isoglossia

We arrived home on Sunday afternoon following 19 hours of vexing, sleepless travel. Not entirely sleepless: Adam logged a fair number of hours in his bulkhead baby basket (photo below, if for no other reason than to appease my sister), and I did doze off just minutes into “Madagascar” (much to Magda’s disgust — she laughed like a drain all the way through it). I didn’t sleep for long, as all of sudden we’d caught up with morning and they were flinging coffee at us. Then I did sleep for half of the hop from Paris to Ljubljana. The seat on that little plane felt as though it was constructed entirely of jousting equipment, however, so the sleep was the unwelcome kind in which you dream you’re being tortured by being made to sleep in a seat made out of jousting equipment. It was counterproductive sleeping and the travel overall was much more vexing than when we flew in the other direction three weeks ago. Adam was in a spaz-oleum, uncontrollable-Po mood during every moment that he was not asleep, and our layover at Charles de Gaulle was the second most annoying layover I’ve ever experienced, lightened only by a bomb scare near our departure gate. It’s clear to me that Mother Theresa never flew through CDG, because if she had she never would’ve been able to continue helping all of those fucking people. We arrived home grateful and drained and with a baby whose sleep patterns are unpredictable even when his biological clock is not jet-lagged six hours off.

It’s hard to write a “we’re back” post without descending into clichés, so I’ll just go ahead and let them flow. First of all, there’s the obligatory bitch-about-air-travel part, which I’ve pretty well covered, so now I’ll move on to the predictable photo-with-piece-of-wing:


A beautiful clear evening to take off over Boston Harbor. The view didn’t suck. That dachshund-shaped thing is Lovell Island, with Georges Island and Fort Warren in the lower right. A few minutes later we could see all of the islands of Casco Bay and the city of Portland, and then, as the Air France people waved food at us, a cool, gradient-rich sunset over Newfoundland:

We were happy to have the little p&s/p.o.s. Canon with us, having trusted the Pentax to the baggage-handling surrender-monkeys. In fact, on this trip we managed to fill up both cameras for a total of over a gigabyte of pictures, including a few entries for our new favorite group on Flickr, Stick Figures In Peril, which we’ll be posting soon.

The summer weather during almost our entire stay in New England was wonderful. Arriving back in Slovenia, it appears that we didn’t miss much, and it was gray and drizzly at Brnik airport when we touched down. We finally reached our apartment after enduring 19 hours, seven diaper changes, six security checkpoints, three meals, three cars, three buses, two airplanes, one bomb scare and one baby. We smelled like a large herd of goats, turned the water heater back on and waited. Next time I travel by air I promise myself and everyone else concerned that I will make sure I have enough antiperspirant for BOTH pits.

Two days later, Adam appears to be more or less approximately back on European time, sort of. Below he’s getting ready for bed in his bulkhead baby bassinet, which one of my sisters would NOT stop pestering me about, so here is what it looked like, bolted into the bulkhead in front of row 33, port side:

The typical “we’re going on vacation” post was here.

Last summer was the last summer that we figured we’d have a ‘real’ summer vacation, the low-drag traveling and randomness and romance, for quite a while. The last summer before Adam. We went to Lesbos and ate octopus and eggplants and swam and slept and enjoyed the sun. Magda’s favorite food was gooey figs eaten off people’s trees while I acted as lookout. We went across to Turkey, ate a kebab, and came back.

At this time two years ago my brother made the trip across the Atlantic to get some boar goulash. We rode the cablecar to the top of Vogel and followed the signs:

I’m all in favor of wild pigs enjoying a beer now and then, and even grabbing two at a time when the bar’s crowded, but when they tuck in to a bowl of gulaš made with their own flesh, well, that’s where I have to draw the line.

A few days later, after my brother’s enthusiasm for Laško beer had reached a fever pitch, we made a day-trip to the Laško brewery. We completely fucked it up, though, in terms of tour times and so on, and returned without so much as a T-shirt (or a beer). We did have lunch in Laško, though, and I think I entertained my brother more during that meal than at any other time in our lives by ordering an omelette filled with brains. At the time, the word možgani was not in my vocabulary. Now it is, and I will not be ordering any more brain-stuffed dishes, not even if it makes my brother shoot beer out of his nose.

Cross reference this post to Self-referential coffee pot and Is that Borkum Riff you’re smoking, Cap’n?

The “This day” in the “This day in history” category is often a loose approximation. I can only guess at the actual date that my late grandfather took this picture of my father (left) and my late uncle. Posting it today would put it exactly a month before the massive and infamous hurricane of 1938 devastated the east coast of North America.

As the people of Rhode Island dug themselves out from under the wreckage, the world’s eyes were on Hitler, Chamberlain, and a certain little adventure in Czechoslavakia.

My grandfather was a keen photographer, and I can still remember many of his pictures. One in particular stands out, though I am not sure whether it was ever really taken or only exists as an image in my mind, a product of stories: a single length of rusty pipe sticking up out of a sand dune. After the hurricane it was all that remained of the house they had rented on this beach each summer.

Although I am the sort of person who would ordinarily rather drink bleach than make a big deal about my birthday (or have a big deal made), I have to say that two years ago I wasn’t terribly bitter about turning another year older.

Since I am on vacation and away from the control panel of isoglossia.com at the moment, I can’t say how great or sucky (can’t ever rule that out) this current birthday is being. But I can safely say that my 39th birthday, which was observed in Toruń, Poland, with my brand-new, still-got-the-tag-on girlfriend, soon-to-be wife, was the best ever.

We had met only a few weeks before, and since Magda was in Slovenia for just two weeks, it was what you would call a “whirlwind courtship,” if you were totally gay. But that’s what it was, no matter what your sexual orientation. We had to work fast, but the two weeks was not enough. When I took Magda to the travel agent to pick up the non-refundable ticket that financially bound me to coming to visit her in Poland, it was a particularly romantic moment. Even then, she still didn’t believe that I was on the real. I don’t think she did until I tumbled off the baggage carousel at Warsaw airport. And I’m still not sure her parents really believed I existed until she wheeled me in the front door.

I do hate birthdays, but I had to go along with it. This right here was an early indication that I was serious about her: that I had allowed her to learn when my birthday falls. With most people I manage to hide that bit of information for a good two or three years, but here was Magda with major passport info in the first month of acquaintance. Good work.

Of course her parents made a big deal of it. How could they possibly know how much I would hate that? Or try to in vain?

The next morning she took me to the Baltic sea and the port city of Gdańsk for more herring. We took pictures of ourselves:

We stayed near the beach:

It was the best birthday ever.