After my first 24 hours in Chicago...

Friday night, we were off to Steppenwolf Theatre to see American Buffalo, by David Mamet. I hadn't known anything about it, other than it being a classic, and it turned out to be a real treat. The seats were excellent (even though they were in the back row; it was a small theatre), and the play itself was disturbing and well done. "Disturbing" because it said much about friendship and "business" (read, shady dealings). The set made me smile- the stage was made to be a junk shop in a basement, with much of a real junk shop's worth of stuff cluttering the stage, with amazing lighting coming from "upstairs" or from florescent bulbs. Very intricate, as also were the story and the dialogue.

Saturday, we went for deep dish pizza at a nearby bar and didn't pay much attention to the (American) football on the tube, except when the guy next to us at the bar made a comment in our direction about a play. I burned my tongue on some marinara sauce.

We walked around Old Town, and we saw A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant. It was very merry, indeed. Fairly self-referentially funny (it started with a disclaimer about Scientology and Dianetics being copyright, etc etc.) The players were all kids, the set was very simple, and it was a 60-minute show. We agreed 60 minutes was a good length.

Then, to a Mexican restaurant, where our dinner was overshadowed by the blind-date a table over, where the guy really needed a hearing-aid, because we didn't need to hear him strike out.

Sunday: more touring around, including The Art Institute of Chicago, which has added a large wing since I was last there in 2006. High points for me: a temporary exhibit called "Light Me Black" - the floor was drywall punched with a lot of craters, and some hundred florescent tube lights were suspended in the middle of the room. Entering, we were told, "please watch your step and don't make more holes." It was remarkably stark, and I liked that. There was also a wonderful exhibit on Arts and Crafts in Britain and Chicago; not only Frank Lloyd Wright, but Stickley furniture, Tiffany glass, and photos by Alfred Stieglitz and others. I was amazed by two finds: a self-portrait by Edward Steichen, a bichromate gum photograph which appears as a painting- Steichen manipulated the print with brush-strokes to add both white and black shades. I stood there studying it for quite a while. ...And there was a neat piece by Marion Mahony Griffin, a line drawing of a Frank Lloyd Wright house which used space and light/dark in a stylistically Japanese way. I appreciated how the exhibit called out a number of associations between Arts and Crafts and design elements taken from Japanese forms in the mid-1800s- lots of connections I hadn't known of.

In the evening, we popped off to Alinea for the most decadent dinner I've ever had. ( Twelve courses )

So that's how I ended my Chicago trip; with a hangover, pulling my bags through a new layer of snow, back through the Red Line, Orange Line L, to Midway (a bit concerned about time; the train was slow; but then my plane was late arriving), back to Toronto Island, back to Royal York Hotel, where I sat and read for an hour because my late plane meant I missed the earlier bus back, then dragged myself up to the Greyhound station to catch the 3pm bus home, which got me in the door at 5:30.

Which, I'll note, was just exactly 24 hours after the caviar, champagne, and quail eggs.

This life, it is a good one.

Oh, finally: I think Porter was a good choice, but not a great choice. I didn't pay more for the plane ticket, the departures lounge in Toronto was wonderful; but on the way back, missing that bus meant I got home two hours after I'd hoped I would, turning a 7-hour travel day into 9-hour travel. *shrug* It was a good experiment, at least.

I'm going to Chicago tomorrow!

Via:

local bus to Greyhound to Porter shuttle bus to ferry to airplane to elevated subway to melted_snowball. Total time: 7 hours, I hope.

I wasn't able to integrate bicycle, rickshaw, or pony into the mix. Yet. We'll see about the return trip.

Back from being tag-along partner in San Diego. I'm trying to convince my body it's actually midnight, not early evening, because 7am is just around the corner.

San Diego was OK. Didn't see anything that made me particularly charmed with the city. Nice climate? Yup. Excellent public transit? Yup. Much to hold our attention for fun? Not really.

We skipped d's conference's Evening Activities: Zoo, and Seaworld. Both were pricey and at least with the Zoo trip, we had a better offer- our friend Joe and his new spouse David came down from the LA area to visit with us.

And Sunday evening, we had dinner with our friend Rob, who was at the conference along with dan.

Food in San Diego? We had a tasty lunch, in an Old City fairly-fake taquria, and we had sushi with very fresh fish last night, but for the most part, meals were only ok.

Last week when we were at our neighbourhood Crêpe place with dan's mom, and our waitress asked what we would do in San Diego, I said we might possibly go to Tijuana, but didn't really have a good reason to. She said, "But what better reason to go, then?" and I couldn't think of a good rebuttal.

So, yesterday I failed to find the birthplace of the Caesar Salad but I did a substantial amount of walking in the process of not doing so. Lunch, which consisted of two chicken tacos, chips and salsa, and a Dos Equis, ran me a whopping $3.25.
My most scary moment in Tijuana was when I started crossing a street and discovered the lights were green in both directions; and the most threatening people I saw were riding police motorcycles (followed up by the guys in military fatigues with submachine guns). The border crossing was extremely streamlined, and smoother in both directions than I expected (I didn't speak to any agent going into Mexico, and the agent going into the US asked exactly one question). Overall, my experience was that of fish-out-of-water, and I wish I had more than a handful of words in Spanish, because I felt terribly rude the entire time I was there.

Efficient public transit in San Diego, as I said. $5 got me a day pass (or $12 for three days) and the light-rail went from Tijuana to Old City (in the north, which was a fun afternoon with melted_snowball). The bus schedules were frequent enough that it offered me three different routes to get to Quaker Meeting on Sunday morning, which seems pretty great.

I have more I'd say, but bed is calling.

Glad to be home! What'd I miss? :)

Oh, to post or to go to sleep. I will take the wiser choice, since I should be rested before getting on the road tomorrow. My plans: leaving around 9:30, stopping for lunch in Kingston, and getting to my parents' place before 3.

But on the other hand: I seem to have a backlog of 9 things I've meant to review from the last few weeks.

Guess you'll have to wait!

Thanks for all the well-wishes for smooth driving. It will go fine, I'm sure; just a bit long.

On that note, G'night. :)

[ps- bike odometer rolled over this evening, 200km.]

I need a nap.

The last bit of travel today is a bus from Roanoke to Blacksburg VA. It's only an hour, but I really need a nap. And it's hot.

But there are fun hills. I'm fairly convinced I flew over the Blue Ridge Parkway for a while before we landed.

I edited and uploaded my favourite photos from our trip to Nova Scotia. I think the slideshow looks pretty good if I do say so myself.

Here's a few to whet your appetite. They all have Alt/title text, so hover over a photo without clicking if you're curious.

In 11 hours we're off to Buffalo, thence to Denver. Looking forward to seeing friends there; back here late Tuesday.

Our Nova Scotia vacation was a success. We put 1,600 km on the rental car. [1]

I have something like 440 photos to weed through from the last week. As a lazy first approximation, click on the google-map link above, and anywhere our route took us, check out the existing photos. :)

There were many surprises on this trip, but possibly the biggest came in Mahone Bay where dan (and possibly me too) were caught by what looked to dan like a Google Street View truck. If so, that would be a fun birthday present to me from Google, as we were there on my birthday...

The most remote location we visited by car was Meat Cove, at the northernmost tip of Cape Breton. Egads, that dirt road. And those cliffs. Whee!

The most awesome food was, of course, eaten on the hiking trails, because nothing tastes better than food you carried up a mountain. In this case: lobster picnic. Yes, that's right. Caught the same morning around 4am, sold to us on the dock at 10am. 5 lobsters for $20. Tossed in a pot by our B&B host and packed up as a picnic lunch. MMmmm tasty. And to follow it up, the next day we had the leftover lobsters in sandwiches, on another trail, just before we saw mooses.

Very grateful for my travel partner sweetie. He did every last bit of the driving in the rental car (rather than $100ish more to add me to the allowed drivers). And he had excellent suggestions, including taking the morning today to drive a long way around to the airport, which meant we happened across the lighthouse on the Bay of Fundy with the highest recorded tidal range in the world (17 meters). We were there at low-tide, and then 30 minutes later we saw waves lapping upward as the tide rose; I will have to look up videos or photos to make up for not seeing high-tide, which given the huge mud-flats, looks like it must be amazing to see as well.

And now that I've run out of superlatives for the evening, with a snoring dog at my feet and a now much smaller pile of email to go through tomorrow, I think it's time for bed.

[1] the google map only shows 1400 km, but we backtracked from our B&B in Pleasant Cove (in the NW corner of the Cabot Trail) a number of times. The squeaky-new white PT Cruiser they gave us came back just a little bit muddy. :)

It's been a while since I've made a proper update.

Last weekend's trip to Philadelphia was fairly intense. I have a lot of respect for the organizers of the workshop; they packed a lot into our 44 hours on-site at Pendle Hill, yet it didn't feel rushed or overloaded. We learned more about the nuts and bolts of leading Quaker Quest training workshops, worked in small groups on articulating our own paths with regard to Quaker outreach, and talked about how the group of 30 of us can make the overall project work more smoothly. In the balance, I feel just as strongly that this is a worthwhile project and a good place for me right now.

The only parts of the weekend which were bad-intense were entirely my doing, because sometimes I'm a space-cadet who loses things wot aren't clamped down. *sigh*

One high-point to the trip was meeting some really neat people, some even roughly my age, from all over North America; and reconnecting with other 'Quakes who I've gotten to know and respect more over the last few years.

Another high-point was being picked up at the airport by Carrie G., who introduced me to Alma, who's now 4 5 months old. We went downtown and met up with her partner, Kathleen, and we had some wonderful time together (with ice-cream, plus also really cute sleeping infant) It was great to catch up for an hour; an hour which I thought I'd lost when I missed my first flight- making the meeting even more sweet.

But that was my 48 hours in the Philly area.

And when I got back, dan made us a lobster dinner, because he has an inside scoop with our favourite fish place, and heard they had excellent cheap lobsters. Yummy surprise, that. Go, dan!

Work has been rewarding, for the most part- I'm dividing my time between three software-design projects, and right now the balance is good. One project involves integrating our department's inventory system with the campus DNS, to simplify provisioning new equipment and make less work on updates. Another involves properly synching SSH keys so (among other benefits) instructors can more easily access their course-accounts from off-campus. The third is an Engineering Computing project of doom, which may be able to massage data from across campus into one place, in the formats needed by faculty to apply for grants, prepare their annual activity reports, and a few other creeping features. It may succeed, or it may collapse into a pile of brittle sticks; given the non-standardized data provided (and required) by the different faculties. We'll see.

I've just passed the one-year mark from coming back to CS, and I still like my work, I still like my work environment. Quite a bit, actually. The end of this calendar year will be five years I'm on campus, or more than half my time since moving here. Wow. I hope I can keep being as valuable to the U as I feel like it's been to me.

What else?

I'm going to be trying acupuncture. I met with my physiotherapist last week over coffee, and she pointed me in the right direction. I'll schedule it just as finish as I finish with the next bit of travel in May. I will be sure to report back, since I know some of you are practitioners. (or practitionees?)

For my birthday (which is next Wednesday), melted_snowball and I are going to Nova Scotia. We're leaving on Tuesday, back the following Wednesday. I'm very much looking forward. The plans are: two nights in Halifax, one night in Baddeck, three nights on the north side of Cape Breton in Pleasant Bay, one night in Truro. d's been patient with my impulse to arrange EVERY LITTLE BIT TO SEE IN THE ENTIRE PROVINCE in just a week. And I'm... actually quite OK with dan's desired agenda of seeing a few sights, doing some road-tripping, eating some excellent food, taking some hikes, and mostly relaxing. (Relax? How's that work?... Heh. Anybody have any tips here? Is there a class I can take on it?... Um. Joking, I think.)

I won't have my laptop, so don't expect much from me next week, even if 3G from my phone happens to work. I'll be too busy eating seafood to post, anyway. :)

The following weekend we're off to Denver to see The Three Bears, and also Other People. Long-planned trip, finally happening. I've never been to Colorado!

And a week after, with a weekend at home again, I'm taking a 3-day Project Management course, way far away at the University's extension office just a few blocks from my house. It should be useful, and there will be two colleagues in the course to trade ideas with also.

I have been keeping up with my friends-list, even if I'm not posting or commenting much. I do appreciate hearing what's up with you all; you inspire me and also give me great stuff to think about; as well as grounding me a bit. So, thanks.

it is too early.

That is all.

The cab to Breslau International Airport is picking me up in 5 minutes, I hope.

See you in Philly, maybe. :)

[I should have fbook access; I figured out my data plan, only $6/mb in the US]

Not figuratively, literally. My bike has developed a (dangerous) tendency to lose its gear, often when I'm starting up from still, and also when I'm coasting. Not the chain, but likely the freewheel, according to elbie_at_trig, who was conveniently going home at the same time as me, just as I was thinking, "if only I could ask someone to jog along next to my bike..."

So, yeah. Tomorrow morning, cycle shop is my first stop on the way to work.

Otherwise, I feel like I'm not spinning wheels, quite the opposite.

Work is going, and the three active projects are interesting, if potentially long. But the structure of things allows me to interleaving the work, and I can't imagine getting bored with it. Really, this still feels like perfect job for me. And hey, I missed my boss, who was gone a week on vacation, but I can hardly fault her for that.

Life feels adequately social, these last weeks. Care and feeding of my introverted self- it sometimes feels like I need a push, but I'm getting most of what I need.

This Thursday evening is the third and final Quaker Seekers at Laurier session we have planned; we're speaking on Equality. I think there's an LJ post sitting in my brain, to help me organize what I'm saying in my two 6-minute pieces.

Last week I had a conference-call with co-organizers for the Quaker Quest Traveling Team. A month from now I'll be one of two presenters to a regional Quaker gathering, and in early May they're sending me to Pendle Hill for a weekend conference with other trainers. This work feels both like something I'm pulled to do, and a big side-order of "what the hell was I thinking when I said yes?" Where it goes nobody knows, but I am loving the finding out.

In late May melted_snowball and I are taking a vacation to Nova Scotia for my birthday; it's our first time to Atlantic Canada and I am already having dreams about rocky shorelines and whale-watching.

This week has featured two meals with duck (breast; and burgers), and two meals with pesto. It is a good life, my friends.

I'm midway through installing linux on a mac mini. I'm in love with this hardware; it's so quiet, runs cool, and is barely bigger than my hand. I'm putting Xen-enabled debian onto it, so alongside the web and email services it can run virtual servers such as Asterisk, or possibly freePBX. Anyhow, my coder.com server will move over some time in April, I hope.

Also in April, my geek crew of Perl Mongers are doing a hardware hacking workshop with Arduino microcontroller boards. So far, I've tested sample programs that play a simple tune; flash LEDs; and (sort of) replicate a Clapper but send a signal over USB to computer. My goals are to control a 600x200 pixel LCD display, and to precisely control a stepper-motor to... well, it'll be cool if it works, that's all I will say for now.

So, all you folks who haven't posted about yourselves recently- what's up with you?

I want to visit Panic, PA.

Then Okay, OK.

And Uncertain, TX and Why, AZ and Stop, GA.

(more confusing place names)

Yay! I'm home! 'Cept it's messing with my brain that there is still snow. Ah well, it's February in Ontario.

I intended to do this trip on six airplanes (YKF->DTW->MSP->PDX, PDX->SEA->DTW->YKF) not eight (Thursday being YKF->DTW->DTW->DTW->MSP->PDX). But a million times better that they fail two maintenance checks and send us back, than the same plane not fail the maintenance checks. I am getting quite familiar with DTW, since we're going back on Friday (visiting dan's parents and my grandma on Long Island). Oy. Can I not fly for a bit?

But I will definitely go back to Portland some time when I have more than 3 hours to be a tourist. As it was, I stayed at a funky hotel, talked with a couple locals, shopped at Powell's Books, had the best hot chocolate I've ever tried, and swung off with some Quaker friends to our Gathering.

There are photos, un-uploaded. There are notes, un-typed.

And mercifully, I'm starting to get sleepy now, even though my body sort of thinks it's 8:30.

I wonder what time I'll wake up tomorrow. :-P

Google Street View has been busy.

As identified by gmaps_sights, Florence, Italy (that link is to the Fake David in front of Palazzo Vecchio. Hey, that looks familiar.)

(Can you find the Mormon missionaries?)

...Maybe over Christmas break I'll take a few hours, curl up with my laptop and some nice Italian wine, and go on tour.

To those who celebrate this weekend, Happy Thanksgiving. There's a parade happening a few km away from here, which I'm avoiding just like we have for the last seven... But there is certainly a lot to be thankful for, including having good friends. So thanks, y'all.

The trip to Long Island for my cousin's wedding was successful: she's married, the groom's family's met and approved of, and I spent good quality-time with the Grandma, aunt and uncle who are down there. Nobody got murdered, despite multiple predictions, so that's (...nearly a?) raging success as well.

d's safely in DC for his conference, and I lined up a proper Thanksgiving dinner this evening with W&J, two local friends who were feeling like company.

As for right now, I'm going back to bed for a nap. g'night!

The weekend is going to be a bit crazy. My cousin's getting married on Long Island. Dan's got his first concert with the local Philharmonic on Saturday. He convinced me I should go to my cousin's wedding; ideally it only happens the once. So I'm leaving tomorrow early afternoon, by shuttle-bus. Then dan sings his concert, and Sunday afternoon, he drives to the airport, where he catches a plane to DC for a conference.

Two hours later, I'm arriving from New York, and he will have txted me the location of the car so I can get back home again and rescue the pup, who will presumably be confused when I come home alone.

Monday, being a holiday here (Happy Thanksgiving all!) I will be collapsing in a heap. If I'm inspired, I'll be sharing a Thanksgiving dinner with some local Quakers. If not, I think I'll stay in a heap.

It's been a busy 5 days. Friday we drove to Erie PA, which turns out to be just as quick as Google Maps says, if the border crossing is perfunctory, as it was. d. had us switch from the Interstate to Rt. 5, which took us past some beautiful Lake Erie shoreline and some distressingly funny road-signs (including "North Gun Club Rd." across from "South Gun Club Rd.," and more housing developments named "Lakeview" than deserved to be along one road...)

And in Erie, we saw his cousin married, in a Catholic service that felt just a bit over-long on the sermon, but quite well-paced with the singing. And we took d's parents to dinner (at the "best restaurant and lounge between New York and Chicago." All things considered, I'll take NY or Chicago, thanks.) dan's mom grew up near Erie, so we heard some of the story to the city, though she didn't know what the current economy looks like. There were lots of neglected early-20th-century buildings, so I took lots of photos of Art Deco and decrepitude. I imagine the city's OK if you know it, but for a weekend trip it didn't strike me particularly strongly.

We returned home on Sunday, and I got busy on our deck, which has been stripped and waiting for stain since April. (Which isn't exactly my fault; the instructions I read online said I was to wait a week after any rain, and don't do it if rain's expected in the next two days. In this rainy summer we had, I believe we've had precisely one 9-day window without rain, and in it, I was visiting relatives or some other good excuse.) I finally said, 6 days of no rain is close enough, and whipped through 2/3 of it on Sunday, and the rest after work on Monday. And I ran out of stain just 3 square feet from the end- I had to wring the stain from the container with a tiny roller, and it just barely made it. I guess I can conclude the deck was sufficiently pre-seasoned. And it looks pretty good now, too.

What with various other bleh, I'm looking forward to the weekend; maybe even just forward to tomorrow.

Oh yeah- today my bike rolled over its 1000th km for the season.

Yesterday's storms hit me coming and going. My day started in Toronto, where I spent the night with melted_snowball; he's there through this afternoon for a conference. I found it a good visit as one-day vacations go. But then was the getting home.

I parked our car at the Yorkdale mall, and by early afternoon, I was already on the road back home, when bam the rains started and became quite heavy quite quickly. As far as I can tell from the weather map and the radio, there was a fairly intense front that moved across the 401 just before I came through. The only really scary part of the drive was when I hit my first patch of the road being resurfaced- there was more than a few cm of water in the trough that was my lane, which made the conditions quite different quite quickly.

So, after 30 minutes of slow wet going, the weather cleared up and shortly I was on dry pavement again. As it was all the way home. I picked up roverthedog from the kennel, dropped her at home, then biked to work in partial sunshine.

I had one eye on the radar map, but I lost a gamble that I'd leave before the rain hit. And wow did it hit. So I stayed an extra hour, worked some more, chatted with sulle_stelle and rebooted stuff when the power went off for a second. I didn't see any of the hail or damaging wind, though the wind seemed quite strong at the University. The weather station recorded a record 24mm of rain between 7:30 and 7:45pm. I waited until 8, then made my way back in a light (but quite chilly) shower. My route home was flood-free, fortunately. Not like this, a shot taken for the local paper, of the four lane road just by Rover's kennel:



And now I have a UPS for my computer, and a very wet lawn that I didn't get to mow before today's rains started, and I wonder what the weather will be like for tonight's ride home. And hopefully the basement is still dry.

bunchberry successfully defended her PhD (from all comers) and she and her spouse, morgan_starfire threw a wonderful party to celebrate. So we went to Michigan to party!

I had some neat conversations with bunchberry's friends; who included math geeks, Quakers, musicians, dancers, and preschoolers. There was an impromptu contra dance, a very cute dog, and lots of good food.

A few slices:

I spent quite a while talking with Max, who has spent many decades as a Conscientious Objector organizer. I asked him how he handles life-balance, not becoming too depressed about the state of the world. He said he's been an adult for over 60 years, and at a number of times, the world has seemed at the brink of disaster, but it's survived the last 60 years, so that helps his sense of perspective, even as dire as things look today.

He says he was on FBI watch lists in the 60s, and he learned recently that they've re-activated his record for the Department of Homeland Security. He knows his phone's tapped, and occasionally some of the more "lurid" conversations make him amused about what the listeners think of him. I asked him if he'd seen the film "The Lives of Others" about the Stasi surveillance men, and he hadn't. He had a funny story about locking his keys in the car when he was in Eastern Germany sometime in the 90s, and the attractive auto-shop worker guy who tried to get into the car for him...

And he had a story about when he was in primary school, in the 1930s. His teacher described the Roman Republic, and the Roman Empire, then the transition "taking just as long as the lifetime between your age now and when you're old." And, he said, "naively, at the time I thought I would have some say in the matter."

---

The band included: a hammered dulcimer, two fiddles, many drums, and a keyboard. The deserts included a rhubarb pie, a key lime pie, brownies, petit fours, cherries, and watermelon.

---

I came up with a description of becoming a member of a Quaker Meeting, talking with one person about how she went from being Jewish to being Jewish-Quaker. I said, "yeah, did they say something like, 'congratulations, and may we present you with your ceremonial hyphen?" I'm picturing something simple, not chrome or anything fancy like that.

---

The drive to Michigan and back was fine; 5 hours there, 4.5 back. Except Eastern Michigan seems to be entirely under construction.

We got back mid-afternoon Sunday, and I spent a few hours mowing and squirting out dandelions.

Thursday morning was a blur of Rome airport, Pisa airport, bus to Florence, walk to hotel (bump bump on cobblestone streets), dinner at hotel, crash thud.

We saw the leaning tower of Pisa from the air, which was special.

Florence made me happy, once we woke up on Friday and started being tourists. We walked around il Duomo, the largest cathedral dome I've probably seen. The inside of the cathedral was... gloomy, though the crypt was fairly cool. Over the last 40 years they've excavated older architecture, including an ancient Christian road and Roman-era houses. There were lots of gravestones and an unlabeled but sort of exciting little room containing a few skulls. After il Duomo, we visited Dante's house (closed) and his church (very small and gloomy). But there was a busker performing from The Divine Comedy, looking fairly devilish if I do say so. We found our way to Ponte Vecchio, the only medieval bridge that survived the German bombing in WWII, which is covered in jewelry markets leaning out over the water on stilts. We later learned that the top floor of the bridge is actually a still-extant passage from one palace a few km down-river, to the major art museum, the Uffizi. That's sort of cool.

We held off seeing the Uffizi until later in the afternoon (our hotel had gotten us a guided tour- which we could afford, and allowed us to skip a 2-hour line for museum tickets, so we did it- and can I put in a word for hotels with concierges? Thank you.) and met up with dan's parents for lunch.

Afterward, d. and I split up; I was going to try and see the crypt under Palazzo Vecchio (another museum/palace), though the crypt wasn't where dan's mom thought it had been, so I wandered the first floor of the palace. The Piazza there has a great collection of statuary, including the famous "fake" Michaelangelo's David, a rather large fountain to Neptune, and Perseus With the Head of Medusa.

We met up and had our guided tour of the Uffizi. And that was quite the amazing collection- I will admit to becoming a bit jaded by the end, when I was rushing to see their three Caravaggios before closing time. It is true that one can see only so much portraiture and Mary and naked Jesuses; so I skipped a few rooms where I didn't recognize a single artist. I'm glad we spent the time and money for the tour. The story, apparently, is that this was one of the first museums outside someone's home; it was put on the top floor of the Office Building for the Incorporated City of Firenze, in the 1500s. It has kept the collections of the Medici family since they were the most powerful in Italy, and added a fair number since as well, eventually one of the best collections of Italian Renaissance art anywhere. I actually bought a catalog in the gift shoppe, the first time I've done that in a museum.

On the way out, I ran across excavations in the basement. One side, the bathrooms. Other side, crypts. No signs. Shrug.

And essentially, that was our one tourism day.

Saturday was family family family; dan's cousin's Bat Mitzvah. The ceremony was short; the congregation was enthusiastically happy; and dan and I understood less of what was going on than we would've if it weren't held in three languages, and if we were more properly Jewish, neither of us having ever been to a Bar or Bat Mitzvah before. The reception was held an hour away at a vineyard near Sienna, which was beautiful and they fed us wonderful food for several hours. Then there was a falconry demonstration, which included one tiny cousin not being eaten by a hawk. I got to hang out with warm relatives and relatives-by-law who seemed happy to meet me. And I took a trillion photos of the winery grounds.

Saturday night, I tried to get us take-out food at our hotel, and they forbid me. ("You're not allowed to bring in outside food." "What, you'll stop me?" "It's forbidden, because we have a restaurant." "...so what am I supposed to do if we want to eat something that isn't in your restaurant, and we're too tired to go out?" "Maybe if you wait until 10:30 and there isn't anyone at the door, you could bring it in then." "...") So I went and got us take-out sushi and carried it in inside my jacket. What a stupid ending to a nice hotel visit.

Sunday morning, we flew from Florence to Copenhagen, where we immediately were bombarded by dense breads, strange vowels, and ultra-modern sensible Danish design. I have less to say about Denmark right now, because I should be packing. I love our hotel. dan's friend surelars put us up; he fed us tasty dinners and gave us exhaustively complete histories (which seem to summarize to "and then there was a war and we lost a lot of the city due to fire.") I hope to have more to write about Denmark later. And there will be photos. Oh yes, there will be photos.

Once I'm back on the proper continent, I think.