It's time for the Stratfords to embark on another great adventure! (In case you missed the previous installments, World Tour I was Denmark, 2006-07, and World Tour II was Jerusalem, 2012-13.) This time, BYU has given Ed a semester off to work on research, and he has decided to spend it scanning cuneiform tablets across Europe and Turkey. Our original plans consisted of month-long stays in four great cities: London, Berlin, Paris, and Istanbul. Ed began contacting museums in January, but little did we know that big museums have somewhat thorny bureaucracies. In the end, Paris and Berlin answered with an outright "No," and Istanbul and the British Museum have still not made a final decision. There are a lot of smaller museums that have smaller collections of Old Assyrian tablets, though, and we decided a long time ago (when we bought our plane tickets) that we weren't going to let anything like a little rejection keep us from living in Europe for awhile. So, here we are, almost three weeks from our flight, and we're not yet certain where we will be when. There are a few stays that are for sure, for which I'm grateful, but otherwise we are all learning to be flexible and patient.
Ed's trip began quite earlier than the rest of us. He left for Geneva, Switzerland on Father's Day, June 21st, for an international Assyriological conference and to scan their tablets. Ten days later he flew to Turkey with fellow scholar and friend Adam Anderson, and they are traveling around Turkey to archaeological sites and museums until mid-August. They have had lots of success with tablet scanning, professional networking, and working on their respective academic writing requirements, along with having a great time. I think this is Ed's best work trip ever, since he rarely gets to travel and room with someone he enjoys so much. It keeps the loneliness and boredom at bay.
The only negative side so far has been a bout with giardia that caused him to faint and spend a few hours in a Turkish hospital on IV fluids. The pharmacists gave him an antibiotic, which has helped, but his stomach is still a little touchy. I told him to stick with the bottled water from here on out, please. (The entire medical encounter, by the way, cost a total of 23 Turkish Lira, or about $7.)
Ed's last couple days with us in June were spent working on a tree house for the kids. We've talked about building one for six years, since we first bought the house, but Ed likes to tackle big projects just before leaving the country for six months, so we started the treehouse. He finished the supportive structure before he left:
Which, after he left, the kids chose to paint green.
I then put the platform on and got creative with some extra supports underneath that we hadn't accounted for when building the structure.
Seth, Ed's brother, came to visit the third week of July, and finished the edges of the platforms that required some precision cuts, as well as the ladder. (Thank you again, Seth!)
I then got out an old gallon of what I thought was brown deck paint, left over from when the previous owners painted our back deck. But it obviously wasn't brown, and when it dried, it didn't darken up at all. So it's purple, which is what Linda wanted in the first place. She's ecstatic. And really--who cares? After all, it's just a tree house!
We finished the staining (the strange pattern color pattern is indicative of the underage help I received) two nights before we left Orem, so the railing will have to wait for next summer. We hope none of the neighbor kids sneak up there and fall off while we're gone.
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