austin_dern

There was a funny thing slipped under the door when we got home Tuesday night: a notice that there was going to be a test of the fire alarm system at 11 the next morning. There wasn't to be an actual fire, if they could help it, but anyone in the hotel at that hour would be expected to clear out and follow reasonable fire alarm routines.

It had been blisteringly hot in Lansing while we were away. It wasn't too hot the night we got back, by that standard --- it felt closer to a Singapore night than anything else --- but we were exhausted-relieved to get back home, into the air conditioning, and collapse.

Trivia: The first auction of tea in London following the end of the East India Company's monopoly, on 8 October 1835, was hurriedly organized and due to excessively high turnout had to be moved from Caraway's coffee house to a dancing academy nearby in Change Alley. The first lot for sale was withdrawn, amidst doubts that it was genuine tea passed by government inspection. Source: Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, Roy Moxham. (Apparently there were cries of ``Unfit for sale except as poison'', because early 19th century Britons had not yet discovered catchy cries.)

Currently Reading: Chrysalis 1, Editor Roy Torgeson.

PS: The Least Pleasant Thing About WiiFit, as I work back into a habit of writing original essays again. There is the chance for the interested reader to show her work!

[ Sorry, late, was in Detroit attending a punk concert. Bet you didn't see that excuse coming. ]

bunny_hugger worried that our honeymoon would be too heavily weighted to the things she wanted to do: going to the Efteling amusement park, going to Blackpool, dropping off a card to Trevor Horn. She wanted to be sure I got the chance to do things I really wanted to do too. I wanted most to spend wonderful, luxurious days with her, so that was easy enough. And I'd wanted to go to Blackpool, certainly. Still, there was something I'd had thoughts of it being really wonderful to go see, and it gets right at the mathematics- and physics- and astronomy-loving nature of me, and that would be, going to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Yes; of the things to specifically do, that was the thing for me.

For all that there was some good news. They'd taken the time available to finish running our clothes through the washer, and even bundled socks together and put them into some rather sturdy bags. The rest of our honeymoon might be short, but it would be in fresh, clean clothes.

Trivia: When sweets rationing ended in Britain in 1953 long queues for rock candy formed outside Blackpool Rock shops as early as 5:30 am among panic buyers, even as the thriving black market carried candy to London. Source: Sweets: A History Of Temptation, Tim Richardson.

Currently Reading: Undersea City, Frederick Pohl, Steve Miller.

We got up just a little later Saturday, but in time to get to the first half of breakfast. We were again alone, although some other folks joined us by the end of the breakfast period. We got beans on toast this time, with toast on the side, and a basket of toast, and the owner's son was distressed to see that bunny_hugger hadn't got any cereal, and wondered if some more toast might make up the gap. Again, the beans on toast were a pretty good combination, and I can see the logic of it as a meal.

He drove us back to the hotel, where we gave in and bought a week's worth of Internet (the alternative was 30 minutes each day for free, which wouldn't do for us), and we got ready for bed. This was another hotel with a combined all-purpose gelatinous fluid for body cleansing, too, although it had two dispensers in the bathroom, one an all-purpose fluid for washing hands and one an all-purpose fluid for bathing, shampoo, and conditioner. The dispenser for soap alone kept jamming on me, so I would do most of my hand-washing with unified soap-shampoo-conditioner, but I did make it out alive.

Trivia: In 2004 Athens became the first Olympics host city with a unified management responsible for both the Olympics and the Paralympic Games. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.

Currently Reading: Redcoats' Revenge: An Alternate History Of The War Of 1812, David Fitz-Enz. I picked it up from the library because a glance through suggested it was a nonfact textbook, kin to For Want Of A Nail. Actually, it's just a not-very-good historical novel with a lot of expository lumps and a belief that ``The World Turned Upside-Down'' was played at the end of the Revolutionary War. The decent premise is, what if Wellington were sent to take over the British forces in Canada around 1814? He battles Jackson in a new Battle of Saratoga and, well, Canada doesn't actually get some new states because Britain carves a new Province out of their conquests. Also there's an irritating bit where (after the Battle of Plattsburgh) a character talks of how Americans won't forget the 11th of September. Bah and pfaugh.

There was no music to wake us the next morning, at 8:30. It was just shipboard announcements that the docking would be in an hour and a half. We showered in the adorably tiny bathroom --- using the weird combination soap/lotion/shampoo that was turning up in more and more of our hotels --- and snacked on remainders of what we'd gotten in Amsterdam the day before, and made sure we had everything packed, and checked that we had filled in our Immigration forms as best as we could figure out. (We weren't terribly sure about the name of our vessel, and actually paying attention to any form is a good way to become unsure about the answers to even the simplest questions on it.) We had over an hour to get ready for our 9 am landing because, as we realized, the ship ran on Central European Time while our 9 am landing was based on British Time, one hour later, or earlier, or, you know what I mean. The relationship Central Time has to Eastern Time.

We got back after the owner's son had gone to bed, so we didn't know the bed-and-breakfast's Wifi password. Since we'd just come off a hotel with hilariously obvious password we tried a few hilariously obvious ones, but gave up. When we were finally told what it was, bunny_hugger realized she was maybe five minutes away from cracking it. We went to sleep, with the electric fireplace turned on to produce light and no heat, where it served as an awfully good nightlight and way to find the deranged bathroom in the darkest hours.

Trivia: Preliminary volleyball matches for the 1996 Atlanta Games were moved out of Cobb County (to the north of Atlanta) after the county government passed a resolution declaring homosexuality incompatible with community values. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.

Currently Reading: A Few Quick Ones, P G Wodehouse.

Our first morning in Amsterdam brought the sad news that whatever problem it was kept e-mail from being received and ssh from working wasn't a transient glitch but something that persisted through the day. (Well, Outlook was allowed through.) After all the running around and activity of the past week, we did something novel for us: slept in past breakfast. We wouldn't make many more breakfasts this trip, it turned out.

Sadly, the e-mail blackout continued, although I could check my gmail account by going through the web site.

Trivia: At the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games a new Olympic Flag, sewn by Korean women and from Korean raw silk, made its debut. The previous flag, the Antwerp flag, had been first flown in 1914 and at the Games since 1920. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.

Currently Reading: Imprisoned In A Tesseract: The Life And Work Of James Blish, David Ketterer. I did not know that shortly before his death, Blish's wife had coaxed him (a rock-and-roll unenthusiast) into some appreciation for Yes. (This would be before Trevor Horn's contributions to the group, of course.) Also I admire Ketterer's endearingly mistaken efforts to insist there's something interesting about The Warriors Of Day or The Night Shapes, or that there's any way to understand what the heck The Duplicated Man is all about.

I thought I heard something in the small hours of Sunday morning. I thought I heard rain. I closed my eyes harder, hoping I was wrong. Then I hoped that it would rain itself out by about 10 am, when we might get going to the park. I hoped.

After some more walking around town we returned to the hotel, confident that while we had lost hours in Efteling due to not knowing how early it might close on Saturday, and more time due to showers Sunday, we had at least got to all the roller coasters and the biggest attractions, and we could be satisfied with that. We were wrong.

Trivia: Four days before the opening of the 1976 Montreal Olympics, work crews dismantled and destroyed an outdoor art and photographic exhibit along the marathon route which included art critical of the city's demolition of single-family housing (and some 19th-century mansions) in favor of high-rise apartments and commercial offices. A provincial court compensated the artists five years later. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.

Currently Reading: Creatures Of Accident: The Rise Of The Animal Kingdom, Wallace Arthur.

At breakfast on Friday we had a visitor: a local cat wandered in and hopped up on the table to get at what of the soft-boiled eggs it could, and then, to what over anything else it could. The cat wasn't much for being told it'd had enough, or that we didn't want it eating the cheese right off our plates, although I did try to accommodate it by putting my (mostly finished) softboiled egg on the ground where it could eat in peace. One of the waiters came over and took it away, although the cat found its way back and we figured that was about time to get to our separate tasks.

We'd be leaving our first overseas home in the morning.

Trivia: At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics at least 640 female athletes were subjected to gender tests. None were disqualified. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.

Currently Reading: Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio, Jeffrey Kluger.

Wednesday, the 4th, we got up and saw there was apparently some kind of enormous news about Comic Sans, based on my Twitter friends. We also got to better appreciate how these cute little plastic ducks seem to be some kind of mascot for the hotel we were in; they even provided one with the soap and shampoo and whatnot, you know, for travellers who failed to bring their rubber ducks with them. We got breakfast in a quite nice buffet at the hotel restaurant and started to piece together what seems to be the Dutch kind of breakfast, if hotels are really representative of that. The most important thing would be the slices of cheese (and lunch meats, on which we passed), which were about two orders of magnitude better than the ones we'd get in a United States hotel. We ate on the patio, where it was a little cool, but with a gorgeous view of the lake outside, and the local ducks, some of which were noticeably different from United States-model ducks, and some of which weren't.

So we could finish eating in the wonderful convergence of events and chance decisions and bits of luck that brought us to be just there, having a wonderful meal, while such a weird and wonderful bit of music should come on. For all the time we had to spend apart, our first full day in Utrecht went very well.

Trivia: The 1960 Rome games had the first Olympic Marathon run at night. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.

Currently Reading: Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio, Jeffrey Kluger.

So, the honeymoon: things started Monday (the 2nd) with dropping off one of our out-of-town friends where he could get the bus to the airplane. I'd seen a lot of this spot in the week leading up to the wedding; this would be the last time until the week after the wedding. On returning we stopped off at a convenience store because I needed travel-sized toothpaste and mouthwash, and bunny_hugger needed airsickness pills, and various other miscellaneous things. Then back home, to do a little more packing, where bunny_hugger warned me I needed to pack more warmly. In the Michigan area temperatures have been routinely reaching the upper 160's, Fahrenheit; in that circumstance it's hard to see the need to bring a parka along. I would learn better.

So, a little tired after all that we wandered into a strange land where everything was written in a funny language, and Tuesday.

Trivia: The French chemist Comte de Chardonnet introduced a nitrocellulose cloth in 1884. Production of so-called Chardonnet silk soon reached 10,000 tons per year, despite being nitrocellulose. Source: Molecules At An Exhibition: The Science Of Everyday Life, John Emsley. (Emsley claims the nitrocellulose silk, like nitrocellulose billiard balls, sometimes exploded spontaneously or spontaneously enough; while I find this plausible, I realize in my increasing age that I've never seen a first-hand account of exploding nitrocellulose silk or billiard balls or, presumably, piano keys.)

Currently Reading: Flat Earth: The History Of An Infamous Idea, Christine Garwood.