News and Updates

1. Another year of Why Can’t Us? being answered by “because you lost to the other team,” in this case the NY Mets, a team that never has to win another game again as far as I am concerned. Alas, my poor Phillies – a fantastic season cut too short, and now we are left with the dire prospect of either the Mets, the Yankees, the Dodgers or the Cleveland Team becoming World Series Champions. It is a good thing I don’t follow baseball anywhere near much as I once did or this would be depressing.

2. I just want to point out the fact that for about a quarter of an hour during the season opener last week the Philadelphia Flyers power play – a facet of their game that ranked dead last in the NHL last season and likely cost them the playoff spot that they were shockingly in a position to achieve with fewer than ten games left in the season – was scoring at a 100% rate. This is a mathematical fact and I am going to treasure it even as things regress to the mean once again because why not.

3. Also, the Premier League is back in full swing and has been for a while and my Wolves are looking like prime relegation fodder this year, which is sad because I have no idea if I will be able to watch them once that happens. Everything is so balkanized now – even the NHL is spread across multiple networks, each of which requires its own subscription, so half the time I couldn’t watch the Flyers even if I wanted to and thus I feel less guilty about not doing so. I forget which comedian said it, but someday soon they will start to bundle all the subscriptions into One Big Subscription and then sell it to you as “cable television.”

4. I have mowed the lawn one last time and put the mower away for the season. It’s not supposed to get over 82F (28C) again this year, though it would not surprise me at all if it did. Folks, the climate isn’t changing – the climate has changed. We’re just trying to figure out where it’s going next, is all. If you don’t believe me, consider that Asheville NC, a city in the mountains of western North Carolina 300 miles from salt water – was just wiped out by a hurricane. On balance, mowing the lawn is not that much of an issue, really.

5. Ancestry says I’m back up to 76% Italian in my heritage, which is fascinating since my dad’s side of the family was Very Much Not Italian so I’m not entirely sure where the other 26% comes from. In the decade or so since my mother convinced me to do this my heritage has never been calculated at less than 55-60% Italian and I have to wonder just how strong those genes really are.

6. We have reached the part of the school year where my office is jam-packed with students and every single one of them is bringing a new and exciting disease with them like an offering. Some of them are pretty exotic – did you know people still get whooping cough? this is what happens when antivaxxers are allowed to walk the streets unsupervised – and others are just the standard run of the mill colds, flus, and general cruds. Pretty soon I will have collected the whole set and can trade them in for valuable prizes to be named later.

7. I have two long term project that are coming to an end soon and I’m not sure how that will feel. I suppose I will find out.

8. It is a sad thing when beloved authors reach a point where they no longer feel the need to listen to editors. I’m just about finished a 900pp book that really could have been a 300pp book without losing anything of any real significance and it’s just a good thing that this particular author is a talented enough writer that you don’t feel too bad about the extra pages, though a competent editor would have taken a hacksaw to that manuscript and made it a much better story.

9. One of the local service organizations had its annual Giant Used Book Sale this weekend and we went because we like to do that sort of thing and it’s a good organization to support. We even found a few books to take home with us, thus beginning the replenishment project after the recent deaccessioning. Wheels in wheels.

10. We have hit our first frost here in Baja Canada, a month after we should have. We were pulling jalepeños out of the garden as recently as this weekend. Strange times indeed.

A Few Thoughts on the State of the Election Campaign

1. We’re coming to the end of the election season and the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump remains a viable candidate is a damning indictment of American patriotism, morality, and intelligence. He’s not even bothering to hide the fact that he has gone Full On Fascist these days. Not that he could stop himself if he tried – the man is a walking 25th Amendment dementia case who hasn’t been able to form a coherent sentence since 2018 and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the White House even as a tourist. But Fascists gonna Fascist, I guess, and he does seem to be drawing such volk to him like flies on dogshit. If you vote for this guy, guess what that makes you? Go on, guess! You are the company you choose. You can’t claim ignorance this time. You know what he’s planning. You know what he will do. He’s told you, loudly, at every available opportunity. Even through the haze of his senility the crystal-clear lodestar of his ideology remains. Either you stand with those who fought WWII to destroy this sort of thing or you stand with the people they fought. And yes, I mean that in every historical sense. If Trump and his supporters don’t want me to call them Fascists they should stop doing what the Fascists did.

2. I don’t know if you caught the recent statement by General Mark Milley (US Army, Ret.), the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – i.e. the highest ranking military officer this country has – but as you would expect from a soldier he minces no words in describing Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump. “He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country…a fascist to the core.” And yet Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s cult following is stronger than ever, which tells you all you need to know about who they are.

3. On that note, just this past weekend Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump called for using the military to round up his political opponents and anyone he decides is “radical,” which effectively means anyone who dares to disagree with Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump by contradicting his policies, being the wrong sexual orientation, having non-white skin, belonging to a union, or exercising the rights of American citizens in any way that doesn’t contribute to the fawning adoration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, and if you want to know how dictatorships start this is a good place to start looking.

4. You could also look at his repeated descriptions of immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the nation or his descriptions of his political enemies as “vermin” who need to be eradicated, both of which are direct quotes from Adolf Hitler and thus we come full circle to point number 1 above.

5. FEMA announced this week that thanks to the batshit insane conspiracy theories thrown around by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his loyal minions they have had to suspend hurricane aid efforts in western North Carolina because aid workers are being threatened with violence. Sometimes you feel tempted to step back and admire the aggressively stupid asshattery of the American right as a platonic ideal of evil that really shouldn’t have been achievable in this fallen material world, and then reality sets in and you say to yourself “What the FUCK is WRONG with these people?” instead. There is either no possible answer to that question or there is an answer that will take the rest of your life to list in all of its details and either way we are so, so screwed as a country.

6. Watch what Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s campaign is doing, here in the closing stages of the election. They’re only very occasionally sending him to swing states where the vote will be close. He’s too much of a coward and a dementia patient to accept a second debate with Kamala Harris, even on Fox where she has offered to meet him. He’s not doing interviews. Honestly his campaign is not really sending him anywhere much at all – a few highly scripted rallies to rile up his cult members here and there, but his disappearance from the campaign trail at this late hour is unprecedented for a modern election. He’s not trying to win votes. He and his campaign know very well that he cannot win any sort of free and fair election. The Republican candidate for president has won the popular vote only once since 1989 – a record of futility unmatched in American history by any major party – and this year will be no different. He will lose the popular vote by somewhere between two and eight million votes just as he has done twice before – it’s been eight years, nobody’s changed their mind about this neo-Fascist toddler. Instead what you’re seeing is a concentrated effort by his minions to suppress votes and sow chaos and disorder so he can claim the election isn’t valid and seize power some other way – either through GOP control of the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court or through a repeat of the Trump Insurrection of 2021. We stand on a precipice, folks. It’s a long way down.

7. If you’re planning to vote for a third-party candidate this year because your precious “principles” won’t allow you to take the better of the two candidates on offer, just know that you are part of the problem and you will not be forgiven for your smug refusal to notice the world beyond your own fingertips. Moral purity is a luxury enjoyed by people with no responsibilities and no concern for the consequences of their actions. Politics isn’t about purity. It’s not about finding a perfect unicorn candidate. It’s about finding the candidate who will get you further along the path you want to go than the other candidate will. There is only one candidate in this election who is normal – who has pluses and minuses and will leave this nation intact when she is done with it, and there is another who represents everything the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution to prevent and the Greatest Generation went to Europe to fight. A vote for a third-party candidate is a vote for the second one, and you either know that or you don’t.

8. The fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has successfully pushed most of his many indictments and prosecutions beyond the election and hasn’t already been jailed for his crimes (some of which the United States has, in the past, executed people for) is a travesty of justice that will haunt the United States for however long it has left.

9. If you’re not making backup plans for when Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump seizes power, you’re kidding yourself. There will be blood. He’s promised that. His cult is eager for it. Fascists do not take kindly to dissent or opposition and those of us who have been banging this gong since 2015 are probably on a list somewhere already. Make your plans now.

10. By my count I have received 17 glossy campaign flyers in the mail frantically attempting to distance Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump from Project 2025, the blueprint for Fascism that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s supporters and former administration staff put together for the initial blitzkrieg against the United States should he be installed into power next year. You can understand why they are trying to distance Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump from a document that mentions him by name over 300 times and which contains policy measures he repeats at nearly every public appearance, I suppose, since Project 2025 is the pure distilled essence of authoritarian dictatorship and is desperately unpopular even among self-declared conservatives. It calls for destroying the merit-based civil service that has defined the federal government since the 19th century and replacing it with a force of toadies, lickspittles, fanatics, and slaves loyal only to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump. It calls for expanding the power of the presidency until it is unchecked and uncontrollable. It calls for the elimination of the Department of Education, NOAA (the agency that provides weather forecasting) and FEMA. It calls for a concentrated surge of bigotry and hatred against anyone who isn’t straight, white, or male. It calls for a national ban on abortion, contraception, and anything that might give women the idea that they and not some old white men in a far-off capital actually control their bodies. It will end Social Security, overtime pay, and the Affordable Care Act which tens of millions of Americans rely on for their care. It will get rid of the FDIC and remove regulations on banks so that they can go bankrupt with ease just as they did in the 1920s and take your money with them. It effectively makes the United States the personal property of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his servants, and if that doesn’t kindle you to incandescent rage you really need to re-examine your life choices.

Testing

I had to get my sleep tested this week because apparently I’ve been doing it incorrectly.

You would think that after nearly six decades of practicing I would have it pretty much down by now but you would be wrong.

If you’ve never done this, it’s one of those minor yet uncomfortable things that happen as you age your way through the process of medical care and it requires you to navigate the Byzantine complexity of the American healthcare system which is designed to protect the wealth of its corporate shareholders rather than anyone’s actual health. Getting useful medical results out of it is an unintended though occasionally helpful byproduct of its profiteering, but FREEDUM and this is why we can’t have nice things in the US.

Sometime over the summer I went in to see my regular doctor, which is a statement that puts me in a distinct minority in this country (see above, re: FREEDUM) so I’m grateful that I at least have this privilege. It has come in handy at times.

This is the third regular doctor I have had in the last few years as the ones I pick have a distinct tendency to retire no matter how old they are. I don’t think this is because of me since I don’t see them that often, but I cannot rule it out. The hospital where they work then asks me to pick a new one and I have no idea on what basis I would make that choice so I just take whoever has the next available appointment and since this usually gives me six to eight months to get used to the idea of seeing someone else it has worked pretty well so far. This particular new guy seems like he knows what he’s doing even if he’s not the most sociable person I’ve ever met. I’ve seen him twice now – once for the “Hi, I’m your new patient, please renew all my prescriptions” meeting that you have to have every time you switch doctors and once for this – and we have yet to have a conversation that isn’t directly connected to medicine or contains a sentence longer than seven words. But so far, so good.

He gave me the required referral for the doctor who would actually do anything connected to sleeping, and that sat on my desk for a couple of months while Life Happened. Eventually I made an appointment with the Sleep Doctor – either they’re not terribly busy or I got very lucky because that only required a wait measured in weeks rather than months – and I went to meet her and fill out more paperwork repeating all of the things that are already on file (medications, allergies, history) and then discuss the new things.

After the examination she said (in a much more professional and polite way, but this is effectively the gist of it) that I am old and fat and yeah these things will happen under those conditions so we’ll do the sleep test to get it confirmed in a way the insurance company that actually determines your medical care will accept and then figure out what to do from there.

This required me to respond to multiple texts from an equipment company confirming that I did actually want them to send me equipment. Of course I don’t read (let alone respond to) texts from numbers I don’t recognize so this took several tries before it worked out, but last week an envelope with equipment in it appeared on my front doorstep along with dire warnings that this test had to be started THAT NIGHT and the equipment returned within 48 hours or there would be CONSEQUENCES.

It would probably go on my Permanent Record.

None of that happened as far as I know. I don’t have access to my Permanent Record so that’s still an open question. But the rest of it? Not so much.

I put the equipment aside on the first day because I had a lot of grading to do and the math just didn’t work out – you have to commit to a certain amount of sleep time for this and that just wasn’t going to happen. But the next night seemed more doable.

For equipment that came in an envelope there certainly was a lot of it.

The main bit was an electronic recording unit about three inches square and maybe half an inch thick. It came with a two-inch wide elastic band that I was supposed to strap around my chest and then snap the recorder to it so that it sat right on my breastbone. It had a full complement of BlinkenLights and made me feel like Ultraman.

There was a cable that screwed into it that went to a sensor that clamped onto one of my fingers like it was trying to feed off of it and a tube that screwed into the unit somewhere else that I was supposed to loop over my ears and then shove up my nose except that my ears really don’t accommodate such things well so I had to just tighten it around my head and hope for the best.

It didn’t work the first night – the BlinkenLights swirled red at me the next morning – so I had to do it again the next night and that seemed to take.

I have no idea what it was actually measuring as I got basically no sleep either of those nights. I find anything on my face to be deeply uncomfortable and every time I tried to move all the various cables and cords would tangle together into a knot. So as far as I know this test will result in my immediate hospitalization and they will put me on a diet consisting of nothing but Ambien and vodka just to keep me unconscious for a while.

It's been 22 years since the last time I graduated from an educational institution. I thought I was done failing tests.

That Point in the Semester

We’ve reached that point of the semester where all you can do is try to keep up.

The first two or three weeks of the semester are hellaciously busy for advisors. Students are coming in to get their classes straightened out – adding things, dropping things, trying to decide whether to do either of those things. They need to make sure their financial aid is straightened out, which has been a nightmare the last couple of years with all the changes made to the FAFSA and the deliberate underfunding of grant aid by state governments. They need to make sure their bill is paid. They need to know how to pay these bills, a Byzantine process with more options than are probably healthy. They need to get the hang of being in college in general, which is not as straightforward as people think. College is an artificial environment and it’s hard to explain if you haven’t been through it. There are a lot of unwritten rules and cultural assumptions and part of being an advisor is helping students navigate through that. It hits hard in the first couple of weeks.

Things calm down for advisors a bit after that, but for faculty that’s when it all starts to ramp up. You’re through the introductory material by then and heading into the heart of the syllabus where things get more complicated and more challenging for both students and professors. Assignments are coming in that need to be graded and if you are basing your assignments on when they naturally fall in the sequence of the material covered (as opposed to, say, trying to spread them out across the calendar to ease your workload) you may find yourself giving exams in every single class you teach in the same week. That’s just how it works out. Have fun grading it all at once. Meanwhile the administration is peppering you with requests for progress reports, alerts, and other such bureaucracy designed to increase student retention so the advisors can reach out to the students who need help and you know that this is important but it is another task on an already large and growing pile.

Then advising gets busy again. Students have a few grades back to them and they’re panicking about some of their classes – sometimes justifiably so – and you have to figure out whether to encourage them to persevere (“This is salvageable if you can do X, Y, and Z”) or cut their losses (“We have a form for just this situation”). You also have to reassure them that this is normal, that setbacks happen, that they can certainly move forward from here, and if they do find themselves in a worst-case scenario where everything collapses around them anyway that college is not a one-and-done experience and they can always come back. There’s a reason we have forms for those situations, after all. There’s also a reason that GPAs tend to rise over time – not because anyone gets smarter, but because students figure out how the place works.

It's a back and forth pendulum of frantic activity.

And if your job entails both advising and faculty duties, well, the busy never ends. It just switches from one to the other depending on what you want to focus on today.

The students are in the same boat, by the way, which is why in my First Year Seminar classes I always schedule the mental health and wellness unit for mid-October. This is about the point in the semester when we start losing people.

Somewhere in there one must eat, sleep, and occasionally do something that isn’t related to any of this because if you don’t take breaks now and then you will eventually stop functioning at all. Fitting these things in can be a puzzle.

We press on.

News and Updates

1. We now return to our regularly scheduled blogging, already in progress.

2. I’m never sure who is going to read about someone else’s travels and mostly I write those posts so I can remember the stories later, but I am grateful to those who took the time to read and travel along with me that way.

3. So, did I miss anything? Any extended barbarism and outright war crimes in the Middle East? Further evidence that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is unfit to walk the streets unsupervised, let alone run for public office? That his supporters and minions are an existential threat to the survival of the American republic? Catastrophic evidence of global climate change that fools will explain away as coincidence even as they bury the dead amid the rubble? Anything? Hello? Is this thing on? I don’t think this thing is on.

4. We’re deep into the semester down at Home Campus and once again I have signed on for 130% of a job so I’m mostly just trying to beat back the nearest alligators and hoping the swamp drains of its own accord. Half the people in my office are new this year so I have become the Answer Guy, which is odd considering how recently I was still the Question Guy. On top of my advising job I’m teaching five classes on three different campuses. Fortunately I’ve made it past the madness of the first few weeks, so that’s a good sign.

5. We now have a soccer team at Home Campus and it’s going about as well as you’d expect for a team that didn’t exist three months ago. They’re learning – the back line isn’t bad though they’re constantly under siege and the goalie is saving them as best he can, but they need to work on their link-up play and getting to the middle third in possession. But they knew this would happen and they’re mostly using this season as a scrimmage to get ready for next year when they will have had more time to gel as a team. I’ve seen parts of a couple of games so far and they’re out there working hard, and as a Philadelphia sports fan that’s pretty much all I ask of a team.

6. About half the team is in my Western Civ class this semester. I’m not sure what a grounding in the transition from medieval to early modern Europe is doing for their game, but perhaps when we get to Machiavelli it will be more useful.

7. The jalapeños in the garden are growing well and I’ve already made two batches of candied jalapeños and one of jalapeño jelly with another batch of jelly that I should make soon. So much to do.

8. I have two long term projects that are rapidly coming to their respective conclusions and that will be a good thing when it happens.

9. Lauren’s trip with Arden went pretty well by all accounts. They spent a week in Guatemala, of all places, and there were many stories to share – some of which, as a parent, I was glad to hear after they were safely over, but that is part of the adventure I suppose. I picked them up at the airport at around 12:30am one Saturday night and got the full Volcano Hike story as well. It is good to have these adventures when you are young and strong, and I’m glad they were able and interested in having them.

10. I wrote out a To Do list a couple of weeks ago and it was depressingly long but I have been chipping away at it and it would be a lot shorter now if I hadn’t been adding more things at the bottom the whole time. But that’s the nature of things these days.

11. Did you know that the Post Office now has D&D-themed stamps? They’re actually really nice, even for those of us who have somehow not gotten into the game despite being exactly the target market for it. And yes, I know, every time I mention a) the Post Office, b) cash purchases, or c) physical media of any kind someone will pop up immediately to condescend at me about how I could possibly still be using any of those things when there are so many shiny digital versions of each of them to choose from, but I like them and will continue to do so. I have my reasons. And they’re really nice stamps.

12. On that note, I somehow managed to get handed half a dozen Bicentennial quarters in a five-day period a couple of weeks ago, which I thought was pretty cool. Add a wheat cent to that haul and it was a good time to be a coin collector.  There are times when the fact that my dad is no longer here to share the news of the day is more deflating than usual, though.

Europe 2024 - From Dublin to Chicago

We didn’t have to be at the airport until early afternoon that day, which meant that we had the entire morning to do things and also that we needed to figure out what to do with our bags if we didn’t want to cart them around Dublin with us while doing so. We didn’t have a lot of bags – we’d done this trip with carry-on luggage, after all – but even that is more than you want to haul around for longer than you have to.

When we asked the staff the night before they were adamant that they could not possibly let us stash our bags behind the front desk, which was confusing since they’d let us do that when we arrived. We’d gotten there a couple of hours before check-in and they were happy to let us keep the bags back there while we foraged for snacks. So there was a bit of a puzzle to work out.

Fortunately Kim asked again that morning and the new person said of course we could do that!

It turns out that there are two entirely separate staffs there – one for the student housing part of it and one for the summer rentals part of it and even though they sit at the same front desk and rent out the same rooms they don’t talk to each other much and they have different policies. The student housing people are much friendlier.

So we dropped off our bags and decided that the best thing we could do on a Saturday morning was to tour a whiskey distillery that included samples, because nothing says “vacation” like drinking whiskey at 11am. Fortunately there was a distillery in the neighborhood, a short walk away, and we got there just about as it was opening.

The Teeling Distillery opened in 2015 and was the first new whiskey distillery in Dublin in over 125 years. Most of the big distillers – Jameson, Powers, and so on – moved out of the city a while ago, and it took a while for pioneers to resettle the place with new distilleries. There are a few more there now. But this one was right in the neighborhood.

We got there before the tours started so they directed us to their café which featured a wide variety of whiskey-related food and drinks including a fascinating joint venture with the Keogh’s potato chip people to produce a Smoked Barbecue and Irish Whiskey flavor chip. It has the Teeling logo right on the bag. They weren’t bad, actually.

When the tour starts you don’t just launch into the tour itself. They let you into a little area where you can look at some displays and get some of the history that way, and there were a few others with us – mostly Americans (including people from Wisconsin and Philadelphia) but also various sorts of Europeans. Eventually we were called to order by Gary, who introduced himself as a “genuine hung-over Irishman.” He had us introduce ourselves and told us that he planned to move to Broomall (a suburb of Philadelphia) with his girlfriend in the next few months and then launched into his presentation.

Where the Irish Whiskey Museum tour was a fairly broad history of both whiskey and Ireland that sought to put it all into context, the Teeling tour was just what it said it was – a walk through an actual working distillery where we could see how the stuff was made. It’s fascinating. Gary took us into the business end of the distillery where he told us about the process – malting, triple-distilling, and so on – and let us wander around a bit to get a closer look at the equipment.

He then ushered us into a darker room where he told us about the aging process – how they age the whiskey only in specific sorts of barrels and how it gets darker and more flavorful over time – before opening up another door to the tasting area.

Our tour came with two drinks – a straight sample of the Teeling Small Batch variety, which I was pleased to discover on sale here in Our Little Town after I got back, and a cocktail which rivals the Aperol Spritz for the title of Summeriest Drink Ever. They were both very good, and they had the cocktail recipe written out for you right on the bar if you wanted to photograph it.

Afterward they let us wander around a bit. On the side wall there was space for people to write their names, so we did that. And then we headed over to the gift shop though we didn’t buy anything, mostly because we didn’t want to lug it home. Fear not – I am now the proud owner of a bottle of Teeling Small Batch Whiskey, purchased upon my return, and as the days get darker and the weather slowly cools I look forward to enjoying it, probably after rather than before any grading I need to do.

We walked back to the apartment lobby to collect our bags and head to the airport, which we decided to do by taxi rather than bus this time. We sat there in the lobby trying to figure out how to do this until the desk person called us over and pointed to a button that they just have sitting on the counter. Apparently so many people call for cabs from this place that the local cab company installed a hot line and all you have to do is push the button and wait about four minutes and a cab will appear as if by magic.

We got to the airport in plenty of time which was good because for the second airport running we found ourselves in a place where the baggage handling system had broken down.

It has to be said that the folks in Dublin were a lot more organized about this situation than those in Naples. Instead of having to fight our way through a madding crowd to get to an immovable line in front of a desk, we were directed to the end of a miles-long line that looped up and down the sidewalk in front of the terminal and just follow along. The line moved briskly and people were pretty generous about letting those with impending flights cut in front. We weren’t particularly worried since we had plenty of time and weren’t checking bags anyway and we soon found ourselves in the actual terminal where we were given directions to security.

Security also moved quickly, surprisingly enough, and suddenly we were on the other side with time to spare.

Our first order of business was lunch, since it was about that time. This was a bit of a struggle since everyone at the airport had the same idea at the same time, but we are Resourceful Travelers and Not To Be Put Off though in the end I got rather turned around by the computerized menu screen where I went and ended up with rather more than I could eat but better that than too little, I suppose.

Also, there was shopping.

All European airports double as malls. Up to 15% of the total GDP of every EU and Schengen Area member comes from people buying things at airports, and we did our bit. Kim found someone to sell her the Jo Malone fragrance she’d been looking for, and Oliver and I continued our Boots reconnaissance and found snacks and beverages for the flight.

Eventually we had to get to our gate, and here we experienced firsthand the wonder that friends of ours had told us about: if you are flying from Dublin to the US, you can – and indeed, must, as I didn’t see any way to avoid doing so – go through US Customs in Dublin.

I KNOW!

This turns what is normally a 90-minute process in Chicago at the end of a trans-Atlantic flight when you are tired and cranky and just want to go home into a 20-minute process at the beginning of the flight when you still have the spoons to be polite and humane to the people checking you through. And when you arrive in Chicago you are treated as a domestic flight! It was just glorious.

The flight was long and uneventful, as you want flights to be. It felt like it took forever, even though it was as comfortable as that sort of thing gets. I read the book that I’d borrowed on my phone and started another. The clouds drifted by. Darkness took me and I strayed away through thought and time. Stars wheeled overhead and every day was as long as a life age of the earth. And then we arrived, safe and sound in Chicago.

Lauren picked us up and took us back to Our Little Town, though with a slight detour that just meant we had more time to talk together and that was a lovely thing. We got home and I immediately unpacked my carryon to give to her so she could take it with her on the trip that she and her friend Arden were planning for later that week, and we hung out a bit before she had to go.

It is good to travel, to see new places and friends, to be a bit uncomfortable in the service of greater experiences.

It is good to arrive home, to the familiar and the comfortable.

It will be good to travel again.

Europe 24 - Dublin, Day 2

Our last full day in Dublin began with a quiet breakfast at the kitchen table, as all good days should begin. It is a lovely thing to be able to ease into a day with a nice meal in good company without feeling like you’ve been shot out of a cannon into the swirl of events, scattering bystanders as you go.

We had a few ideas for what to do that day – Dublin is a city where you can easily fill as much time as you have, that way – but our first goal was to visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which was a pleasant fifteen-minute walk through our neighborhood and past the elementary school where the road curved to join a somewhat larger road. You could tell it was an elementary school even without reading the signs because a) it had bollards planted along the curb to protect children from drivers who couldn’t manage that curve and b) those bollards were painted to look like pencils, complete with pink erasers at the top. I’m not sure why none of us thought to take a picture of them, but there you go. You will have to trust me on this one.

St. Patrick’s is a gorgeous Gothic pile of a place and I’ve always thought that this is what cathedrals ought to look like rather than the – admittedly beautiful – brightly lit Romanesque churches full of Renaissance art that one finds in Italy. It’s grey stone and dark wood and stained glass and we spent a happy few hours wandering around the place.

You come on it fairly quickly once you get past the elementary school, as it just kind of sits there not far from the little grocery store where Oliver and I had found snacks on our first day in Dublin, and it seems to me that this kind of serendipity in buildings is what neighborhoods are all about. Even something as grand as a cathedral is just part of the area. Zoning is boring.

We bought our tickets – only in Italy are churches free – and found our way into the nave, and it was as lovely as we were hoping it would be.

It was also crowded, both in the “wow there are a lot of my fellow tourists in here with me” sort of way as well as in a “this is a living church with services and ceremonies that happen all the time” kind of way, which wasn’t a feeling I got from many of the Italian churches we visited. Those often have the feel of monuments to past glory that sometimes have small groups of people huddling in the shadows of the ancients. St. Patrick’s seemed like the kind of living place where a mass or a youth group meeting could break out at any moment if you weren’t careful and people would show up because that’s just what they would do.

Fortunately for us we seemed to be between events, so we had the run of the place for a while. We split up, as usual, and I worked my way counterclockwise around the outer edges of the building before heading into the middle for another circuit. There was a lot to see.

Everywhere you look at St. Patrick’s there are memorials to the dead. They’re carved into the stone. They’re embedded in the floor. They’re cast in brass. It’s just that kind of place.

Jonathan Swift – best known today as the author of Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal – was born in Dublin and graduated from Trinity College before becoming (among other things) a dean of the Cathedral, and he is buried there. There are several memorials to him, as well as to his longtime (and from what I have been able to find rather ambiguously defined) companion Hester Johnson, usually known as Stella.

There is also a rather grand memorial to the Boyle family, which dates to 1632. One of the later Boyles, Sir Robert, is generally regarded as a founder of modern chemistry (he’s the guy who came up with Boyle’s Law, which is the thing you forgot when you were trying to determine how the volume of a gas changed as the temperature increased on that exam back in high school) and as a chemist this was something Kim enjoyed seeing.

Most of the memorials were to people we didn’t know. So many memorials exist to remember events and people that nobody remembers. It’s all that is left of some of these people and that is a strange thought indeed. There’s a lot of them, though, and you can spend a good chunk of your day just reading them all as you walk by.

They even have memorials that you can create while you’re there if you want to remember someone you knew, which is a nice thing to do for people.

There are also a great many stone carvings, some of which are clearly tombs and some of which seem to be more broadly Christian markers. Some of them are very, very old.

The thing about St. Patrick’s is that every time you think you have reached the back end it unfolds into something else and keeps going. There’s a really gorgeous choir area that seemed like it was getting toward the back of the place, for example.

But then behind that there was this little chapel-like space a bit further on.

Eventually you do get to the end of things, though, and there’s another little chapel there just waiting for you, perhaps as a reward for your persistence or perhaps just because that’s where there was room to put it. You never know.

Everywhere you look is stained glass.

Toward the end of my circuit I stumbled across this area, which is dedicated to the various Irish military units that served the Empire prior to Irish independence. The flags are interesting because they are not preserved in any way. The plan is just to let them slowly fall apart naturally. I’m not sure what the purpose of that is, but it is an interesting idea and it does convey a sense of age.

 

After I’d made my circuit I went back up the middle of the nave and found all sorts of other things. There was a small area where you could do brass rubbings, for example. They had some brass plaques and as much paper as you wanted but when I tried it came out as an amorphous black blob on the paper – my artistic skills remain as powerful as ever, in other words. Oliver and Kim had better luck with it.

Also, if you looked very carefully at the arches, you’d find these little heads carved into the stone. I’m sure they have some deeper meaning than the “oh, wow, aren’t those adorable!” reaction that I had, but then it was my vacation and I reserve the right to have whatever reactions I wish.

There was also this door, which came with a long story about the origins of the phrase “to chance your arm,” an expression that I’d never heard before and therefore did not realize needed to be explained. Apparently it is now used as a general phrase meaning “to take a risk” and it comes from a battle where those on the losing side took refuge in the Cathedral’s Chapter House and were then guaranteed safe passage out of Dublin by the winners. The losers thought this was a trick until the leader of the winners had a hole cut in the door and then reached in to shake hands on the deal, risking his arm in the process.

After spending some time and money in the gift shop we headed back outside where we found some fairly odd sculptures and a nice little grassy park on the other side of the Cathedral. It was a pleasant place to walk and you could get a good view of the Cathedral from there.

Our next goal was the Chester Beatty Library, which houses the collections of – wait for it – Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, who had an interest in ancient religious manuscripts and artifacts and the money to collect such things. His interests were broader than Christianity, though, and the museum has an extensive collection of Islamic, Persian, and East Asian material as well as some of the earliest Christian papyri in the world. There’s a lot to see.

The Chester Beatty, as it is more commonly known, is not that far from St. Patrick’s and it was a pleasant walk from the one to the other. It sits on a lovely bit of property just across from Dublin Castle and there’s a nice area outside for when you get tired or just want to spend some time in the open air and not walking.

The atrium when you first get in is also quite something. There’s a little gift shop on the left – mostly books and artwork – and a café on the right and we would get to both of them in due time.

The main attraction of the Chester Beatty is the vast collection of texts, which are displayed on multiple floors in many different rooms. There are texts in scripts you’ve never heard of. Texts in scripts you have heard of but can’t read. Texts in scripts you feel you ought to be able to read but they’re so ornate and ancient that it’s hard to tell. If you like religious books and texts, this is your place.

The papyri are fascinating to see as well. They’re smaller than you’d think they were and some of them are not in great shape, but they are so unfathomably ancient that they’re just astonishing.

Sometimes things are engraved on gold rather than written on parchment or papyrus.

And of course where there are texts there are illustrations, and there are plenty of those as well if you prefer artwork to texts.

 

The place is four floors tall and when you get all the way up to the top there’s a rooftop garden where you can hang out for a bit and look out over the lawn toward Dublin Castle. From this elevation you can actually see the pattern carved into the grass, which isn’t obvious at ground level. After lunch Kim and Oliver returned to the museum but I’d seen everything I wanted to see so I just took a long slow stroll around the perimeter of the lawn, poking my head into the various bits of flora and stonework along the way. I ran into a wedding photoshoot at one point, and really you can understand why they’d go there for that though I’m not sure why they thought they’d have the place to themselves for long enough to take photos like that. I may be in the background of someone’s wedding album is what I’m saying here. I hope I look presentable.

Directly across from the entrance to the rooftop garden, at the end of the little fourth-floor hallway that is the only access to the room that I could find, there was a small room full of illustrations from a medieval European manuscript known as the Hamilton Field Book of Hours, named after the American artist who owned it before Beatty bought it in 1927. It dates to the early 1400s CE and is mostly in Latin with a bit of French thrown in. The pages are very small but the whole thing rates a separate room of its own in a museum full of treasures, so it was worth a look.

When our meet-up time arrived we all agreed we were hungry so we stopped at the café in the atrium – the Silk Road Café, as it is called – and had a lovely lunch which we ate outside.

Oliver wanted to go to the Irish National Museum after this, but there are about a hundred of those, all sort of loosely linked together and generally right by one another. So we started walking in that general direction to see where we’d end up. Dublin is a fun city for that, it turns out, and there is a lot to see if you’re paying attention.

We ended up at the Irish National Museum of Archeology, which deals with the more ancient side of things. It’s a pretty impressive place from the moment you walk in.

They have artifacts there that go back three thousand years or more, and you just kind of wander around making sharp corners here and there and finding yourself in entirely new parts of the museum with hitherto unsuspected vistas of antiquities spread out before you. One of the first things you come to is a room filled with enough gold to gild every lily in Florence, arranged neatly and catalogued precisely and mostly you end up wondering how they had so much gold back then because it really is quite a lot.

There are a number of Celtic crosses here and there, as well as a chalice that apparently I should have known about ahead of time – the Ardagh Chalice, which dates from the 8th century CE – and a harp as well.

There are just rooms and rooms of artifacts, and they’re all pretty interesting. We spent a couple of hours just kind of wandering around on our own, occasionally bumping into each other and exclaiming over something we’d just seen.

The bog boat was pretty impressive, though. Apparently it goes back to about 2500BCE, which is a long time ago.

I think my favorite thing in the museum, though, was this guy, mostly because he seemed pretty amused at being a disembodied stone head encased in a glass box and you have to appreciate someone who can roll with things like that.

Oliver wanted to explore the museum further after our agreed-upon meeting time so we made plans to catch up later at the Irish Whiskey Museum and then Kim and I headed out to the nearest Pret-A-Manger for a snack because by that point we were hungry and while Pret does not provide gourmet food it does deliver on what it says it will and that was all we asked of them. After that we found a Jo Malone store where Kim searched for a fragrance she had wanted and then went to a Boots, mostly because we had been talking about Boots (Bootses?) and suddenly there one was and it seemed like destiny so who were we to refuse.

There was a busker outside the Jo Malone shop – a young woman with a guitar – and it has to be said that the busker quality level in Dublin is very high. I don’t think you could get away with doing that in Dublin if you weren’t really good at it.

We reconvened at the Irish Whiskey Museum, a fascinating place that is exactly what it says on the tin. You head upstairs and buy your tickets and in return you get a guided tour of the history of Irish whiskey. Some of that is the history of the beverage itself – smoother than Scotch whiskey because it’s triple distilled instead of double-distilled – and some of it is the broader context of how Irish whiskey has fared through the ages. Hint: English retaliation for Irish independence in the 1920s plus the sheer unmitigated dumbassery of Prohibition in the US in that decade did Irish whiskey no favors and many of the distilleries that existed in Ireland in 1920 were gone not long afterward. Our tour guide Matthew clearly enjoys his job and kept us well informed and entertained for the hour we were there.

The highlight of the tour is of course the tasting at the end. We got the regular tour, which came with three whiskeys (the deluxe tour came with four) and they were all quite good though we each had our preferences. My favorite, if I recall correctly, was the Fercullen Falls.

They actually do have a bar right there in the museum where you can go once the tastings are done and you’ve worked your way through the inevitable gift shop (not that I am complaining about that in any way – gift shops are fun, whether you buy anything or not), and we spent some time there being serenaded by a guy with the guitar and sampling further whiskeys.

By this point we were actually getting hungry for dinner so we left in search of a place that would provide such a thing. Instead we ended up at the statue of Molly Malone (known locally as The Tart With The Cart). Apparently if you rub her boobs it is considered good luck, or maybe people just say that as an excuse to rub her boobs. I don’t know. We left the rubbing to others and enjoyed the two guys busking a few feet away instead. They did a nice version of Caledonia that was fun to sing along with.

Just up the block from that was a Nando’s and we decided that a cheeky Nandos was just the thing.

I’m not sure when the adjective “cheeky” became a mandatory part of any description of going to Nando’s. If you’ve never been there, it’s a chicken place. You can get a quarter or a half of a small chicken – or a whole one, if you’d like – plus sides and various hot sauces, and it’s actually very good. I’d been to one in Illinois back before the pandemic while I was waiting for Lauren to finish an afternoon event for her foreign exchange program and I enjoyed it but it didn’t seem particularly cheeky to me. After a bit of investigating that turned up nothing I finally took to social media to ask my British friends what it took for Nando’s to qualify as “cheeky” and got an answer from Richard. “Originally spur of the moment,” he said, “particularly as being one of the less bad spontaneous decisions you can take after too much alcohol,” though he noted that meanings change over time. “By now it is redundant, as every Nando’s is considered cheeky.”

So now you know.

It was good food in any event, cheeky or otherwise, and while we were sitting there figuring out what we wanted to order a group of American teenagers stopped by our table on their way out and asked if we wanted their gift card since they’d forgotten to use it and were leaving town the next day and wouldn’t get another chance. It was a very nice thing to do and it paid for about half of our dinner!

We took the 151 bus back to our apartment. The bus stop was one of those big ones where half the buses in the city seem to stop so we waited there for a while along with a large and boisterous crowd, enjoying the scenery and the sculpture across the way until our bus came by.

 

 

We rode back on the top of the double-decker bus to our stop, where the squirrel painted by the fence told us we’d arrived. A quick grocery run for breakfast stuff and road food for the next day and we were back in the apartment idly watching the Olympics and – with some travail – securing our boarding passes for the flight back home.