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Well, there might not be too much of a delay with the blog after all.  We are ensconced in our campsite in the Netherlands, where we’ll be for the next 3 days, and it is a pretty full service place.  Of course there is computer access.

I’m sitting just to the right of this playground.

There is a fancy restaurant and a snack bar where we had dinner.  I made out like a bandit because I just ordered a burger, but Isabel and Helena got adventurous and ordered  Amsterdam Croquettes, which it turned out nobody liked but me.  I’m not even sure what they were, but my best guess is mashed potatoes and meat, a little spicy, breaded and deep fried.  We ordered fries for 3 and they were more than enough for the 5 of us.

There is a laundry, a bicycle rental, all sorts of playgrounds, and free showers (not a common thing in European campgrounds)  There are a lot of people here who seem to be spending the summer.  That is, there are cabins, and very elaborate trailers, and a little hobbit house.  We are slumming it with our tent.

The trip so far has been mixed.  We hit the road with much less complication than I thought, everybody got up on time and we were moving by 6 a.m.  It was a cool and breezy day, nice for a drive.  Germany is absolutely thick with windmills, it’s quite impressive, really.

One thing that I’m going to have to skimp on this trip is coffee.  At home I can make it whenever I like, so 6 or 8 cups a day is not uncommon.  But at 1 Euro 30 for a crappy, tiny cup from a machine, that’s going to be a rarer treat.

The kids have been fighting and going nuts in the back seat, so I’m glad we’re staying in one place for a few days.  Will write more tomorrow.

We’re off on a week’s vacation starting  early tomorrow morning.  I hope to be able to write  this blog every day, most camp sites have Wi-fi now, but I can’t guarantee it and  I’m not going to worry about it.  Certainly, my facebook presence will be greatly curtailed, but maybe that’s a good thing.  Maybe that’s something I need a vacation from.

It will be more of this….

Certainly, my Poems About Paintings page has lagged a bit in the last week just because I’ve been in the same rut for too long and haven’t felt inspired.  Time to recharge the old batteries.

It’s going to be a very roundabout trip, with a lot of driving, but it will be interesting indeed.  First, we are headed for the Netherlands, where we will stay in a campground  by the beach and take a day  trip or two  into Amsterdam.  Since I haven’t been to Amsterdam since I  was young, single, and totally irresponsible, it will be a bit like seeing the place for the first time.

…and less of this.

Then, we have to take Sam’s friend Robert home to Innsbruck, and we will find at least one place along the way to do a one day trip by canoe or raft.  That’s one of my favorite things to do in the summer, and it’s certainly been hot enough lately.

When I get back, I expect to be refreshed and in a good mood to start my newest job.  Starting Monday, August 3rd, I will be the Tarot Reader in Residence at Marie Brožová’s art gallery, just a few short stops off Old Town  Square.

If you’re in Prague, stop in and see me.

It is stinking hot and I wish it would rain.  Rain clears the air, relieves the tension.  I like the rain.

Of course, I shouldn’t complain.  Some people are living where there is actual drought, and wildfires.  And there’s going to be a lot more of that.  Because the climate’s changing.  It’s changing a lot faster than we thought it would, according to a guy named Jim Hansen, who used to work for NASA and I guess is somewhat of an expert on the issue.

He says the sea is going to rise 3 meters within the next 50 years.  There goes Venice.  There go the Seychelles.  There goes Florida.  That might actually wake people up a bit.

If the Seychelles go under there will be a bit of a refugee problem and some people will have to reschedule their vacations, but the people who matter won’t be too bothered.  They are the White Rhino of nations.  They will disappear and people will forget they every existed.

I feel pretty lucky, to tell the truth, to live in the Czech Republic.  We’re far enough away from any coastline that we don’t need to worry about the ocean rising.  We don’t live along any known fault lines, so we’re probably never going to do in an earthquake.  We’re nowhere near Yellowstone so when that erupts and kills 90% of all the people in North America, we’ll be just fine.  No hurricanes here.  Forest fires are not a big problem.  That could change, I suppose, if drought becomes the order of the day, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Yup, we’re pretty safe here.

The thread was actually about how Chinese builders put together a house, from 3D printed materials, in 3 hours, and it looked like a really nice house.  The thread, as comment threads tend to do, was spreading out all over the place, and I said something about how we could have a perfect world and it’s a darned shame nobody reads Buckminster Fuller any more, and somebody  responded with (I’m paraphrasing broadly here) haha, you’re so silly, how do you expect to do that?

Three hours, and a luxury villa at that

That was last night and it took me that long to come up with this response, and it’s blog length, so I’m just going to plagiarize myself and repost my  riposte here:

Well, since Charles so correctly pointed out the need for a plan and I said I would get to work on a plan, I feel I at least owe a response. However, this is not the plan.
The plan for how to get from where we are – a world divided into over 200 nations, with thousands of languages and religions and more ideologies than you could shake a stick at; a world which is polluted to a horrifically unhealthy degree; a world in which billions of people are struggling just to not starve to death; a world which erupts into war at the slightest reason, even the slightest pretext – to a utopian paradise where all the food that people need can be plucked from the trees like in the land of the Eloi, where everybody has a clean comfortable home with all the conveniences of modern life, where clean water and clean air are considered a natural part of existence, where mag-lev trains link the world and children go to school every day in clean, safe, well lit classrooms – would take thousands of pages and lots of technical drawings.
This is the plan for how to come up with the plan.
Yammering at each other on facebook can be, occasionally, illuminating but there is far more noise than productive sound, so facebook is not the answer. What we need is something that is not social media but idea media, a place where we can debate every issue to conclusion, and by conclusion I mean consensus.
It should be a site which starts with the question ‘How can we make the Earth a wonderful place to live and ensure the healthy continuation of the human race?’ There would be no friending or unfriending. Everybody who’s on is on with everybody else. Memes, or original posts, get posted ONCE. All comments directed to the same post. Comments monitored, stupid comments tossed, expert comments encouraged. Periodic polling of participants and redefining of arguments, until consensus is reached. Until we come up with a plan.

Just saw ‘The Imitation Game’ at our local, outdoor, 50 kč cinema.  It was packed, and some people were sitting on the ground in front of the rows of chairs, and there was an extra seating session over to the side, on the gazebo platform.  It was good to be outside in the evening, after a bloody hot day and a complicated mess of delayed and rerouted trams, and it was even pleasant when the wind whipped up late in the film and there were leaves blowing in the lights of the projector, it added a bit of drama.

It really would have been a bleak film without her

I enjoyed the film tremendously.  Even though I tend to think both Benedict Cumberbodkin and Keira Knightley are somewhat over-rated in their profession, I managed to forget about that and get swept away in the story – although I suspected that the Keira Knightley character was a fictional creation, just so the film wouldn’t be all a bunch of guys standing around arguing about math.

That was one of the things I checked on Wikipedia as soon as I got home.  The film was closer to historically accurate than I gave it credit for, and Joan Clarke, Knightley’s character, was real.

I also suspect that the epiphany in the pub scene was just Hollywood, it was too cute by half and very  similar to a scene in “A Beautiful Mind.”  But, I don’t know.  That wasn’t in the wikipedia article, but you can’t expect every little detail to be.