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Today is already tomorrow as it is half past midnight and I have no idea what to write about.  Discovery Channel on in the background, a program I used to watch but haven’t for a while about two guys who look for meteorites and this is a cool thing but gets dull after 5 minutes because, after all, it’s a couple of guys walking around in fields looking for rocks and they find one and say “Wow, look at the size of that!” and it’s a totally ordinary looking rock, but I just got my ‘learn something new every day’ moment when they pointed out that the metal detector was invented by Alexander Graham Bell, who also invented the hearing aid.  The telephone did not define his whole life.

Today was a story of spicy food.  Met Helena for lunch and we went to a Turkish place, I had a kebab and the guy asked me if I wanted it spicy and I said “Very,” knowing full well it wouldn’t be and he said “I will make it very spicy, you will remember me” but it wasn’t particularly spicy, they never do spicy in this country.  There is something to be said for Czech cuisine, but spicy isn’t it, and Chinese, Mexican and all foreign restaurants adapt.
For dinner, Helena made a vegetarian stew because we had a vegetarian guest and she bought some hot peppers to go with it and they were so spicy they burned my lips and gave me hiccups, and me and Sam were the only ones who would touch them at all.  It was great.  Spicy food is a pleasurable pain.

All for tonight.  Talk to you tomorrow.

I watched a documentary today on the proposed Bering Tunnel, which would certainly be an amazing feat of engineering if built and link the Americas with Asia/Europe/Africa by rail, so I’m rooting for it, but there were a couple of things they said which I found fault with, because that is what I do.
They were listing all the things it would have to be, like fire resistant, and not likely to collapse, and ‘able to withstand a 7.9 earthquake.’  They never explained what would happen if there were an 8.2 or 8.5, for instance, or why it shouldn’t be built to resist those.  Admittedly, they are rare, but they have been known to happen and it would be a darned shame if it were built and then knocked  down by nature a week later, with  a couple hundred passengers trapped inside, and a totally flooded tunnel, probably to never be built again.
The other thing was, they didn’t  seem to be talking about passengers at  all, but made a big deal out of how Siberia has so much  oil and natural gas and this would be good  for the U.S. economy.  Well, if that’s the reason for building it, I vote no.  We need to switch to solar and wind, and we need to switch like yesterday.

In good news on that front, Scotland recently had a day where their entire daily need for electricity was provided for by wind, and I believe a couple other countries have had days like that, so the world  is changing, and it’s technology, and not politics, which is  changing it, so I draw hope from that.

We’ve got our nephew staying with us tonight, the one who is one week younger than our Isabel. They are both 9.  Isabel, meanwhile, set out this morning to spend about a week and a half at her friend’s grandmother’s place.
Patrick had a football tournament not far from Prague, so it was easier for us to go pick him up and Helena will drive him home to Mlada Boleslav tomorrow.  While he’s here, though, Helena thought we should do something cool and show him one of the tourist attractions of our neighborhood: the ferry across the Vltava.

Now, we would have liked it if Sam had come with us but Sam thinks he’s too cool to do anything with the parents and his friend from Austria (he’s actually a friend from Prague, they went to the same school up to about 4th or 5th grade before Robert’s family moved) was also not interested, so it was me, Helena and Patrick.

His first question, as soon as we stepped out the door, was “Are we going by car?”

No, we said.  We are walking.  It’s not far.  Well, children have shorter legs than adults, and less than halfway there he started pointing out that this did not agree with his definition of ‘not very far.’  But, we were there in under 15 minutes and it is a pleasant walk.

We didn’t have to wait long for the ferry at all, and it was a beautiful crossing, with the sun low in the sky and blazing.  On the other side, we took a short walk along the river, past a homeless man (you could tell he was homeless because he stank) lying on a bench. I got the feeling he was staking his claim, establishing residency for the evening.  I guess, in calm summer weather, it was sort of a prime location.

We came to a fruit tree.  I would have said loquats but H says they are just yellow plums and I think she’s probably right.  They look like loquats but they’re juicier inside.  They were ripe and most of the fruit was well out of reach but there were a few branches coming over the wall and leaning down just far enough I could grab some.

Patrick was very pleased with that and then we had a contest, trying to spit the pits from the walkway where we stood into the river.  Sometimes it went clean in, sometimes it bounced off the concrete and went in, and sometimes it fell short.  (It wasn’t littering.  The whole area was covered with fallen and rotting fruit.)
It’s only about 10  minutes between ferries.  On the ride back, it was quiet and we could here the tape the pilot was listening to.  “La tienda esta abierto.  The shop is open.”  Kind of impressive, really.  A Czech student with a summer job ferrying people across the river, making use of the time to study Spanish – in English.

Then Patrick wanted to take the Metro home, which really didn’t save us much walking at all, but we agreed and took it for the one stop.

Public transportation can be fun.

One thing I haven’t done in far too long, two or three weeks at least, maybe a month, is to add a poem to my Poems about Paintings page.  Partly it’s because  I was on vacation, partly, maybe, it was due to boredom with the whole project, and partly it’s because I’ve been overly obsessed with politics, and all of my time on facebook has been spent arguing with people instead of looking at pretty paintings and trying to find inspiration.

That’s the goal of the project.  To see a painting, draw some kind of inspiration from it, and write a poem.  Boredom with the project is possible because how many poems can you write about trees and flowers and mountain streams and seascapes and so on.

So, I was glad today to see one and get inspired.  One of the things I really like about writing poetry is that in the search for rhyming words, a new thought will suddenly pop up at random and voila, something new is created.  That’s sort of what happened with this one.  I wanted to write a nice, cute poem about a yard overgrown with wild flowers but then the last couple of lines just jumped out at me and I realized the truth of them.  Although we think of flowers as beautiful, delicate, fragile things, they grow everywhere and are tough and tenacious life forms.  Here’s the poem:

There are places flowers grow
in tidy gardens, row on row
They also grow in big, clay plots
and randomly in vacant lots
do not be fooled by their looks so fair
their pretty petals, their fragile air
their poise, their grace, their perfumed smell
they are fierce, and wild as hell

Now begins the process of obtaining the artist’s permission, which is a waiting game, and if  she ignores the request, in a couple of weeks I’ll start looking for a similar work by some famous, and very dead, artist, so I can put the poem onto the site.
Still, I am glad I got the poem written and that dry streak, I hope, is broken.

The political arguments don’t seem to have changed much over the last week or so.  Of course, there is new information almost daily, but it seems like most people’s opinions are set, or at any rate, most of the people who are on my facebook page, which is not an accurate cross-section of the general population.
Actually, now that I think about  it, while writing this, I think people have given this election a bit more thought than previous ones, and maybe that’s a good thing.  Maybe not, it’s a roll of the dice.  I remember a lot of women voted for JFK because he was handsome, and a lot  of people voted for Reagan because he seemed an agreeable sort of fellow in those movies he was in with Bonzo the Chimp.  Whether or not those were good choices, we’re still arguing about today.

Not everybody puts a lot  of thought into how they vote, and that’s Democracy.  So, for those who don’t want to think about it too much, here is my handy-dandy guide for who you should vote for:

If you wanted Sanders, and are generally a left leaning sort, you should vote for Jill Stein.

If you wanted Sanders, and are generally a right leaning sort, you should vote for Gary Johnson.

If you are either white and racist, or a gun nut, or the kind of person who used to think it was funny to put firecrackers into cat’s butts when you were a child, then you should vote for Trump.

If you don’t mind corruption, and war, and having the big corporations control the world forever, then you should vote for Clinton.

If you are the kind of person who isn’t that interested in politics and is sort of confused by what’s going on, you should not vote. It’s O.K. You’re allowed to do that. Really.

Somebody’s going to win, probably nobody good, and most of us are just going to spend the next 4 years seriously pissed off, no matter who it  is.