Dreaming Real: The Empty Shelves
Taking Off #3: Weather
[Image: monthly weather averages for the 30 proposed destination cities in our 2020 “EuroTour.” (Details below.) Click for a larger version.]
As The Missus and I think about where in Europe we’d like to visit, an obvious corollary is: “…and when?”
To some extent, we’re constrained by our personal calendar. We both retire in March, and our lease is up in June, but we’ve got a few family visits in mind in that little three-two-month window. Ergo, we assume, we’ll depart these shores sometime in June late May. But with thirty possible cities, scattered all over what’s currently still lumpable together as “Europe,” where to head first? and where second? …and so on.
When one has been working with software as long as I have, one tends to consider thorny questions in terms of data. The data which I think drives an answer to this question: the weather we can expect to encounter.
I started by building a spreadsheet, one row per city, with one column per month between June and January. (We’re not likely to stay that long, but I wanted to leave some wiggle room at the tail end.) Each of those monthly columns was further divided into three columns: average high temperature, average low temperature, and average rain days. I also added a three-column group for “annual” averages of those three figures, across that eight-month period. And for comparison’s sake, I threw in rows for a half-dozen US cities with whose weather we were familiar. (This enables us to observe, for example, “In terms of its average weather, Bath in June resembles Philadelphia in October.”)
When I looked at what I had in the spreadsheet, I confess I felt overwhelmed. So I imported the whole thing into a little database program; from there I could generate a “report” of it all, with color-codings and other ways to highlight information of interest. The result I exported to PDF (converted to a .jpg image) in for display as the image above.
The color coding for the temperature and rain-days figures is explained in a legend at the bottom center. Other things to notice:
- The six months we’ll most likely be traveling (June-November) are boxed with a heavy black line.
- Three green rectangular boxes start at the top left and then kind of march down and to the right. There’s no magic data analysis going on with those boxes: the rows enclosed in each are those in each proposed “leg” of the tour — British Isles, northern Europe, southern Europe — and the columns cover the approximate range of months we’d be doing that “leg.” [Aside: I really want a better word than “leg.” Ideas?]
- The green boxes overlap at their ends, because we don’t (yet? ever?) know exactly when we’ll hop off from one portion of the itinerary to the next.
- One interesting thing about those three boxes: across all three of them, we wouldn’t expect to encounter any really severe differences in weather — that is, we only have to pack for one sorta-kinda-the-same climate. This should simplify packing, and make less worrisome the moving around from one region to another.
Of course, the best-laid plans, etc. etc. Famous last words, so on and so forth. If you want the gods to laugh, tell them your plans — all that. But we’ve got to start making some assumptions, on which we can build further assumptions, and so on.
Taking Off #2: Questions (and Ultimately, Answers)
Map: thumbnail of our itinerary, so to speak, as of today. Click on it to see a larger, more zoomed-in map which more clearly separates out the destination markers.
As more or less novice international travelers, The Missus and I have loads of questions both general and specific about traveling and short-term-staying in the British Isles and Europe. We know we don’t need answers to all of them before actually getting there, but we also don’t want to forget any questions which might ultimately be in the need-to-know category.
Everyone’s got their own ideas about how to make up a to-do list. This one seems to rather sprawl across categories, though: it probably requires geographic and calendar details, simple bulleted lists and whole paragraphs, lingering questions and firm answers…
After some thought, I’ve come up with a simple dumping-ground page which will function as my running scratch pad. (You can view it here. It’s password-protected, mostly to discourage random drop-ins from strangers and bots, but if you can figure out the acronym for this site then you’ve got the password.) The page’s contents will be flexible, morphing, growing, and shrinking over time, with links to more detailed discussions about some of the items to appear in later posts. So if you’re really into keeping tabs on the current status, that’s the place to bookmark instead of a whole list of individual ones.
A couple weeks ago, we attended a family celebration up in New Jersey, where we shared with various people the rough outline of this whole EuroTrip idea. A few of these folks, especially of the sibling-offspring variety, encouraged us to plan as little as possible — to just let things happen. While there’s a certain adventurous appeal to the thought, really: we’re not that adventurous. We know we don’t need to plan out every detail of every destination, we don’t need to buy tickets to everything in advance, and so on. We do know the pleasure of being caught by surprise. We can certainly let those things “just happen” on an ad-hoc basis. But we also like to have some certainties in hand — a skeleton, as it were, on which to hang all the individual surprises (and not incidentally, mitigate if not eliminate the unpleasant ones). That’s what the “Need-to-Know and Need-to-Decide Index” page will be for.
Taking Off #1: Some Background
[Map: to label this an “itinerary” would be to mislead you. At best, it’s a pre-alpha version of an itinerary. (For reference, I cribbed this from Google Earth in August 2019, but I am counting on its persistence over the next year. We especially don’t want to see any of those countries under water by then.)]
Let’s see now… how to summarize what we’re up to…?
Well, for starters, we’ve realized for years that we’re pathetically under-traveled, to coin a euphemism. Yes, we were married in Vancouver, on a cruise up the northwest coastline; yes, I’ve been to Israel and to Canada for a couple of visits, long before The Missus entered the picture; and yes, The Missus — I think? — has spent a tiny amount of time in Mexico, thanks to a long-ago habitation in El Paso, Texas. Between the two of us, during our lives we’ve at least visited many areas of the USA itself — but almost none of them as a couple.
And that’s pretty much it. See? Under-traveled.
In spring, 2018, we took a tentative step towards correcting that: we spent a week in England, splitting our time between a little town (Ludlow) in Shropshire and London itself. “A week,” I hear you well-traveled ones thinking; “A week?!?” Yes, it didn’t take us more than a couple days to realize the folly.
So here’s the current (very gray, shadowy) master plan for mid-2020:
- Post-retirement, visit the UK for two months.
- Visit northern Europe for two months.
- Visit southern Europe for two months.
To aid in pulling this off, we sold our house this past April and moved to an apartment with about half the floor space. (We have a metric sh!t-ton of stuff in storage — much of which we know I am confident we’ll probably never see again.) The sale and the move afforded us some genuine adventures in their own right, and maybe I’ll post more about it all later.
But for my purposes now, it’s important only to know that our lease expires in June, 2020, and that we have no plans to renew it. Between March (retirement) and June, we’ll prep for the real trip, and we’ll visit family… and then we’ll be gone for a while.
The planned sequencing of those three destinations is driven mostly by our understanding of likely climatic conditions: going to the UK in June-August should help us avoid the worst (i.e, coldest — The Missus hates cold weather!) temperatures and precipitation there; going to northern Europe in August-September should enable us to see at least some of that before anything like, um, articness sets in; and moving on to southern Europe in September-October should feel positively paradisaical after whatever we experienced elsewhere.
(For the record, we’re both looking forward to visiting all those destinations, particularly the UK, but also the Continent. If we were only going to see northern OR southern Europe, though, we’d probably have to face some touchy negotiations: I’m more the northern-Europe sort, and she’s more the southern-. In more general geographic terms, I’m mountains and she’s beaches.)
So that is Stage 1 as we see it.
RAMH@11: The Tendency of a Body in Motion to Remain in Motion (and a Playlist)
[Image: cover of While You Were Chasing Your Hat, a children’s book written by Lilian Moore and illustrated by Rosanne Litzinger, published in 2001. Kirkus Reviews said of it: “The simplicity of the words, coupled with the uncomplicated yet beautiful illustrations, offers a soothing look at the natural world.” I’m ready for some soothing!]
You probably know of the Q-and-A site called Quora: post a question there, and get answers — sometimes over the course of years — from people with a whole range of credentials. An answer’s worth, of course, can be evaluated by referring to the answerer’s credentials. But further validation comes simply from the number of upvotes the answer gets, relative to other answers to the same question.
If you’ve answered a question there, you get various notifications about other Quorans responses: comments, up- and downvotes, requests to answer similar questions, and so on.
A few days ago, I got an upvote on a question I’d answered back at the start of the year: “What is the best instrumental opening to a rock song?” My answer was no great shakes, and the gods know I have no authoritative musical credentials (even just as a listener) to brandish. But re-reading the answer got me thinking of a playlist here, for this year’s anniversary post…
As a child of the ’60s, I am naturally a fan of what we might call “hook-y music”: no, not music to skip school by (er, do they still call that “playing hooky”?), but music springing from a hook, an instrumental hook. (There are hook-y lyrics, sure, but I’m not talking about lyrics. Hell, I’m not even auditorily equipped to talk about lyrics!)
So, to the point: this year’s playlist consists of hook-y songs featured (at length or glancingly) on RAMH since 2008. (Well, not all of them were actually featured; some were just mentioned, or featured in posts which never (yet) saw the light of day.) From their opening notes and throughout, they continue to hook me — and I recognize them within the first few seconds of playing time. As with many such lists, this one could have grown to ridiculous lengths, but I’ve opted to follow the standard anniversary practice here: taken together, they’ll all fit onto a single audio CD. Vocals, most of them, and by and large rock or pop songs, but the list opens with an instrumental-only number whose first notes pretty much says to me: This is how a songwriter hooks a listener.
As with many such lists, this one could have grown to ridiculous lengths, but I’ve opted to follow the standard anniversary practice here: taken together, they’ll all fit onto a single audio CD. As usual, there’s a certain logic to their sequencing here — but as (almost?) always, I think the best way to listen to these is in “shuffle” mode — happy accidents, all that… and some of them may even be soothing.
In Praise of the Awful, But Mostly of Awe
[Image: “Self-Portrait with 12 Bags of Trash,” by Anne-Katrin Spiess. The artist explains: “I noticed litter lining both sides of a very scenic stretch of desert Highway 191 in Utah. I decided to ‘Adopt a Highway’ and cleaned the stretch between mile markers 176 and 177. I photographed each object I picked up, and sorted my findings by category to create ‘Self Portrait With 12 Bags of Trash.'”]
From whiskey river:
On Bitching
after CatullusListen, Hilarius, you’ve got to snap out of it.
I know you’re in your fifties now,
but don’t let yourself give in to bitterness.
Sure, when you were younger the muse
used to visit more often, sprawling across your lap
and whispering in your ear, but at least
she treats you now and then to an idea
or plants a stanza in your head as you’re waking up.
And stop bitching about editors
who keep publishing each other’s poems
in Pretension Quarterly or The Moribund Review.
Try not to let it bother you so much.
Why waste your energy enumerating
all the petty injustices that have gone on
since ancient times and are bound to continue
for centuries to come? And there’s no point
in envying the poets who swagger into rooms,
charging every molecule with their need
to be important. So, let them be important.
And if, sometimes, you feel as if you
hardly exist, well, as a great poet once said,
be secret and exult . . . instead of sulking.
Believe me, I agree with you, it’s too bad
things sometimes work the way they do,
but it’s exasperating to listen to you
after you’ve had a few too many cups of wine
railing against the zealously self-promoting
postmodern obfuscators, the hip ironists revved up
on their own cleverness, the tedious fundamentalists
of rhyme and meter, or the one you call
the formalist narcissist Stalinist surrealist.
Not bad, Hilarius, but you need to get over it.
You didn’t want power, remember?
You wanted to write poems. So, write them.
And the next time some self-satisfied preener
wins a prize, don’t dwell on it, but remind yourself
of all the poems that didn’t get away, the poems
of your friends and how they’ve borne you up
and spurred you on with a better envy,
and remember the friends themselves, laboring
alone at their desks, mostly under the radar
(unlike the “famous poets” you call the oxymorons),
and giving you what literary life you have
which if not dazzling is at least genuine –
and thank the gods to the end of your days
for the time they’ve granted you to spend
on making poems, even if they come to nothing.
(Jeffrey Harrison [source])
…and:
Tides and storms, the patterns of seasons and migrations, the quality of the soil and the air – all of these continue to influence and are influenced by us; they remind us of the intricate web from which we cannot disentangle ourselves, try as we might. Also, some of us are still lucky enough to live in places where we are awakened by birdsong in the morning, where at night we can see the Milky Way spilled across the sky. These things are part of our daily human experiences. As such, these phenomena —like anything else—can take on particular meaning, both original and universal.
Such meaning depends on authenticity, which often depends on engagement. This is the case whether we are talking about authenticity between people and people or between people and nature. We must be attentive; we must give our senses over to the other.
(Hannah Fries [source])
Your First Miracle
[Image: “Israel-05625 – Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend,” by Dennis Jarvis; found it on Flickr, of course, and use it here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!)]
From whiskey river:
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here…
This is another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than a hundred million centuries. Within a comparable time the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, “the present century.” Interestingly, some physicists don’t like the idea of a “moving present,” regarding it as a subjective phenomenon for which they find no house room in their equations. But it is a subjective argument I am making. How it feels to me, and I guess to you as well, is that the present moves from the past to the future, like a tiny spotlight, inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. In other words, it is overwhelmingly probable that you are dead.
In spite of these odds, you will notice that you are, as a matter of fact, alive. People whom the spotlight has already passed over, and people whom the spotlight has not reached, are in no position to read a book… What I see as I write is that I am lucky to be alive and so are you.
(Richard Dawkins [source])
…and:
Horses Explain Things to Me
Today is a crash course on moving gently.
How to take a gift from someone so gingerly
they believe they still have it. If you move
soft enough through the wind or woods,
they say the sun will make a space for you.
Some of your regrets might soften. I move
terribly. I crush twigs and spiders but the horses
say nothing of it; they let me pet their long manes.
I hop on and we walk out to the end of wanting.
What is God? I ask them. They tell me, Yes.
(Brett Elizabeth Jenkins [source])
The Weight Deadens on Your Shoulders
[Image: The Pooch (12/26/2006-09/04/2017). Photo taken 8/21/2017. She was an unwilling photographic subject: if you held up a smartphone or camera in her direction — which you always wanted to do, you couldn’t help it — she’d turn her head aside, as here, while keeping a gimlet eye trained on you. She was a cute dog, often involved in cute activities, but the only way to document them was to shoot a bazillion shots and just pray that one would be suitable.]
No whiskey river Friday this week; I just cannot work up the enthusiasm.
The Pooch (that is to say, Sophie) died this past Monday morning, towards the tail end of a long weekend for all three of us. She was all right, and then she wasn’t.
Okay, true: she wasn’t “all right” healthwise — but then again, she never had been. Small dogs often have breathing problems of one sort or another. In The Pooch’s case, she had an issue called “collapsing trachea”: the windpipe over time slackens, just at a point where it bends. Eventually, it slackens enough to close up completely, with the expected results. One of the chief early symptoms of a collapsing trachea is occasional coughing, often in the form of so-called “reverse coughing”: it sounds sorta like a cough, sorta like a sneeze, and often has hints of a goose’s honk. So we knew, early on, that eventually the problem would take her.
(It’s not “treatable,” by the way. Oh, you can administer cover-ups like cough suppressants. Surgically, a couple of things can be done, to strengthen the trachea artificially. They all come with potential side-effects and, in some cases, the side-effects can be much, much worse than the condition itself. Even so, surgical options were out of the question for The Pooch: she was so small, and the risks bloomed proportionately.)
But knowing that something awful will happen seldom seems to fully prepare you for its, well, happening. The Missus and I have spent the week in a fog of crying jags triggered by nothing in particular except the weight of a new, awful, sudden vacancy. (I think today was the first time I’ve ever broken down while taking a shower, surrounded by nothing at all to remind me of her except, yes, that very vacancy.) We’ve lost other pets. And yes, we’ll come out of this grief eventually — but boy, this one has hit us hard.
Potpourri, June 18th (2017 edition)
[Latest in the apparently annual June 18 tradition, of commenting about whatever the heck I want to…]
I damned near forgot what day it was… or, at any rate, that I typically do a blog post for the occasion! (The photo at the right was taken circa 1952, and celebrates another occasion — Father’s Day in the US.) I’m in a much better frame of mind this year than last (with the multiple-hard-drive disaster I’d been grappling with for months).
To get this rolling, here’s today’s strangely apropos poem of the day, from The Writer’s Almanac:
There Comes the Strangest Moment
There comes the strangest moment in your life,
when everything you thought before breaks free—
what you relied upon, as ground-rule and as rite
looks upside down from how it used to be.Skin’s gone pale, your brain is shedding cells;
you question every tenet you set down;
obedient thoughts have turned to infidels
and every verb desires to be a noun.I want—my want. I love—my love. I’ll stay
with you. I thought transitions were the best,
but I want what’s here to never go away.
I’ll make my peace, my bed, and kiss this breast…Your heart’s in retrograde. You simply have no choice.
Things people told you turn out to be true.
You have to hold that body, hear that voice.
You’d have sworn no one knew you more than you.How many people thought you’d never change?
But here you have. It’s beautiful. It’s strange.
(Kate Light)
I’m so glad that although Garrison Keillor no longer hosts Prairie Home Companion, he’s maintained his curation of the Almanac. I know at some point he’ll have to surrender that, too, and I know that he himself does not personally compile each issue; he delegates that to his staff. But for now, he still does the audio reading of each daily entry. Here’s today’s, read in full:
Name Time
[Image: “La Otra Navidad (The Other Christmas),” by Oiluj Samall Zeid; found on Flickr and used here under a Creative Commons license. The site is a mausoleum in León, Spain, commemorating Republicans killed in the Spanish Civil War. Each nameplate represents one victim.]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
[Interviewer Terry] Gross: I’d like you to read another poem from your book “Book of Longing.” And this is called “Titles.” Would you tell us when you wrote this?
[Leonard] Cohen: I’ve been writing it for a while. But I finished it last winter in Montreal. It’s a poem called “Titles.”
(Reading) I had the title Poet. And maybe I was one for a while. Also, the title Singer was kindly accorded me even though I could barely carry a tune. For many years, I was known as a Monk. I shaved my head and wore robes and got up very early. I hated everyone. But I acted generously. And no one found me out. My reputation as a Ladies’ Man was a joke. It caused me to laugh bitterly through the 10,000 nights I spent alone. From a third-story window above the Parc du Portugal, I’ve watched the snow come down all day.
As usual, there’s no one here. There never is. Mercifully, the inner conversation is canceled by the white noise of winter. I am neither the mind, the intellect nor the silent voice within. That’s also canceled. And now, gentle reader, in what name — in whose name — do you come to idle with me in this luxurious and dwindling realms of aimless privacy?
(Leonard Cohen [source])
…and:
The secrets to living are these:
First, the past cannot be improved upon.
Acknowledge what was and move on.
Next, the future cannot be molded.
Then, why bother?
Last, nothing can ultimately be controlled;
Not the past, nor the future, nor the present.
Accept this moment as it is.
Honoring these three,
One lives without shackles.
(Wu Hsin [source])
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