Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

It turned cold again in the late afternoon, but it was actually kind of bright and sunny during the day. I find the cold wears me down, leaves me fatigued, but a bit of sunshine and I perk right up. I am a heliotrope. (Not too much, though. In the hottest heat of the summer, I seek the shade and long for a day with a cool breeze and a dash of rain. The heat within the cold, the cool within the heat, the contrast, the relief, that’s what I mostly like.)
Anyway, after my gymnasium class, I was about to walk over to the mall and have lunch at McDonald’s before facing the kids’ class that follows. To put it mildly, it’s not my easiest class. But as I stepped out the front door of the school, the beauty of the day hit me right between the eyes and I said “Screw it, I’ll walk” and about halfway there took a detour through the woods. Now, the snow is mostly off the streets and the sidewalks have patches of dirty ice and slush, but there, the trails were all hardpacked with pure white, and you could look down the side trails which, in leafier seasons disappear from vision maybe 20 yards in, but they appeared as long, white, glistening aisles, like in some fantasy castle, and there was an old man pulling a little girl on a sled and it was all lovely. Then I came to the end of the trail, sort of, where I had to turn off anyway, but it was an amazing sight, an eye opener. I emerged from the trees and the view was over a valley and into the hills beyond, and it was fields and forests and there I stood. At the absolute edge of the city.
Yes, there are places it ends that abruptly.

Watching a very schlocky teen horror show, girl has to stay home from the big party to controlling parents, even though they’re out of town, and her best friend is a total backstabbing bad girl and all of the BFs friends are totally unsympathetic hooligans and bullies but the guy she’s truly in love with is practically a knight in shining armor, and she calls into some radio station which apparently can magically solve all of your problems and it’s kind of a self help thing, shout louder, say you really want it, then take some AA styled pledge about how you’re going to control your own destiny and things will start to happen, so you know, it is practically pre-determined, unless this is a much better movie than I think it is, that the bad girl is going to get her come-uppance, the hero boyfriend will come to the rescue, and all will be fine in the end.
And that’s just about what I’m in the mood for tonight.
There seems to be no resolving the impasse between Hillary’s supporters, who won’t give it up, and Bernie supporters. Like, I heard Ashley Judd’s rap/rant/speech and was really impressed and totally agreed with everything she was saying and then, after that long list of true heroes, like Susan B. Anthony and Rosa Parks she said Hillary…and I totally lost interest.
Seriously, Hillary supporters, you cannot continue to be unaware how poison that woman’s name is. She cheated, and now we have Donald Trump as president.
You blame us. We blame you.
Here’s my suggestion for a compromise: Tulsi Gabbard. We get all of Bernie’s policies, which is what we want, and you get your first woman president, which is all you seem to care about.

Back to the movie. It’s turned all sorts of supernatural, people floating in the air and turning into something like zombies and cutting each others throats with garden shears. I’m sure I will have lovely dreams tonight.

my fingers are on the keyboard and I don’t know where they are going. The world is in disarray but, to be honest, the world has been in worse disarray than this before and it was not the end of the human race although, admittedly, that’s a pretty low bar.
We just almost burned the banana bread. I love banana bread. And banana pancakes. And everything with bananas. I was watching a documentary earlier today about some scientists who are experimenting with cooking by all sorts of lasers and test tubes and reducing everything to pastes and powders and vapors and it all looked kind of gross, but I suppose people may go for it when it’s available and we are drifting further and further down the food as commodity river, but if it’s healthy and they actually invent some new flavors, sure, I’d go for it.
But I think the documentary was a couple years old, because I seem to recall seeing it a couple of years ago, and that’s often the way with science shows, I’ll get totally excited about some new development and then realize it’s from 2005 or so, whether it’s about bullet trains or outer space exploration.
You get the same thing on Facebook, even with political arguments, where you’d think people would try to be up to date, but noooo.
I guess that’s the effect of a digital civilization. Everything lasts for ever, it’s always new to somebody so it never even fades from memory, and it all gets mixed up in time.

Had a few errands to run today, to a couple of my least favorite places. First was the American embassy, to renew the kids’ passports. For one thing, there is always a photo of the current American president prominently displayed. For another, they are jerks about the security, can’t even take a mobile phone in. Then, once you are in, you are a fly in the spiderweb of bureaucracy, and the person behind the desk has all the power. I noticed a plaque on the side of the building stating that Franz Kafka had once lived there. How appropriate, I thought.
It wasn’t too bad, though. A 5 minute wait, we handed over documents, they sent us to a separate window to pay, another five minute wait, signed a few papers, raised our right hands and swore the information was all correct (seriously, we had to swear. WTF is that all about?) and we were done and out. I didn’t realize it until about 10 minutes ago, but there was no photo of Trump on the wall. My guess is they have a photo of Hillary in the basement, that was supposed to go up, but whoops.
The 2nd stop was just with Isabel, Sam headed off to school and Helena to work, and we went to the Post Office, the one in Prague 5 where the customs are. Fortunately, it was not a busy day, because that can be a serious time suck. You start at one counter, they send you to another, in a different room, where I had to pay 285 crowns, but visit two different clerks, one of them twice, and then back to the first counter, where they stamped a couple of things, made me pay an additional 99 crowns, and then sent me to actually pick up the package. They did not speak English and were not very friendly.
The package was Christmas and Birthday presents for Sam and Isabel from my sister Rebecca, and one of Isabel’s gifts was a DVD of Wall-E, which I’d never seen either, so we came home and watched that. What a trippy little film. I felt that, since the intended audience was obviously children, they were giving their intended audience a lot of credit for intelligence. It wasn’t until halfway through the film that human beings occurred, or more than a couple of words were uttered.
So, not such a bad day in the end. I’ll remember Wall-E longer than the hassle at the post office, and I’m glad we’ve got the passports done as well.

As I was combing through my Junk e-Mail list, because you never know when something useful will appear, and I saw “Walk-in Bathroom Quotes.” I was thinking the would be lists of great quotes about walk-in bathrooms, like “‘Tis a far, far better bath that I take now than I have ever taken before” or “Two baths diverged in a yellow wood,” but after a second it dawned on me that they were using quotes in the sense of price estimates.
Then, just flipping through the channels just now and watching a thing about a solar car race in Australia, Darwin to Adelaide, and the phrase “must be shipped to Australia in less than 3 months,” but when words are spoken quickly, and they almost always are because once you have the gift of speech, it would be ridiculous to slow down and enunciate each word so there can be no mistakes, it would just take forever and we’ve got so much more to do with our lives.
There are so many things that need to be said and so little time in which to say them that nobody wants to slow down, much less shut up and listen, and a p followed by a d comes out as a t.
As popular(or as irritating, depending on your point of view) as puns are, there are millions and millions more out there, they are happening to pretty much everybody pretty much all the time, in random conversation, on TV, or on the internet.
So, people who moan about how lame and pathetic and geeky and uncool they are, you all should count your lucky stars, as they say, that the vast majority of them go unrepeated and unreported. Otherwise, we would spiral down uncontrollably into gibberish and madness.