went for a run yesterday morning and notice many people walking before it heats up. We also take the cross-country team there to train to break up the monotony of running at school. If you combine several laps of the park and school, you can get a decent 5-kilometer run. Furqat was an Uzbek author, poet and activist. He was against religion and Asceticism and supported human dignity. He lived in Tashkent for a short time (1889-1893) and traveled extensively. The Russian Tsarist regime eventually forced him into exile in western China due to his criticism of their rule. There is a statue of him in the Milly Bog (National Park) in Tashkent.

It is so nice to have my dog back in my life. Our precious Obi was happy to see us after our long summer holiday. I’ve been taking him for some long walks in the evening and noticed he is a bit out of shape. He also does not do well with the heat so I am being careful with him. Last night we walked around Milly Bog. The cityscape is changing in Tashkent and the large skyscrapers in the Tashkent City project are nearing completion. You can see three of them in the background of Bunyodkor Square.

I have not been seeing much of my family. They are suffering from jet lag. I am doing pretty well to maintain my day/night balance and it helped being in the office at school Friday and Saturday. I am already in full work mode, collecting new teachers from the airport, arranging my new office and taking care of the multitude of tasks that need to be done to start the school year again.

Living internationally since 1992 means I’ve been on many flights over the years. I mostly enjoy travel days because it means a day with no phone calls, emails, etc. A little break from my life for reflection, reading, and talking with family. I love the fact that our teenage children are trapped with us.

My “day” started at 1:45 AM with the alarm going off after 3 hours of sleep. My home village of Caspian is almost a 3-hour drive to Austin Straubel Airport in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Green Bay is a better option to fly out of than the closer airports of Marquette and Kingsford in my opinion. Despite the longer drive, there are more flights and easier logistics when it comes to checking in luggage and making connections. The only downside today was a 6:01 AM departure from Green Bay to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.

We almost missed the connecting flight. We forgot that most international flights depart out of Terminal 5 at O’Hare Airport, which is located away from the other terminals. We were sleeping and waiting around for a gate announcement in one of the domestic terminals, but it never did come on the departure information boards. Thankfully, Nadia asked some nearby passengers about the Turkish Airlines flight and they reminded us that we needed to go to Terminal 5. When we finally realized that, it was close to boarding time. We had the option of taking the train shuttle, which requires going through security again, or taking an 11:30 AM bus that literally drives between runways. We decided to take the bus which was a mistake. A summer storm temporarily halted flights and planes were backed up. We waited for 25 minutes to cross a particularly busy tarmac route. Finally, the kind pilots of Scandinavian Airlines saw the line of utility vehicles and buses full of travelers and let us pass. We made it to the gate with 5 minutes to spare before they closed boarding. The storm also delayed the departure of the flight which left around 1:30 PM Central time.

The long flight from Chicago to Istanbul was exhausting for me. There was a lot of turbulence and it was hot and stuffy in the plane. We paid to choose our seats (another money-making process for airlines) and had the emergency exit rows which gave me plenty of leg space. I watched Quentin Terantino’s Django which is a great movie. I also watched 65, a science fiction movie starring Adam Driver. It was not good, just him and a girl fighting against dinosaurs. By the time we arrived in Istanbul at 8:00 AM the next day after 9 and 1/2 hours of flight time, I was in rough shape. I get headaches during long travel, no matter how much water I drink. I was also sleepy and had nausea from the bumpy flight.

The Istanbul Airport’s “Yotel Air” is a godsend! We booked two rooms for 7 hours and it allowed me to shower, use the toilet, take a long nap in a comfortable bed, iron my clothes, and feel much better for the last leg. Worth every penny of the 150 Euros! I could have slept a bit more, but am ready to board our final flight, Turkish Airlines from Istanbul to Tashkent. The massive airport in Istanbul is beautiful. One downside of the size of the airport is the length of time it takes a plane to taxi from the runway to a terminal. It was about a 20-minute taxi to the terminal. I am always amazed at the variety of human colors and cultures one sees. It is so different from the past 3 weeks we spent in my home village of Caspian where 96% of the population is white. It made me realize again how isolated of a childhood I had. For example, I never heard a foreign language spoken in person until I went to university.

The final leg of 4 and 1/2 hour’s flight was really smooth. I watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes and mostly slept. The flight left around 7:00 PM and we arrived in Tashkent around 2:00 AM on Friday, July 28 with the time change. Not much to note on the flight or our arrival to our home in Tashkent. It was interesting that Turkish Airlines as part of their flight information provided during the flight gave passengers the prayer times and the direction of Mecca. You would not find that on a non-Islamic country’s airline or if the destination was not to an Islamic country. As you can see below, there is 1 minute and 36 seconds until the prayer time and Mecca is 3,528 kilometers to the north west.

It was a special weekend to have my two brothers and their families together with mine. It was the first time since my dad’s funeral in 2012 that we are all together. We had dinner at Alice’s Supper Club in Iron River and then played cornhole and whiffle ball in our backyard. As you can see above, my brother Jimmer and I are adopted and my brother Andy was the biological son of our adopted parents. We do not look alike or act alike, but grew up together in a loving household and have the lifelong bond of family. It was great to reconnect with them and my nephews Beau and Tony this summer. Owen, Oliver, Beau, Ocean, and Tony are quickly becoming adults and starting the next generation of our family tree. I loved spending time with them! We had to capture the moment with this photo in our yard on July 23, 2023.

We had a nice final day in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Ocean, Nadia, and I traveled to Marquette for a final doctor’s visit and my eyeglasses came in, so all was good. It was a hectic packing process as the errands were unexpected. We returned from Marquette around 6:00 PM and left Caspian at 2:15 AM last night to catch a 6:01 AM flight out of Green Bay to Chicago. My brother Jimmer is such a good guy, he drove his van with our bags to help us get to the airport.

I loved driving my oldest son Owen, to and from work this summer. He is working as a groundskeeper at the George Young Golf Resort. The discipline of working Monday through Friday from 5:00 AM to 1:00 PM has been good for him. Nadia and I are proud of him that he is sticking it out. He is learning what it means to have a job, get up early, get enough sleep and the value of a paycheck. He is also learning about golf, managing a resort and taking care of the greens, bunkers and fairways. I wish those mornings of me packing a lunch and then driving a sleepy Owen the 6 miles to the resort could have lasted a bit longer. Riding in the quiet of pre dawn Northwoods with your son… Nothing better! I stopped on the final day to snap the photo below of sunrise on Chicagoan Lake, which is adjacent to the golf course. I think it captures the beauty of the inland lakes of my beloved Upper Peninsula. 

The moments us five together are fleeting as Owen starts his third year at Northern Michigan University next month. Oliver is entering his senior year at the Tashkent International School and we’ll be saying goodbye to him next summer. My daughter Ocean is now a gorgeous woman and will be in tenth grade. I wish I could slow down time so Nadia and I could enjoy being parents together a little bit longer… 

I enjoyed reading Jodi Picoult’s “Wish You Were Here”. The novel is set during the pandemic and the main character, Diana O’Toole, a young employee of Sotheby’s Auction house in their art department gets COVID. I don’t want to spoil the story, so if you have not read it yet, stop here. 

The first half of the book is kind of set in Isabela, one of the Galápagos Islands. I say “kind of” because she imagined traveling to the island just as COVID swept the Americas and was trapped there. She received help from the locals and had adventures on the island for weeks. However, she was actually back in New York and on a ventilator for 5 days, fighting for her life. The book explores the power of the mind to “lucid dream” during comas, surgeries, near-death experiences, etc. Diana was planning to do the trip with her boyfriend, a resident doctor in Manhattan. She completely blacked out and dreamed she went on the trip without him while having a severe case of COVID. The experiences she had were imagined from the places she read about during the trip planning. During the dreams, she fell in love with a local, decided to drop her boyfriend and leave working as an art auctioneer and start an art therapy practice. 

“The truth is, we don’t really know what happens when we medically sedate someone, and how your mind syncs your reality with your unconscious.”

Wish You Were Here, Jodi Picoult – 2021

The mind is powerful and misunderstood and I believe people have these intense, lucid dreams during times of great stress and unconsciousness. I was thinking if I ever experienced anything similar. I remember once when I was a child, I remember having an “out-of-body” experience where I left my body and watched myself play on our family’s back porch from above. I also had a period during university of intense dreams that I was flying at an incredibly fast speed over my hometown of Iron River. The dream recurred several times one summer. I’ve never had surgery and have never been put under anesthesia, and am glad I avoided it so far, but it would be a life experience and I wonder how my mind would react.

It also made me think about memory. I have a bad memory and have really forgotten a lot of details of my life. I think that is one reason I blog so much, to help me remember. My brother Jim has an amazing memory and he remembers things like what our school lunch times were like in middle school. He brings back descriptions of our childhood that most people have long forgotten. Dreams, memories, “terminal lucidity” are just some of the aspects of the human brain that are fascinating. I think medicine in the upcoming centuries will understand more about the brain and give better explanations of these. Picoult’s book triggered my thoughts about the power of the mind. Pic

Diana in the book asks her mother, a world famous photographer, “Did you always want to travel?” “When I was a girl,” my mother says, “we went nowhere. My father was a cattle farmer and he used to say you can’t take a vacation from the cows.” (I felt the same way growing up. The furthest I travelled until my senior year of high school was Minneapolis, a 5-hour drive from my hometown and following our high school football team to the state playoffs in 1977 to watch them in the Pontiac Silverdome. When I graduated from high school and college, I wanted to see the world!

I like the idea of “tsunami stones”. Japanese believe that it takes three generations to forget. People who experience trauma, pass it along to their children and grandchildren, but after that, the memory fades. The stones are made to warm future generations. Diana as an art therapist has her patients erect “COVID stones”. Some of the mantras on the stones are “Find Your Joy” and “No job is worth killing yourself for”. It’s understanding that an extra hour at your desk is an hour you don’t spend throwing a ball with your kid.

Some other items of interest.

• “You can’t plan your life, Finn,” I say quietly. “Because then you have a plan and not a life.”
• terminal lucidity – terminally ill patients suddenly remember and think clearly after years of dementia and their brains are destroyed
• Unlike animals, we can now sing and speak and scream… but unlike animals, we also can choke to death if our food goes down the wrong pipe.
• Djinn or Jinn – invisible mythological creatures from pre-Islamic Arabia

Diana specializes in art and in the novel, she is dealing with a painting by French artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. He had skeletal dysplasia that left him only 5 feet tall with undersized legs. He was commissioned to paint a series of posters for the Moulin Rouge caberet in 1899 Paris. My wife Nadia loved the Baz Lehrman movie about the caberet. Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings are worth millions. You can see one of the posters of the Moulin Rouge series below. He painted himself as a seated patron in the center left.

My cholesterol level dropped almost 100 mg/dL thanks to the drug atorvastatin! I’ve been taking 10mg daily since March of this year. Wow! My cholesterol levels in my blood have been averaging 221 since I started recording them in 2005. I finally took the plunge this spring when I had a reading of 243.6, and combined with my age, puts me at an 8% higher risk of heart attack. This put me on the threshold of taking a statin so I decided to stick with it this spring to see how it goes. I saw big losses also in my levels of triglycerides (-176) and LDL (-76). My HDL (good cholesterol) is still not much over the recommended threshold of 40 mg/dL. I’ll try to eat more foods that help that and exercise more.

I can see why atorvastatin is the most commonly prescribed drug in the USA with over 141 million prescriptions annually. Heart disease is the number one killer of humans, and lowering my cholesterol lowers my risk of a stroke or heart attack. Atorvastatin is shown to reduce heart attacks in multiple research studies. Thanks to Bruce Roth who invented the drug way back in 1985. The drug sold over $125 billion under the trade name Lipitor between 1996 and 2012 for Pfizer. The medication is relatively inexpensive and all health plans cover the cost for adults between 40 and 75 in the USA.

I continue to closely monitor my health and set an appointment for a colonoscopy next summer. That will be a great blog post! 🙂 This year I will try to follow Michael Pollan’s mantra, “Eat food (no heavily processed food), not too much (I need to eat less, I still eat portions like I am a teenager) and eat more plants (not only good for you, but good for the planet). I will also try to exercise more. Yesterday morning I went for a run at the track at the beautiful Nelson Field.

For the first time since my father died in 2012, we had the entire family above gathered in one place. My two brothers and their families joined my family for dinner last night at Alice’s Supper Club in Iron River. After dinner, we hung out in our garden in our home in Caspian. As you can see from the photo, my brother Jimmer and I are adopted so we have a range of looks and personalities in our family. We had a delightful evening with lots of laughs. Hopefully, it won’t be so long between occasions that we gather together.

We contributed to the $337 million dollars the Barbie movie took in on its opening weekend on Sunday. The closest theatre is an hour drive from Caspian in the town of Quinnesec. Ocean and I wore pink for the occasion. The Barbie doll was first brought to the toy market in 1959 and Mattel has made a lot of money during the more than 50 years of the doll. We had a good discussion of feminism and the struggles of boys and girls to develop themselves and their careers in our world.

I took the boys on a hike on Saturday to the Cooks Run Trail in northwest Iron County. There was not really much to see on the three 1-mile loops besides trees and swamps. We cut the hike short after 2 miles and returned to the car to get away from the mosquitos. We ended up have a refreshing swim in Hagerman Lake, one of my favorite Iron County lakes. I love spending time with Owen, Oliver, Beau, and Tony as young men. We had a lot of laughs! I am looking forward to watching them mature into adults and am curious about what they will do for a living and who they will marry. I am just happy they still like to hang out with me and allow me to tag along.

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is covered with protected national forests and lakeshores. I grew up on the edge of the Ottawa and Chequamanon-Nicolet national forests. The Ottawa National Forest is where I call home. I love the over 1.5 million acres of lakes, rivers, and streams, the 200 inches of yearly snow, and the solitude (the largest “cities” on the fringes of the forest are Ironwood with a population of 9,000 and Iron River with a population of 5,000) and the designated wilderness areas within the forest, including the nearby Sylvania Wilderness. The Ottawa National Forest covers a big chunk of the western Upper Peninsula. There are three large national forest areas in the UP and one national lakeshore. This provides me kilometers of hiking, biking, and cross-country skiing trails and roads.

The national forest system has 157 total forests. The most extensive forests are located out west, with Alaska having the most national forest land and Idaho having the highest percentage of its land under national forest protection (38%). The Upper Peninsula if it was a state, actually has a higher percentage than Idaho with 58% of its land designated as national forest. 42 of the 50 states have designated national forests or grasslands.

One of my favorite activities, while I am in Iron County, is cycling. There are a lot of roads (paved and gravel), former railways turned into trails, and lots of logging two-track trails to bike. There are very few cars and up here, cars give me a wide berth, unlike in Uzbekistan. Today I cycled a combination of trails and roads for about 50 kilometers. I only encountered a few cars, with the exception of light traffic on M73. I road to Bass Lake to look at the Eagle’s Nest and then by Stanley Lake to home. A red fox ran out about 10 meters in front of me.

Yesterday we rented kayaks through Sylvania Outfitters. They supported our 6-mile trip on the Ontonagon River from Burned Dam Falls to the ghost town of Interior. We were on the middle branch of the river which eventually empties into Lake Superior. It was a cold, overcast day but we all were swept away by the beauty of the flowing river.

Iron County has ideal cycling conditions! I’ve been trying to get out as much as possible on my brother’s bicycle while I am here. Riding through the countryside of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is one of my favorite things to do. The population density of my home Iron County (4 people per kilometer, which is the same as Canada and a little more densely populated than Australia. There are not a lot of cars or people (11,631) in a big space (3,140 km2). Iron County is closest in area to the Turkish side of Cyprus, which has a population of 358,000. There are also good roads for road cyclists and a variety of gravel roads, logging trails, former railways turned to trails, ATV trails, etc. to give cyclists many opportunities to ride in the forests. There are no high mountains, but many rolling hills which are strenuous, but not impossible to scale over a course of a ride.

Iron County is one of two “land-locked” counties in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Land-locked meaning not having a Great Lakes Coastline. It borders Wisconsin and is in the Central time zone as is the four counties that border Wisconsin. This is confusing when we have appointments in Marquette, the largest city in the UP (20,.629), which is in neighboring Marquette County, but is in the Eastern time zone. The entire Upper Peninsula is great for cycling with a low population density (300,000 people in the size of Switzerland).

Some people not from here complain that there are too many trees. Driving or cycling between towns means a monotonous band of green (in July) with breaks only for bodies of water, some homes, and towns. It does limit the views and if one goes into the thick forests, there numerous mosquitoes. The weather in July is ideal, not too hot during the day and cool evenings, but for much of the year, there is snow and cold weather. There is also a lack of cycling culture here. In the university towns of Marquette and Houghton, you see more cyclists but in overall, very few people ride bicycles here.

Logging is a positive and negative for cyclists. The positive is there are many logging trails that mountain and gravel bikes can explore. The negative of course, are areas that look blighted (above). Overall, it is a cycling paradise and one of the reasons I like to return home.

Summer storms are common in the Upper Great Lakes Region. Storms occur in unstable atmospheric conditions with warm surface air rising, cooling, and then releasing precipitation. Often this precipitation is held up in the upper atmosphere to generate quite large hail stones. The rising air is replaced by “downburst winds” which in some cases cause destruction like tornadoes. They touch down at isolated points along the route of a storm and skip over other areas. These are not swirling winds like a tornado, but they blow in one direction. You can see the evidence of this in trees that fall down all in one direction. Ecologically, these downbursts create light gaps in the forest and the downed trees eventually become fuel for fires which many plants rely upon to germinate. (Note – The Sierra Club Naturalist’s Guide to The Northwoods of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Southern Ontario is an excellent resource to explain weather and climate in this region.)

Last night just before sunset, a summer storm came to my village of Caspian. I was south of town, teaching Oliver and Ocean how to drive and we were on the border land between Michigan and Wisconsin when the storm came. We approached Caspian shortly after and experienced the aftermath of downed trees. No one was injured, and the Caspian-Gaastra fire department was on the scene directing traffic and clearing debris. It was quite an exciting event in a normally quiet little town.

Since this is the only time we will be in the USA until next year, we usually take care of doctor’s appointments, purchase things we cannot find in Uzbekistan, and other errands/tasks that must be done while we are here. We’ve been driving to Marquette quite a bit recently for visits to a dermatologist and optometrist. Marquette is a 90-minute drive from Caspian and is the unofficial capital of the Upper Peninsula. It is such a lovely town being on Lake Superior, surrounded by forests, and having some of the amenities of urban centers. As you can see above, we stopped at the Trenary Cafe for a coffee and some of the famous Trenary Toast. Trenary is a small town on the eastern side of the Upper Peninsula and the bakery’s famous toast is actually a twice-baked, Finnish korppu. Many Finnish immigrants came to the Upper Peninsula and brought their customs and traditions that still survive today. Jorma Syrannen in 1928 brought the Finnish coffee cake to the UP. Despite my adopted mother being Finn, we never ate Trenary Toast or korppu, although, my relatives drank a lot of coffee always accompanied by sweet cakes and cookies. Cinamon rolls and coffee were usually served at all family daytime gatherings.

We bought eyeglasses for me. I have progressive lenses which are not made in Uzbekistan. I got a thorough check of my eyes and all is healthy. I increased the magnification of the reading section of my lenses, however, and the optometrist suspects I’ll be needing another magnification in a few years. The eyes stabilize around 60 years old, so at least I have that to look forward to. Owen bought some reading glasses as well.

We also visited the dermatologist and Ocean and Nadia had some moles removed. Nadia’s mother died of skin cancer at a young age, so we are sensitive to sun spots, freckles, and moles. Ocean was brave and I ended up having a nice day with Nadia and Ocean.

We are still playing lots of tennis this summer. The courts are always free and we can use free-of-charge because they are open to the public. We had an epic 2 and 1/2 hour doubles match against Owen. Nadia and I lost 1-6, 7-5, 4-6 to Owen. His youth, the speed, strength and agility were too much for us.