With uncharacteristic luck, we chose what was indisputably the most gorgeous day of the entire winter for our babysitting dry run. Shortly after the boys finished their breakfast on Saturday Rada and Bojan arrived to take charge, leaving us free to zip off for a day of skiing. Not an alpine start, but early enough to ensure that we’d get enough skiing in to feel as though we’d been beaten with tire irons by the end of the day.
The valley’s haze dropped below as the žičnica lifted us up to what turned out to be just barely above snowline. Thanks for nothing, Al Gore.
Up top we found perfect weather (if not much natural snow), just cool enough to keep the snow in nice corn form, warm enough to render hats unnecessary, except for the brightly-colored monsterhair viking-horn ones required by local law to be worn to indicate an extra Y chromosome and/or sociopath. Even gloves were borderline overkill.
Hey, Magda, the ’80s called. They want their ski-pants back.
As noted below, it was our first time skiing together since before Adam was born, and all this together time was something of a shock to our systems. Being away from the boys was bizarre, and slightly guilt-inducing.
This is me, blinking back tears like a little schoolgirl and wondering if the telemark turn is worth the burn:
(Answer: no. But hatless skiing leaves you less maneuver room for whining about your burning thighs.)
Given our late start, we should have been among the last of the throng to leave the mountain, but there was the siren song of Panang curry to be heeded. A stop at Ljubljana’s one Thai-esque restaurant restored our depleted energy. Question: why in hell had I never had a mojito before? This is a serious oversight.
We returned to find the boys sleeping happily and our babysitters pleased to report no incidents, or even signs of our having been missed. We’ll leave for London on Friday feeling confident our children are in good hands, which may be more than we can say for ourselves.
And what an appealing title it is.
Since making an impulse buy in the Ljubljana Apple shop back in July, I have been using a silicone iSkin keyboard pad. Despite my initial abhorrence of it (to torture an analogy, it at first felt like typing in the shower while wearing a raincoat), I have grown extremely accustomed to its rubbery-spongy interface and now as I type this while the freshly-laundered iSkin dries in the January sun I am alarmed at the brittle clackitiness of my naked keyboard. Try to keep this askewness of mine in mind as you read this disjointed entry.
So more than a month has passed without my updating this site — thankfully, Magda has kept up the birthday observances recently. Between Flickr, Twitter, The Book Of The Face, and long, whinging emails, I find that actually posting on a blog feels like borderline overkill. However, contractual obligations require me to turn the pockets of my mind inside out to clear out, in more than 140 characters, the lint that has been collecting in them since we left for Poland. I will use paragraphs, but only just.
As hoped for, our stay in Poland saw some snow, which thrilled Adam no end. His first snowman:
Because I am insane, we have purchased yet another camera bag. I have also been making a pair of special snoots. No step in the manufacturing process is trivial, yet I find it oddly soothing to painstakingly glue little bits of drinking straw together into honeycomb patterns. What we have not been doing is taking any photographs, but what with all the snoot-making and bag-buying, who has the time?
In the meantime, Magda found and scanned some precious old photos while we were at her parents’. Let me recommend:
Like most Americans, I do not read anymore. Actually finishing a book is something I really miss when I take the time to think about it, but I’ve accepted it as a fact of fatherhood. And now that Alek can climb up onto to the sofa and thus access the only place in the house that used to be safe for the Atlantic Monthly and a beer glass, well, it looks like not even magazines are going to be manageable any longer. So it was with a special feeling of The Rare Treat that I spent the last week of 2007 plowing through 500 pages of my Christmas book: Norman Davies’s Europe: A History.
Unfortunately, my ability to read (which was a direct result of having a complete set of grandparents in the house) ended abruptly with our landing at Brnik airport three weeks ago. So now I’m stuck in the Counter-Reformation. From the perspective of the sixteenth century, though, I can wholeheartedly recommend this book if you’ve got any sort of affinity for non-fiction. It is beautifully, lucidly written and almost overwhelmingly augmented by maps, graphs, charts, and appendices of all sorts, and the text is sprinkled with little asides about the development of glass-making on Murano, psychoanalysis of Vlad the Impaler, the Vatican’s list of banned books from Homer to Lady Chatterley’s Lover and so on. Thoroughly engaging. I am dying to finish it and see how it ends. Check back with me next year.
In addition to lots of reading, we had several nice walks in the city (some featuring kebabs).
And we hit some bars.
We even did some PARTAY-ing.
Both boys are TERROR-FIED of fireworks, it turns out.
WARNING: DUMB APPLE STUFF IN THIS PARAGRAPH
Today I received notice that a new battery for my computer has arrived in Ljubljana. This is a mere 54 days after asking my local dealer to file a request for replacement under warranty — that’s only nine days beyond what the law mandates! The battery was five months old at the time of the request and had fallen to less than a third of its original power and was dropping fast, so fast that the computer had pretty well become a desktop machine. This would be vexing enough, but the dead battery had been bought to replace the original battery, which had itself turned abruptly into a brick. Apple is well (if quietly) aware of this problem. Extremely pissed off at the foot-dragging, I recently had a Canadian friend import a third-party battery for me, so I am now averaging a new battery every seven months with this machine. Good luck with that non-user-replaceable only pain-in-the-assedly [edited to reflect Erik’s comment] user-replaceable battery scheme in the new ultra-portable, Apple!
Otherwise, no complaints.
We have been drinking of the wine lately. Fortunately, Christmas frequently sees much exchanging of bottles, and some friends of ours gave us some of their own white, a mixture (if I recall correctly, which I may well not, I mean, it’s wine) of Rebula, Sivi Pinot, and Chardonnay grapes:
Me: We should tell Silvana how good that wine of theirs is. It’s really excellent.
Magda: We can’t do that. If we say it’s good, she’ll feel obligated to give us more.
Me: Yeah, it’s really a no-win situation…
Fortunately, the deli around the corner from us, our closest equivalent to a Kwik-E-Mart, has just installed taps in the wall, marked BELO and ČRNO. €2.25 a liter. Bring your own jug.
In just over a week, we are off to Swinging London to attend a job fair. Our hopes about how fruitful this trip may turn out to be have fluctuated somewhat. Recently I have been feeling unemployable, but yesterday evening the weeks of constant drizzle, rain, and overcast finally broke, days after we had lost count of how long this wretched weather had gone on, and at least a week after it had gotten to our moods. The return of the sun makes me feel either more optimistic or less bad about the prospect of not finding work and thus remaining here on “the sunny side of the Alps” now that it actually IS AS BILLED. At any rate, there is a good chance that we’ll get to eat some Indian food while we’re there. So we’ve got that going for us. Who needs jobs when you’ve got chicken tikka?
We’ll be leaving Adam and Alek with Adam’s highly capable babysitter and her husband, who behave nearly like surrogate grandparents. We are not terribly concerned about how this will go off, although we will be gone for four nights and arriving home very late on a fifth. Still, we’d like to be sure that things will be as smooth as possible, so we’re planning a day and evening of ultra-babysitting practice this Saturday, when we will go skiing for the first time in two years (the first time together in nearly four?!) and, if necessary, go out to dinner and to a movie. With any luck, the last month of drizzle has been dumping meters of snow in the mountains and this beautiful clear weather will last through the weekend. So we’ll have nice, deep mounds to face-plant into and plenty of natural light by which to regard our shriveled, wizened legs.
Omitted: 2007 — The Year In Review.
…of Aleksander.
In this world.
Soon after midnight, to be precise at 0.18, Aleksander will turn one.
One year of joy.
One year of love.
Another year that proved that love, even when supposed to be divided, miraculously multiplies.
Happy birthday, Alek!
New arrival.