This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Well, that all seems to be working… now if only my camera would arrive. Sigh.

You may have noticed the lack of non-bazaar photos over the past couple of months here. That’s because the day after I took the photos of our local rose garden back at the end of April, my little trusty point-n-shoot (which was a generous gift from one of this blog’s readers) gave up the ghost. This left me without a digital camera, aside from my phone, which does take good pictures for what it is, but is hardly what you’d call a real camera.

I guess I’ve been kind of jonesing for a while about the situation, wanting to do something photographic, and since film photography gets really expensive really fast (though I do love my film cameras), I decided instead to head down a different road and take the opportunity to get all my old photos organised. I’ve had a flickr account for a couple of years now, but it’s mostly been sitting there rotting because I host my blog photos locally on my own site, and anyone else who asked to see photos usually requested that I e-mail them. But now that I have a big photo archiving project in the works, it made sense to have a place to put my pictures where people could see them. After all, what is the point of getting everything organised if no one gets to benefit from it? So I upgraded to flickr pro, and that was one problem taken care of.

The other problem was significantly larger: 95% of my photo archive is non-digital. I have boxes and boxes of prints sitting in an attic. Thing is, that attic is not in this country. When I moved to Turkey, there was a weight limit to how much stuff I could bring, so photos were a pretty low priority when compared to essential items. That means my pictures are still in England (which is where I lived before here). Luckily, I managed to talk kind and wonderful Lily into going through those boxes, and scanning in the best shots. I’m starting to get those photos uploaded to flickr now, and hundreds more are on the way.

This project, however, has done little to distract me from the fact that I don’t have a camera. In fact, it has made the jonesing worse. So many people are doing fantastic work on flickr, and I was shocked to discover that a good portion of them don’t have expensive equipment. I was particularly impressed with the cheap-n-cheerful Nikon D40, which is just about the only DSLR camera remotely near my rock-bottom price range. For a pro photographer chances are it wouldn’t be acceptable, but for the likes of me it would probably be just fine. Certainly I like the photos I’ve seen that were taken with it. I think most of what I like about photography has to do with the eye of the photographer rather than the equipment.

So I started researching the D40. And that made me want it more. I talked to some D40 owners. All said the camera had performed way over their expectations, especially given that it’s the cheapest DSLR out there.

Nonetheless, even though it’s only a few hundred dollars, that’s still a lot of money for me, not something I can just slap down at the cash register without a thought. I agonised. I weighed the pros and cons of making a major purchase. By this afternoon, I’d found the online shop with the best price on the D40, and I was toying with that “buy it now” button. Do I click? Do I not click? I get myself in this panic every single time I buy anything at all.

Then a most unexpected sign came from the heavens… or at least, from twitter:

@melissamaples I love your photos and a dslr would be a great addition for you, hope you will be able to swing it.

Oh, how can I not respond to encouragement like that? Terry gave me the confidence to click that “buy it now” button, even though I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to work out all the financial stuff. Life is short, Antalya is changing everyday, and I want to record it with photos.

So it appears I bought a camera, and now I have to figure out how to replace the money I used. No sooner did I have that thought than I got a message from PayPal - Terry sent a generous donation, “to help with the cost of the camera.” I could hardly believe my eyes. Thank you, Terry. I hope the photos you start seeing here pretty soon make the donation worth it for you. I’ll do my very best to show all of you exactly how Antalya looks through my eyes. Really, sometimes I think it’s the most beautiful place in the world.

I own a grown-up camera! I’m pretty excited. Of course I’ve purchased it at that most awkward of times, Friday evening, so I don’t expect that the next-day free delivery thing applies to me. I’m guessing they’ll send it Monday, and I’ll have it Tuesday-ish. I hope I don’t have a what-have-I-done heart attack before then.

If anyone would like to be flickr friends, please do add me. I only have about a hundred photos there now, but Operation Scan-and-Upload is well under way, and my photostream is growing everyday. When I get the D40, watch out.

If anyone else would like to make a donation (however small, every bit helps) to the Pay For The Camera I Already Bought fund, you can use the gold donation button at the top of the sidebar on the left-hand side of this page. I will pay you back in the form of awesome This Is Antalya and Life of Melissa photo posts, you have my word.

Thanks again to Terry, and to all of you who have been such amazing supporters of this blog for nearly two years now. I appreciate the continual kindness you have shown me through RSS subscriptions, comments, e-mails, story and photo submissions, donations, and connecting with me on every social network out there.

I hope everyone has a great weekend.

Hey folks, I’m doing a bit of routine maintenance and updating today… so if the site acts wonky, rest assured I’m on it.

Edit: That all seems to have gone entirely too smoothly. So I guess we’re back up again.

Out with the old…

…and in with the new:

I promised you guys a new layout this year, and here it is. I hope you like it, but to be honest I’m so in love with it right now that I probably wouldn’t care if you absolutely despised it. I’m a romantic that way.

The idea for the layout came from the fact that in ten years of site design and web authoring, I don’t think I’ve ever, ever made a site with a white background, though I’ve often wanted to. So this time I decided I was going to do it. And I like the result. It feels clean somehow.

And of course, once again we have Rachel Kelso to thank for her amazing skills with a camera. She’s responsible for about 90% of the coolness on this site.

Anyway, I’ve been php-ing for about twelve hours, so if you’ll excuse me I’m going to lie down and relax for a while.

See you guys tomorrow.

It appears I’m an unobservant idiot— I haven’t received any blog comments in my e-mail for about three weeks now, and I thought it was because you guys suddenly decided you didn’t love me anymore. Then today when I was digging through my admin panel I discovered nearly a hundred comments that I hadn’t been aware of. Upon doing some research, it appears that the most recent WordPress upgrade broke comment notifications for some blogs, including mine. I’ve implemented a code fix to the relevant php file, so hopefully that’ll unbreak that. We’ll see. I’ve also gone back manually through those missed comments, and hopefully I’ve responded to anything that needed attention (i.e. those of you who asked for a response from me on a specific issue or topic). If I missed something important, let me know.

So, I’m sorry if you thought I was being lazy or ignoring you— neither is the case. I’m just not very observant.

Well, hello there! You might be wondering where I’ve been, but chances are you were already on top of that story. The good news is, I successfully completed my NaNoWriMo novel (yay!), and melissamaples.com has just recently had its one-year anniversary (double yay!), so things are fantastic over here and I’m ready to start getting back into the swing of things and making some changes and improvements to mark the start of my second year here.

The first thing on the agenda is a little experiment— the weekly bazaar is one of the more popular features with our ever-growing readership, and in recent months people have started commenting more and more frequently that they wished we could have a bazaar giggle every day of the week instead of just on Thursdays. So, in light of those suggestions (and because change is a good thing), effective immediately the weekly Thursday Is Bazaar Day feature will be slimmed down into daily doses for your Turklish reading pleasure. There will be at least one new photo everyday, and they’ll be ones you haven’t seen before, fresh and chuckle-worthy to get your day started off the right way, seven days a week. I do take your feedback seriously, so hopefully this is a move in a direction that reflects what you’ve been asking for.

There will be a few more changes around here, most of which will be cosmetic. The site is pretty as it is, but I think we’re all ready for a new layout, yes? There will probably be some shuffling of content as I start to incorporate more useful information into the site, but I’ll try to keep the confusion to a minimum, and as always the blog will remain on the front page, so those of you who come here looking for light-hearted fun won’t have to change a thing about the way you view the site.

Lastly, I want to thank each and every one of my readers for making the first year of melissamaples.com a wildly successful one— it’s gone better than I ever could have imagined, thanks to your loyalty and patience with me. As I ramp up the changes here, please do keep those comments coming and let me know what you think. Your opinion is important to me, and what you guys want directly affects the content you see here.

So, let’s get our bags packed and head swiftly into our second year together, shall we?

Here’s to a new year full of the mysteries and delights of the language we like to call Turklish.

I’ll cut to the chase: I’m going away for a couple of weeks. It’s not a holiday, as such— it’s a Vipassana retreat up near Istanbul. I’m leaving tonight, (i.e. Wednesday night, the 10th), and I’ll be back on the 24th.

Those of you who are familiar with Vipassana retreats don’t need to read any further… if you’re not familiar with Vipassana but don’t care all that much, suffice it to say I’ll be engaging in some hardcore silent insight meditation for ten days, with some travel time on either side. That’s about it.

The semi-long version of the story is that about a year ago I started dabbling in Vipassana via the online teachings of Gil Fronsdal [wiki]. I had wanted to try meditation for a long time but didn’t really know where to start, so like most of my peer group I turned to the internet for help. I stumbled upon Zencast, and it pretty much snowballed from there. I’ve never had any formal training, just my little bits of practicing at home and whatever I’ve read online.

Vipassana is an ancient form of meditation that focuses on insight and seeing things how they really are, without changing or judging them. It’s a practice that dates more than two millennia back to the Buddha himself, whose teachings have been passed down through generations all the way to a handful of Vipassana masters who still teach today. I like the idea of being an objective observer of things I should normally feel very subjective about (for example my breath and the state of my body), so I found the concepts of Vipassana very attractive. It has to be said, though, I’m not the most diligent meditator— consistency is key with these things, and I’ve hardly been sitting every day. I started to think maybe a meditation group or a teacher might be the next step.

Then a month or so ago I made the observation that not only had I never seen a Turkish Buddhist, I’d never even met any Turkish people who meditated (meditation being a secular practice in itself open to those of any religion or no religion). I started looking online for Turkish meditation groups, and since Vipassana is a particular interest of mine, I narrowed my search to see where in the world Vipassana retreats or sittings are held. At first it didn’t look like there was much going on in this part of the world, but then I found the web site of S.N. Goenka, a Vipassana master whose ten-day intensive retreat courses are held, quote, “all over the world.” Yeah, sure. All over the world except for Turkey, I thought. But lo and behold, when I looked at the list of course locations, there was a name and a contact address for Turkey along with a note stating that the next retreat would be held in October 2007. I fired off an e-mail asking for more information and waited a couple of days for a response.

Meanwhile, diligent researcher that I am, I started digging around for blogs and forums where I could read the opinions of those who had already taken a ten-day Goenka Vipassana course. I soon discovered that there is a huge amount of controversy surrounding this method of Vipassana and indeed Vipassana in general— I won’t bore you with the details, because you know how to Google stuff if you’re curious, but in a nutshell there appear to be a lot of people who fiercely defend this method as a tool for exorcising one’s personal demons, and a lot of other people who say it ruined their lives. One thing all seem to agree on, however, is that the retreat changed them forever.

So of course then I was even more curious, and by the time the organisers of the retreat wrote me back I’d pretty much already decided I wanted to go. I filled out my application and it was accepted the same day. I leave on a bus tonight to travel across the country (which reminds me, Turkish bus travel is something else I wanted to talk about— perhaps when I return from this trip, yeah?), arrive at the site tomorrow afternoon, and then I’ll be locked up with my fellow students for ten days, waking before dawn and meditating for ten hours everyday, eating only before noon and not communicating with anyone in any form (not even eye contact or hand gestures). It’s bound to be quite an experience.

Part of the strict code of conduct for the retreat states that we’re not allowed to have journals or writing materials, which means I’m just going to have to remember everything and write it down later. Since I’ve once again signed up for NaNoWriMo this year (what is it with me and controversial methods?), I figure that at the very least this retreat will be a good opportunity to dig up some internal conflict, create an empty female protagonist, and on the first of November I can just shove all the demons into her and turn her loose in novelworld.

In any case, I’ll be back here two weeks from today— I’ve not got any guest writers or anything lined up, so the blog is going on retreat, also. You’ll have to live without the bazaar for a couple of weeks, but when I come back I’ll have lots of stories and photos, and after that I’ve got lots of changes planned. We’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of melissamaples.com, and I want to take it into the second year revitalised and fresh. I hope you’ll join me.

I wish you all a great couple of weeks, and I’ll see you when I get back.

I know this is the first time in my life I’ve ever made a mistake, but yesterday it seems I accidentally commented out two of the bazaar items and they didn’t appear in the original post. I realised my mistake this morning, and since they were both really funny I thought I’d just mention it here for those who don’t read via RSS and therefore don’t get updated feeds. Anyway, sorry for the mix-up, check it out when you get a minute. Link.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’d be making some changes to the site, including reorganising the categories in the sidebar so that they actually meant something and better reflected the content they hold. I’m starting to implement that particular change tonight, so as early as tomorrow browsing by topic will be much easier.

It’s possible this can have one semi-negative side effect— some RSS subscribers may receive apparent reposting of older items. I apologise in advance if this becomes annoying… on the other hand, I hope you discover something interesting that you missed the first time around. Thanks for bearing with me while I try to make the site easier to navigate in preparation for some even bigger changes yet to come.

I know, I know, I went AWOL for a couple of days, but I swear, I have a genuine forged note from my parents explaining my absence. No, seriously, one look at this photo of me and you can probably tell what a rough couple of days it’s been. Friday the internet was broken in the hotel, and then once we got out and about we never stopped until we were on the bus back to Antalya (stories and photos of all this later, I promise). Then we got home later than expected yesterday and the day turned into a write-off, basically [insert stress and emotional drama and attempts at getting back to normal here]. Anyway, today’s a new day, another chance to turn it all around. I’ve just had a brief glance through the SD card at all the photos from the past two days, and I’m pretty excited about the things I have to show you. Unfortunately I have quite a busy day ahead (practical catch-up from being gone half the week), but I vow to find some time this evening to do some virtual catch-up as well and get some photo posts up. So until this evening, y’all have a great Sunday.