isoglossia

Our typical Friday evening routine involves no cooking either before or after Adam’s bathtime. Around 8.00 I walk over to Pizzeria Ž and bring back a large pie. While I’m waiting for the pizza to be ready, I can catch up on my reading of Slovenske Novice, the country’s premier source of news about shark attacks, additions to the Guinness Book of World Records, theories about why Dr. Tom Cruise & Nicole Kidman were genetically doomed due to height differences, and good old fashioned Page 3-style T&A. Last night as they were whipping up my štiri siri (emmental, gorgonzola, parmesan, and mozzarella), I read this interesting bit of international news. For non-local readers, I humbly offer a rough translation:

Santaclausery
In the Danish capital today the World Congress of Santas concluded. On Bellevue Beach, located near Copenhagen, more than 100 Santas and their helpers from over ten nations gathered to test themselves in clambering down chimneys and climbing slippery, snowy slopes. Interestingly and entertainingly, one of the warmhearted fat men, from Washington, USA, is legally named Santa Claus, which is English for Božiček.

Stop the presses. You can see why Slovenske Novice is the biggest-selling “news”paper in Slovenia. The caption below the photo reads, for those easily confused by flags, “This Santa swam to Denmark from neighboring Sweden.”

Corrections to my seat-of-the-pants translation from local readers are more than welcome.

Two years ago tonight Magda and I went on our first date. According to her. According to my records, our first date was held two days prior, when we went to the Nova Gorica municipal pool for night swimming. She does not count this as a date, though, as in her mind it was just two people going swimming together. To me it was a date because my hands were all sweaty when I asked her, and according to my sister’s calculus that means it was definitely a date. The following night she came to my house for dinner, and by the third night there was no denying that what we were doing was dating. Anyway, here’s a lame-ass-but-precious-to-me picture of us about to go out on what was indisputably our first and/or third date.

In basic training we had the stupidest drill sergeant possible. I think it was done on purpose because fourth platoon was derided by the rest of the company as “the aighead platoon.” All of us were bound for language training and/or the Army Intelligence Center, which of course to a combat engineer or truck driver immediately equates with “buncha pussies.” So Staff Sergeant Campbell was visited upon us, dumb as a hake.

All drill sergeants must pass rigorous courses in Drill Sergeant School in areas like Browbeating & Belittling, so all of them had a series of ready-made epithets to hurl at slow, lazy, or eggheaded trainees. This idea should be familiar from films like “Full Metal Jacket” and so on, but I never heard the word maggot thrown around. Instead, the abuse followed this very simple formula:

“Whudda yew lookin’ at, + [epithet] where [epithet] = [accoladic noun + ironic delivery] + ?”

This typically fell within very narrow parameters and yielded results such as “Whudda yew lookin’ at, HE-RO?” although “Whudda yew lookin’ at, KILLERRRR?” was also popular, and of course if your collar was up you could count on “Whudda yew lookin’ at, ELVIS?” The dripping ladleful of irony was lost on no one, egghead or not. Except maybe Sergeant Campbell, because he did not follow the formula they taught in Browbeating & Belittling. His formula differed radically in the second element and looked like this:

“Whudda yew lookin’ at, + [epithet] where [epithet] = [nonsensical proper/compound noun generated at random + sincerity] + ?”

Sadly, the list of epithets, which we as diligent Intelligence eggheads collected avidly, has been lost in the mists of time. The only one that I can recall for sure, with absolute clarity, was Mr. Peabody. I thought for a while that Jar-Jar Binks was also on the list, but that turned out be apocryphal and, what’s more, chronologically impossible. We have no idea how Sergeant Campbell’s random-name-generator worked.

But! Through the magic of Javascript, we can re-create the experience of a browbeating from Sergeant Campbell. Just click on the first half of the belittling formula to generate a random Campbellian epithet. (Note to parents: this device also works well if the first element is changed from Whudda yew lookin’ at to How ’bout we change that diaper.)

Family visitors have given us an excuse to make some day-trips in beautiful summer weather, which provided some firsts for Adam. On Saturday we all drove up the Soča valley and across the pass at Soriška Planina and down to Lake Bohinj, which is one of my favorite spots in Slovenia. There we left Iwona and Lech by the lake and took all the kids, yes, even Adam, up the cable car to the shoulder of Mount Vogel.

   
The cable-car ride gives some excellent views down over the lake and across it to Slovenia’s highest peaks. Here’s Triglav, the highest at 2,864 meters.
   

And that’s the lake, which is great for swimming.

The last time we’d been up there had been on a very foggy ski trip. Magda spent the whole of that day yelling “I can’t see jack!”, so the views were news to her. The good people of Vogel have recently installed a panoramic sign that not only tells you what you are seeing, it even eliminates the need to see it.

Adam seemed to enjoy achieving his personal lifetime highest altitude (1535 meters).

On Sunday we drove in the opposite direction, to the tiny sliver of Slovenian coast, and spent the day sunning and swimming at Portorož.

Adam seemed to really like the sea, and got the splashing thing with no problem. Even splashing salt water into his own face just made him howl with joy.

All in all, a good weekend.

Earlier this week BoingBoing had an article about sleep paralysis, a condition I have occasionally but mildly experienced. It was more weird than terrifying, so on reading the article I was thankful that my condition, if I can call it that, was (is?) mild. Still, although it’s been quite some time since I halfway woke up unable to move with a succubus on my chest, all is not peaches in the sleep department here.

First the good news: the new mattress on the new bed in the new apartment is vastly superior to the old mattress on the old bed in the old apartment. I hated that brushed-velour bastard the first night I slept on it, but it was not practical to replace it, the bed being some weird non-modular sort, so I did what I could to improve its sleepability and then just got used to its deep sleep-suckitude over the course of nearly two years. So sleeping on a high-quality mattress is a shock to the system, sort of like a rib-eye after weeks of ramen noodles. At first it disrupted my sleep:

My back: What the… What the hell is this? Why am I comfortable and uncontorted? How am I supposed to meet tomorrow all question-mark-shaped under these conditions?

But now I’ve gotten used to it, and I have to say that a quality mattress is a great thing. Adding to the niceness of the new sleeping arrangement is the airflow in the new bedroom. We have two skylights let into the sloping ceiling, and they can be opened to create a cross-breeze with the windows on the terrace side and allow cool air to flow across our sweaty bodies. These windows also give a sliver of view of the isogloss and Italy and Mount Sabotin with its “Naš Tito” sign.

However. Certain things have been interfering with my sleep lately, in spite of the wonderful new mattress. The first one I noticed was that someone in the bed, I am not naming any names, likes to poke me sharply in the wee hours. I mean, poke me in the ribs during the wee hours. This causes me to awaken, and I hear a voice whisper, “could you please sleep on your side?” Of course I grudgingly comply, but I cannot fathom why anyone would consider this sporting.

Next, I noticed recently that something is biting me during the night. I told Magda this yesterday morning and she denied that it was her. I had more or less ruled her out anyway based on the bite marks: two tiny raised pricks a millimeter apart. She could do that, but why would she? The bites include a blotchy red mark surrounding the double puncture about the size of a 2-Euro piece. I have them on my wrist, my stomach, and a place I won’t mention. They itch like hell and I keep staring at them, at least at the two I can easily access, expecting thousands of tiny funnel-web spider babies to erupt from my putrefying flesh at any moment. Magda says they’re mosquito bites and I’m insane.

Finally, last night I sprang awake with a horrible pain that made me gasp. It was immediately obvious that it was just a cramp in my right calf, but it was as ambitious and complete a cramp as I’ve ever gotten, like an instantaneous turbo-cramp. The Jim Carrey of cramps. It felt like the tendons had parted and the entire muscle was balled up like a granite grapefruit in the middle of my leg. I had to leap out of bed and put weight on the leg to stop the shooting pain. The most interesting striking not-completely-mindbendingly-dull thing about this was that I did not crack my skull wide open on the ceiling, as predicted.