Lesson learned

We saved maybe $1k taking an early flight out of Madrid through Lisbon and Newark. Per the counsel of the folx at our hotel and also my old colleague Todd, who's been living in Madrid not much shy of a decade and showed us how Madrilenos eat lunch, we were at the airport early and were first in line for our flight on TAP (Air Portugal). 

I had some concerns our carry on bags weren't going to pass muster with TAPs size requirements but the last thing i wanted to do was check and then have to retrieve my bag in Lisbon for customs on the way out of the EU and then again in Newark coming into the US.

So there we were, first in line at the gate, standing there because it seemed like standing was the protocol. The first woman from TAP arrived at the desk and said: "Those are too big. You're gonna have to check them." It ended up costing us $330 but they are checked through tlo RDU. Had I known that was an option I would have checked them from the jump street for maybe $100-$150.

Then we got on the plane. Our bags would have totally fit in the overheads and -- and this is what's most galling of all -- there were people who boarded later with American-sized carry ons like ours. I think that -- like traffic cops in smal rural towns-- boarding teams at discount carriers like TAP probably have revenue quotas they need to hit and that once that's done they just need to get people on the plane. The moral to this story is, clearly, if you're worried your bags are too big don't stand in front of the check in desk and call attention to it during pre-boarding. You'd've thought I might have known, sigh.

A mystery solved

On recent trips, I had been mystified by a strange dandruff-like substance that seemed to be proliferating in my knapsack and our rental cars. When we were in Alaska I thought that it might be coming off the poplar trees, if indeed there were any, I've never really gotten very good at identifying trees, despite receiving as a gift a field guide to trees as a birthday present back in 1988 after I had complained about not understanding the significance of various trees in poems. It was very thoughful of Dorothy to go out and get that for me lo those multiple decades ago. I've given it insufficient attention to really master tree identification, despite my earnest intentions.

But here we were in rental cars first in France, then in Spain and the same mysterious stuff has been floating around our cars. At long last I've discovered the culprit.

It's my rain coat! It's a Columbia brand shell, I think. Some kind of discount Gore-Tex wannabe. This shell has lived and long and noble life, but it has now been deposited firmly and finally in the garbage can of our Madrid hotel. When I get back to Chapel Hill I will buy myself a proper Gore-Tex item, probably at Great Outdoor Provisions at Eastgate, a relatively small and local chain where the people have been very friendly and helpful over a summer of significant upgearing in our household.

In the hills of Gipuzkoa

San Sebastian has proved a spectacular place to lay low and let Mary work through the tail end of her COVID. Yesterday our first two-day rental ended, so we had to move. In the four hours when we didn't have a place to lay our heads but did have a car to drive, I got Mary out to check out the town. First we walked along the beach, then we went up the hill to the Parque de Attracciones Idelgo, an old school amusement park at the top of the hill. Here's what it looks like looking down the coast.

Having been cooped up in hotel rooms/apartments for the most of the last few days, except when she was sleeping on the train, Mary was in hog heaven taking pictures with her phone. But she hadn't charged it enough. I offered to go back to the car to get her charger, but only if she promised to let somebody take a picture of us together at the top scenic overlook. She generally resists having her picture taken when out touring around because she thinks her hair and skin look crappy. There was a Russian family standing around out there talking, so I went up to them and asked them in Russian if any of them might take our picture. After recovering from the shock of being spoken to in Russian, the youngest of the three obliged.

Later we made our way out to where we were staying for the next two nights (booked on one day's notice), a place in the hills out on the edge of town that seems like it's geared to a mix of tourists and/or corporate travelers. Below is the view off of hour back terrace. For most of the day today I sat on the couch and watched the clouds roll through and the weather shift as I made my way through a Mick Herron novel. At 2:15 it was pouring down rain. At 2:25 it was sunny. Half an hour later the slate terrace was dry from the sun and gusting wind. It's kind of magical to sit here and watch the weather blow through.

SNCF's treachery, and a somewhat unexpected denouement

I bought our tickets from Bordeaux to San Sebastian using the SNCF app, which was happy to sell me a ticket to Hendaye in France and then one on to San Sebastian in Spain from Irun. I assumed the stations were adjacent, but in fact there are two miles between them. The French rail monopoly also failed to note that there is metro service from the Hendaye train station directly into San Sebastian. So we were out $25 for these stupid useless tickets. Thanks and fuck you, SNCF.

When we got to San Sebastian, we planned to hop an Uber to our AirBnb, but Uber doesn't work here. We waited for a cab, then we called one, but it never came. So we ended up walking all the way from the train station to our apartment, 20-25 minutes or so. Mary was not feeling so great but she did it like a trooper. Our host Iker is the nicest guy in the world and the place is spectacular.

Then, I went to the pharmacy around the corner and picked up a COVID test for Mary (which I really should have done when I went to the pharmacy the day before in Bordeaux to get her a thermometer). I think you see where this is going. 42 months into the pandemic, Mary has finally been caught by the dread bug. It looks like we are going to spend more time here in San Sebastian than we had originally intended. It could be worse. It is spectacularly beautiful here. Check out these pix. We may not be able to stay in this condo but there are others to be had, albeit with less beautiful views.

La chaleur infernale

We are in Bordeaux now, finally at the tail end of this brutal heat wave. Literally an hour ago the temperature started dropping. It's now down 13 degrees from 100 to 87 and is supposed to drop another 20 degrees overnight and perhaps bring in some rain.

Hopefully Mary's temperature will also fall. We are supposed to take a train tomorrow to the Spanish border and another from there to San Sebastian, because the train track widths are different in Spain from the rest of Europe. But Mary has been feeling crappy the last couple of days and I just bought a thermometer and she's just above 100. Just too high to pretend that it's actually nothing. She went downstairs for breakfast today but couldn't even make it through her coffee before I helped her back upstairs.

In the morning I went out to the Bordeaux Cathedral then brought her home a quiche. In the afternoon I went back to the Musee d'Aquitaine, which I had earlier ascertained had decent AC, at least as far as public sector European buildings go. It was cooler than being on the street, at least. It was a decent museum, albeit with more prehistory and antiquities than I had expected (mostly because I hadn't thought about it before) and then a big jump from the 13th century to the 18th. Turns out most of Bordeaux's wealth came from trading with the new world and a non-trivial portion of it derives from the slave trade. As with museums on our side of the pond, they were reckoning with this legacy in their historical museum.

One good feature in the museum was beanbag chairs spread around, some with comic books next to them. There were signs indicating they were "zones de repose" for kids. 

The Dordogne, or is it?

Chad had told me to go to the Dordogne region so we headed off that way from Vannes, on the south side of Brittany. We ended up at a very nice chateau near Puisseguin, not far from the Dordogne River.

It's the middle of a hellish heatwave here in southern France. Today the car briefly said it was 112 out. So we have been limiting our outdoors activity. Yesterday we surveyed the local chateaux and decided that the best sounding one was the Chateau de Montaigne, which the 16th century philosopher had lived and had written his Essays. As instructed on the web site, we hustled over there so as not to be late for the 3pm tour. Alas, when we arrived we learned that the guide who was to have given us a tour of the Tower (where Montaigne lived and wrote) had fainted from the heat. So we did a self-tour of the castle, something normally forbidden on account of a bunch of relatively modern graffiti which appeared there sometime in the 80s.

By the end of yesterday, Mary was feeling poorly from all the heat and I had discovered the error of my ways -- that we had not in actual fact reached the Dordogne proper. So today, like the ugly Americans we are, we spent the whole time between our hotel check out in the Gironde and checking into our hotel in Bordeaux doing an air-conditioned blitzkrieg tour of the Dordogne. It's pretty there. I could see going back sometime.

Around mid-day we stopped into Perigeux for lunch and ended up in the Boulangerie of a Monoprix department store. I had felt the AC billowing out of there and knew that was the place to go. For a while we had to stand while these older white guys took up all the tables while staring at their phones. They were probably there for the AC too.

Coffee in France now

In France one barely sees a human make coffee today. All the hotels have machines where you press a button to select your type of coffee and a machine spits it out. Only in the town of Carhaix in Brittany thus far did I find a human who actually made me a coffee, and it was in the foulest dive bar one can imagine. It smelled of stale beer and cigarettes despite the fact that I'm pretty sure you can't smoke inside (there was an ashtray just outside that hadn't been emptied in weeks, seemingly). And I only found that after going into a small restaurant and asking for a coffee (there was a machine behind the bar) only to be rebuffed: "No no, we're just a restaurant." Up the way a bit there was another guy shutting down a Turkish restaurant for the day and I asked him where one might get a coffee. "Je ne sais pas" was all I got out of that slack motherfucker.

And this was no garden spot, mind you. There was one quaintish street down which a few bicycle tourists pedaled, but even there there were some vacant store fronts. It was worse on the high street. You'd think in a town like that those in the hospitality industry would want to be hospitable. You'd be wrong.

Once more I digress. Back to the "only machines make coffee" thread. I get it. Human labor is expensive and sometimes scarce, though there are plenty of immigrants willing to work. Making coffee is, the protestations of the tattooed and pierced baristas of the world notwithstanding, much more a science than an art. I get that it is easily automatable and the coffee we've been drinking is fine, though Europe no longer has much of a leg up on America in the coffee game. Still, it's wierd that all of my coffee in France has been self-serve from a machine. 

On the positive side, it makes it much easier to get a refill.

En Bretagne

Out here in Brittany for Sophia Konanc's wedding, a few observations.

First off, though there's a lot of seashore and thus a lot of beach, I wasn't prepared for just how much of a beach place it is. Further south, for sure, I get it, but up here it seems a little chilly. Further south I get it for sure, but up here the highs are typically in the 70s in August, sometimes as low as the 60s. Anna compared it to Myrtle Beach, and while it doesn't have the trashy honky-tonk vibe of places like Myrtle or Santa Cruz or the Jersey Shore, she's not all that wide of the mark. Then again, Northeasterners have flocked to Maine in the summer from the dawn of time and they don't necessarily swim in the ocean, so I get it.

For sure a big part of me regrets that we are hustling to the south as soon as tomorrow, particularly as the interweb tells me we are doing so in the face of an historic heat wave. It will be in the high 90s and perhaps scrape the underbelly of 100 in the Dordogne while we are first there and then in Bordeaux. But then the heat wave will break and it will be chilly: in the 60s when we are the Basque provinces and the low 80s in Madrid.

But I digress. The wedding of Sophia and Valentin was lovely to be sure, but it has also been interesting to get a better view into the often mysterious ways of the French haute bourgeoisie. They are in many ways as much stiffies in their mores and habits if not more so. There were some curiously literal expressions in the marriage ceremony about the importance of making babies, which I get. We all know we need babies to keep white people and the wealthy going and in power. But it was surprising nonetheless. 

Then it turns out that the French basically won't let wives speak at wedding receptions. Marushka wrote a toast but David ended up having to read it, basically unmodified. She was not overjoyed. 

There was more, but now I gotta go eat my toast. 

Table tennis store -- Faubourg Montmartre

Out for a stroll day one in Paris from our hotel near Gare de L'est, looped down Boulevard Sebastopole to Boulevard de Bonne Nouvelle then wound around some back streets and ended up near the Bourse before turning back. We passed through what turns out to have been Faubourg Montmartre, home to a ton of different Asian restaurants including a Kurdish one and even a little stall that was selling Piroshki. I got a chicken one, which was very fresh. I had a hard time disentangling the Russian word for chicken from the French "poulet" when ordering in Russian. 

While passing by a small store that I first thought was a sporting goods store, judging by shoes in the window. Then I noticed a broad array of ping pong paddles in the window and realized that the store was entirely devoted to table tennis gear and thus that all the shoes had been table tennis shoes. The proprietor was determinedly sweeping dust off the ledge out front before closing the grates for the night. Gotta love cities. It reminded me of the pleasure of passing a small chess store in Queretaro, Mexico when mom and I were there in 2019, or of happening into the quinceneara district there, full of row upon row of brightly colored dresses for the coming of age party. 

Later we had dinner with Mary's friend Laura Lieblein the the Marais and before headed home walked around Place des Vosges, one of my very favorite squares anywhere. Laura took a pic of me and Mary, who even smiled for the occasion.

Accepting limits

Deplaning at Charles de Gaulle and coming into the terminal was an immediate reminder of one of the big differences between Americans and Europeans: our relative perception of how much AC is enough. Americans like to hang out somewhere around 74 or so. Europeans don't cool public spaces much below 80. They actually accept the limits of costs of energy generation because the economics pretty much dictate it. Energy is manifestly expensive here. They don't have the luxury of kicking the externalities can way down the road like 

Similarly, we had had a quick conversation in an airport cafe with a retired couple from Wisconsin and/or the DC suburbs. They were going to visit an old nanny of theirs in Bordeaux who used to vacation in the south of France but no longer does because she has a pool in her backyard. Given the choice, few Americans would make an either/or choice like that. We'd wrangle a way to do both, whenever possible.

Ready for lift off?

I awoke early this morning, which should surprise few. Today we drop Graham in his dorm first thing in the morning and then fly first to Charlotte -- the Queen city, some say -- and thence to Paris. Actually, I was already awake and likely not headed back to sleep but this was aided and abetted by a text from our AG and future governor informing me and another couple who will be staying with us that our Airbnb is best reached using Apple rather than Google maps. People don't understand the man's ability to wrangle details and manage teams.

But mostly I was awake early with the bittersweetness of the day: taking Graham back to UNC -- which is really where he belongs of course but it was nice having him on loan for the summer -- then jetting off into empty nesting in earnest. With George Jr now properly laid to rest -- and barring any utterly unforeseen health events in one of our families -- we are on to the nest. 

In the past week Mary was getting organized to take another trip to Alaska with her big camera with the express purpose of taking serious pictures in the places she snapped using her iPhone in June. While part of me wishes she could see that it's perhaps not exactly Alaska but the novelty of being in a new environment which was opening her eyes to new possibilities, it will also be good for her to go out on a new adventure by herself and as a bonus she and Natalie will also get some quality time without me (though hopefully not so much as to cramp Natalie's Juneau style). In any case, the trip is booked.

I myself have been looking at some fall conferences to keep sharpening my professional blade. As for now, time to get on with the day.

The end of summer

On Wednesday we drop Graham at his dorm in the morning and then head to the airport to fly to Paris in the evening. Summer's coming to an end. As per usual we have mixed feelings.

At tennis I was beset once more by inner demons, briefly overcoming them to battle back from being down 2-5 to force a tiebreaker, then collapsing after being up 4-2 in the tiebreaker before a couple of double faults opened the door for Z to shut me down. I guess I have to give myself credit for the initial comeback.

When I got home a little after 11 Graham still hadn't eaten anything and I tried to nudge him to do so in a somewhat timely fashion so he could get in three meals for the day, pursuant to his goal of adding some body mass. He pushed back. Something like "If we were to accept that that was a goal the more important thing would be for me to eat on my own schedule." He was having none of this pushy dad stuff. I suppose it is good for this nearly 20-year old young man to be resisting his dad's pressure so as to own his goals and itinerary. Still, it would be good for him to bulk up a little bit. In any case, he's headed back up on campus soon and it's probably for the best. He doesn't need me all up in his business and cramping his style.

New phone

Picked up a new phone for the first time in six years yesterday. My old Motorola had served me well and had survived some health scares, but I was tired of needing to manage the data on the phone and since %G does kind of exist in some places, or so we're told, I figured it was time to join the new era. The people at the store were kind enough to give me one of last year's Samsungs for free for my coming in to the store and letting them incrementally upsell me on a data plan, thereby clearing their shelves of inventory. Works for me.

There will be a lot of work in updating logins and whatnot for this phone, no doubt. As each generation of functionality migrates to the cloud there is more and more. Such is the cost of admission to modernity.

Yesterday evening I visited with a greatly beloved client couple. The husband said that he had needed to change carriers a few years back because the old one no longer supported flip phones. He barely checks email. If I need to find him during a given work day, I need to call him on the land line at his work or go by his shop, where I know he will be under the hood or chassis of some old and rarish car. There's something to this way of life, though there are downsides as well which it wouldn't be appropriate to discuss here on the blog.

Small miracle

In our office building there's a black guy who's part of the team that cleans the building at the end of the day. Let's call him Jim, I'm pretty sure he said he commutes to Chapel Hill from Garner. Cultural stereotypes make me to say he's an older guy, because he is older than the mental age at which I like to picture myself, which is eternally somewhere in the 20s, adjusted for inflation, so it's drifting me up towards Jack Benny's constant internal age of 39. But he is in fact probably a good deal younger than me.

So Joe told me a story not long ago about how he was coming from work one day along 40 or maybe 54 and he came across a wreck and saw a car that he recognized as his daughter's, banged up pretty badly. He pulled off and discovered that his younger daughter -- who's maybe 16 -- was in the back seat and that she couldn't feel her legs. He said that all he could think of was circulation so he got in the car and started rubbing her right leg vigorously. After a while she regained motion in that leg so he started working on the other one. Same thing. After a little while, she could move that too.

An ambulance came and took them to the hospital. She went into surgery, after which a doctor came to talk to him. She had broken her back. The doctor asked what had inspired him to rub her legs like that, and he said that all he could think of was circulation. The doctor told him that had he not done that, she would have lost use of her legs for life, but that he had saved her. Amazing.

He told me this story shortly before we headed north for George Jr's service. George was a quad-, not a paraplegic. I don't think there would have been an analogous intervention for him. But love and plain old parental instinct can do a lot under the right cirumstances. 

Primed and ready

A week from today Graham heads back to college and Mary and I board a plane for France first for Sophia Konanc's wedding, then for an additional week and a half of vacation down the coast of France and into Spain, flying out of Madrid. I am about ready.

My book of business is more or less at full maturity. Stuff comes at me from right and left, sometimes way out of left field, on many if not all days. I am beginning to see the virtue of doing things like bunching scheduled client reviews into certain portions of the year and holding other times free for professional development. Otherwise it feels like I never may quite get my head far enough above water to think deeply.

Ideally this vacation will help. In many ways it is reminiscent of our honeymoon back in '97, which took us from San Marino to Rome in a couple of weeks meandering around Umbria and Tuscany before hitting the Amalfi Coast and ending up outside of Rome at Eric and Anna's place. The main difference is that this time the internet is more mature (so we can plan a little more, if not too much) and so are we (I think even Mary won't take offense if I say I anticipate less sex on this trip). We'll also probably live a little better because we have more money. Other than that, frankly, it probably won't be that different, because we aren't that different. The biggest difference I guess is that the iPhone lets Mary take more photos so her photography is less limited by the cost of developing film, all of which makes her marginally less intentional about her picture-snipping. I have learned to walk in laps while she shoots, burning more calories.

Small town groove, Copenhagen style

The team at my co-working complex has been getting their bagel-ordering algorithm nailed down, which means there are fewer and fewer excess bagels for me to take home each Monday. Yesterday there wasn't even one for me to turn into my lunch, with a little PB&J on it. Which has a bit of an end of an era feel to it but is honestly generally to the good. 

So yesterday I found myself at work trying to figure out what I was gonna eat. I am by and large disinclined to get in my car to go to lunch or, indeed, do anything, since doing so involves taking an elevator down to the ground floor, walking across to the parking deck, taking another elevator up to where my car is, leaving the parking deck... and at that point in time I still haven't gone anywhere. 

So I decided I really needed to try out walking to lunch. There aren't a ton of walkable options, but there is a Subway and also Brenz Pizza over in the complex where the Schwab office is. East 54 is what they call it. So I pre-ordered a pizza and walked over, with an Economist in my pocket to be sure because I planned to sit and eat.

Once inside I saw a guy I knew from the noon AA meeting out in the park. Good guy. He had struck me as a pretty serious Big Book thumper, which is to say a serious 12-step traditionalist, which is not entirely my style but one that I recognize works for a lot of people. He recognized me too so I sat and had lunch and an excellent talk.

While we were sitting there he started talking to this woman on their team who it turns out is part of the chain's founding family. I had not realized that Brenz was originally from Durham and is in fact a very small chain, there's only 6 of them, spread across just a few states. Since I too am from Durham this enhances the appeal of the place.

Anyway, in short I am validating the "Copenhagenize" design-principle of the new Glen Lennox by walking to lunch. That said, as I walked past some of the empty units that are likely slated for destruction in pretty short order it's hard not to get a little melancholy about the loss of affordable housing stock that has meant so much to different groups of Chapel Hillians over the years. 

Getting rolling

In the flow of the morning today, already read fascinating articles in the Journal about how remittances from emigrants are propping up authoritarian regimes in places like Venezuela (where they may comprise a third of GDP) and Nicaragua. A profound problem, perhaps a cousin of the Dutch Disease, in which the strength of a nation's currency -- usually driven by the discovery of some natural resource. Then I read an article about Americans' mania for self-storage spaces (perhaps a 10th of Americans lease one) and what a tremendous business it has been to be in in the last decade and change. What a tremendous waste of space brought on by our excess identification with objects.

In a moment of weakness I popped over to Facebook to see if Leslie's husband Walter had finished the Pan-Mass Challenge, a two-day ~180 mile ride he's been doing every year since Leslie had breast cancer 18 years ago. You can donate here. While Leslie hasn't updated status on Facebook about the ride yet, of course he's done with it. In fact, come to think of it, I believe that this year he and his friends tacked on an extra 90 mile day at the beginning because that's how they roll.

Of course, while peaking at Facebook I immediately got distracted. As is not infrequently the case, the source of the distraction was Michael Galinsky, whose productivity across multiple media (photography, writing, music, film) rarely ceases to astound. Nor does his propensity to share it. There are those who would critique people so productive as oversharers and undereditors, but I think it's America and his heart is in the right place so why not.

At the same time, given that I devote so much of my life to triaging the content I ingest due to a surfeit of candidates for my attention, I have to manage my exposure to any given other content creator. As my friend Blue once said, if you're reading, you ain't writing. Often, perhaps that's for the best. 

A hot one

Today appears to be shaping up as a hot one so I'll need to hustle to get out on my bike before it becomes too oppressive, but nonetheless I must pause to offer succor to the gods of blogdom, lest the rhythm of the day once more bounce me off in different directions. As per usual, I'm happy to be home and to have a Saturday which can unfold in its proper way: meeting, exercise, lunch, nap, coffee... Today is broken up only by a wedding of two clients today at five, an outdoor wedding... I will not elaborate on my feelings about the outdoor element of this wedding.

It was a bustly week in its own way. A day that looked full emptied as friends/clients had to move meetings because of macro and micro issues, then another client muscled in to discuss marital money challenges. I knew his spouse's perspective, now I got his better.

But mostly I was glad to be home. I'm excited to go away with Mary to Europe in a couple of weeks on our first such trip since our honeymoon, but first I'll embrace being here for the last two weeks of summer with Graham.

Speaking of, Graham and friends have been having regular board game parties together. Last night six or seven of them got together and did it at our house. I'm talking multiple nights a week. This summer has really been one of remedial socializing for him, cramming in much of the relationship-forming that didn't take place because of COVID, autism, and the intensity of achievement culture at East. All good.

Return to Larchmont

We were back in Larchmont over the weekend for George Jr's celebration of life. Actually, we stayed in Croton-on-Hudson (where Mary and I had had a mini-honeymoon starting the night of our wedding) at an AirBnb. That was its own clusterfuck which perhaps I'll narrate in the future. For now, lets not bicker and argue about ew killed ew and focus on the positive.

After some back and forth over venues it was decided to do George's celebration in the event hall of St John's, where Mary Lee went to church and took the kids (and me once or twice) the Christmas services through the years. A short walk from the old family home. George and Mary Lee's ashes are in a wall there. I went to many noon AA meetings there and was delighted to do so. In short, it is the family church and it was absolutely the right place to be.

Actually, one last anecdote. At Mary Lee's service one of the clergy (they're all women at present) told a story of being on a church camping trip somewhere back in the 70s when she and George Jr had snuck a little light, age-appropriate hanky panky in a sleeping bag or something. A total highlight of the service. She is now a lesbian.

But back to this past Sunday. It was just right. Everybody was there, though George's longest-serving attendant Sam was late because of traffic so we had to start late. Rob and Beth were pitch-perfect. Kevin's friend Daniel did a magical little acoustic set interspersed throughout, accompanied a little by Paolucci and Winston. At the end we all went over to 2 Circle and admired the old setting and the sound as the sun went down.