News and Updates

1. Lauren has made it back from her travels safe and sound. I picked her up at the airport on Tuesday and it was nice having her around for a couple of days before she headed back up to her own apartment tonight. She has graciously given me permission to tell the story of her summer journey from my perspective, so at some point I will do that. She has become quite the traveler now, far more so than either me or Kim, and as much as I am glad to have her back I will admit that she’d probably have been happier continuing on. Perhaps next summer.

2. Everything returns, but what returns is not what went away. (Louise Glück)

3 Oliver’s classes have started and there is always a certain excitement to that – the orientations are done and now it’s time to get down to classroom business.

4. My own classes start next week and I’m both looking forward to them because I always love telling stories and I generally like my students and not looking forward to them because they are a lot of work and grading sucks.

5. Grading has in fact taken up a great deal of my time of late, mostly because there’s always someone who thinks they deserve a grade for work they didn’t do and it is a special joy to remind them that this is not the case, particularly in Wisconsin where the Academic Integrity Code has the force of state law. But it is a process, and that takes time and energy.

6. I’m not going to write about the political situation here except to say that every day brings more sickening evidence that the United States has already crossed the line into Fascist dictatorship and historically there has been only one way out of that situation. Don’t lie to yourself. Don’t look away. Don’t submit. It’s going to get ugly and the only question is how ugly. At some point I’ll write about it again, but right now I’m just watching it happen.

7. I think there should be a rule in all workplaces that they’re not allowed to replace more than one mission-critical software package at the same time. Right now I’m trying to navigate three of these changes down at Home Campus and I have to tell you that it’s been interesting, in the liberal arts sense of the term, the way three-headed frogs are … interesting.

8. I’m always impressed at how much time, labor, and money people will spend to create, introduce, and troubleshoot systems designed to replace simple human judgment. One of the processes I was recently trained on for one of the new software packages took over an hour to explain the various steps one has to take to do something that we used to just do by hand in three minutes and we didn’t actually complete the training, so there’s probably at least that much more to go. This to me is not progress, even if it is automated.

9. And get off my lawn.

10. Every week here in Our Little Town they embark on a new road construction project, which is a good thing in that the roads really need it and in the end it will be much nicer to get around the place, but it does make it difficult to get anywhere, particularly as the projects compound and slowly hem us in. At current rate sometime next month we will have to have our groceries airdropped to the back yard and simply wait it all out rather than try to Dukes Of Hazzard our way through the construction zones to the supermarket.

Europe 25: From Porto to Stockholm

When we mapped out this trip we knew that our time in Florence and Porto would be packed full of activities. We would be in new places and seeing new things, and while we planned to be with friends in both of those cities we also understood that taking it easy wasn’t really part of that plan. This is why we put the Stockholm leg of the trip at the end, because we’d actually be staying in our friends’ home for that part and could just sit still for a bit if we wanted to do so.

Also, it is generally cooler in Sweden than in southern Europe, and that would be a nice reward in itself.

We woke up early on our final day in Porto because we had to get to the airport. Since scaling the hills of Porto first thing in the morning was not really an attractive prospect, particularly with our bags – even just carry-on and a personal item gets heavy after a while – we’d arranged for a Bolt (the European equivalent of Uber) to pick us up instead. At the appointed hour we made our way out to the sidewalk and the driver showed up right on time.

This was a man who definitely enjoyed his job. We got to see a lot of the parts of Porto that we hadn’t seen before and at an astonishing clip, but he got us there safely and with plenty of time to get through security and hang out at the little restaurant near our gate while we waited for our flight to Stockholm.

Meanwhile Lauren was completing her journey to meet us there. Her graduate program started about a week after her undergrad graduation ceremony in May so she was in class while we were in Florence and Porto, but when that class was over she’d arranged to come out to Sweden to spend the week with us. She ended up taking a long and fairly circuitous route involving a surprising number of rescheduled flights through entirely different cities than the ones she’d planned originally, and we just kept track as best we could.

For all that, though, she got there well ahead of us, took the train from Arlanda Airport to Stockholm – pausing for a brief time while the train lost power – and then a different train from Stockholm to Huddinge where our friends live.

So not only did we have our friends to look forward to seeing, as we sat there in the Porto airport, but also our daughter! Life is good.

Eventually it was our turn to fly and we boarded the plane to Sweden.

It is a surprisingly long flight from Porto to Stockholm – a bit more than double the two hours that I’d thought it would take – but we arrived at Arlanda without any particular troubles. International flights should not be exciting, as that usually means something has gone wrong. We made our way out of the gate toward the main terminal and from there it was about a hundred years of wandering through hallways, up escalators, around corners, and across vast open spaces before we finally found the train platforms, and eventually we too were whisked toward Stockholm’s city center, though without the power failure.

It turns out that finding the 41 train to Huddinge from there was more of a trick than we thought it would be. It was clear that we needed to find a new train, at least – the airport express had quite literally come to the end of its tracks and for it to go any further would have meant ending up on the nightly news while the anchors did the Frowny Face that lets you know that things didn’t end well – but how to do that was not obvious. Fortunately Kim actually speaks Swedish and could read the signs, so in the end we got to the proper train and were zipping along on the commuter rails toward our friends.

David picked us up at the train station in Huddinge. It’s been a while since we’ve seen him and he’s only gotten taller since then, which is a bit of a trick given that their cars have gotten smaller. But it all worked out and soon we were relaxing with Lauren, Mats and Sara, as well as their exchange student Frieda. Frieda is German, and since Mats, Sara, and Lauren have all lived in Germany and speak the language well the conversations over the week tended to veer from English to Swedish to German and back again, and since I only understand one of those languages I just let it all wash over me. It's a fascinating experience if you let it be one.

It is a lovely thing to stay with friends who you can simply relax with, especially far from home, and we did a lot of just hanging out and talking while we were there. We did a lot of other things too, don’t get me wrong – we saw a fair bit of Stockholm and kept ourselves busy with sights and sounds. But being able to spend an evening or two playing cards or board games with good people gathered around a kitchen table is a nice break.

We sat down for dinner and then wandered out to the porch for a while, just to hang out.

We met the cats, both the old one and the new one.

And after a while we wandered back inside to the kitchen table, which is where one naturally gravitates in comfortable places, I find.

Eventually the travelling caught up with us and we headed off to bed. Lauren bunked in the lower level of the house, while Kim and I went to the little guest cottage out back.

And just like that, the last leg of our trip began.

Late on a Sunday Afternoon

It’s late on a Sunday afternoon and there is gravy simmering on the stove and the house smells like my childhood, and if you tell me it’s not called gravy it’s called spaghetti sauce I will ignore you because you don’t have the standing to tell me what my childhood was like and you really don’t want to hear my thoughts on that kind of presumptuousness.

My computer has just finished the update to the new OS that I’ve been postponing since late April, which is admittedly several smaller OS updates ago, because I don’t trust these updates ever since one of them nearly bricked a different computer a few years ago. “Technology is what doesn’t quite work,” a friend of mine once told me. “When it works all the time, it’s an appliance.” Computers are technology and software updates are even more so and while it seems to have done its thing without creating problems I’ll believe it later, after I’ve had time to use it for a while.

The cat is staying about where we want her to stay for her weight, which is an improvement over losing too much like she did earlier this summer and weighing too much like she did for most of the decade before that and I think perhaps I could take a lesson from that except that there is gravy simmering on the stove and good food is one of the few things that can keep the news of the day from getting overwhelming. The cat doesn’t care about news though she will eat the gravy if you let her and there is nothing quite as ridiculous as a gravy-stained cat.

We thought we were done with plumbers this summer but that does not look to be the case so tomorrow will begin another round of phone calls and appointments and it would be nice if things just worked the way they’re supposed to work but it is a fallen world and the plumbing breaks down accordingly. Right now I am just glad that nothing is leaking and everything that should produce water when asked to do so is actually producing water when asked to do so. It just needs to do that better, which is one level down on the scale of tasks. My dad taught me that all of life can be divided into four categories and from top to bottom these are 1) necessary, 2) desirable, 3) optional, and 4) yeah let me get back to you about that, and if the plumber coming to fix something falls into Category 2 then things aren’t as bad as they could be.

Somehow we have found ourselves in a time of glorious weather, bright but not overly sunny and about 72F/22C, with lows that you can sleep through well enough and the whole thing expected to continue for another week or so at least, and every day that we spend like that is another day closer to November and civilized weather. It’s tea weather in August, and this is a rare and precious thing in a rapidly warming world.

I’ve gotten the websites for my classes set up and now all I need to do is get the first lectures updated for the new school year but that can wait for a few days so today is one of those restful days that get fewer and further between every year so I will enjoy the quiet and the fact that the house smells like my childhood because I have reached the age where I understand how fleeting such moments can be.

Europe 25: Street Art in Porto, Gaia, and Aveiro

It’s somewhat difficult to write about public art in a city where a significant percentage of the buildings are covered with decorative tiles. Where do you draw the line? What counts as public art and what simply counts as wall coverings?

This is a high-class problem to have, really. Porto, Gaia, and Aveiro, which I am lumping together in this discussion because I’m only going to make one post about public art from our stay in Portugal and the same basic conditions apply to all three of those cities, are full to the brim with all sorts of art, pretty much wherever you look.

There are a lot of really nice Art Deco buildings, for example.

And we really liked the neon on this one.

What’s interesting is that even just the logos seem to have some art to them in Porto. The negative space on this one was really cool, though to be honest I no longer remember what business this was advertising.

There were a great many cows. The Ale Hop stores all had their own cow, for example, and the train station in Aveiro did as well. I don’t think they were selling anything at the train station, but a cow’s a cow.

This one was advertising a soccer club that had its own store in Porto. I just thought the motto was interesting.

It always pays to look up as you’re walking around in European cities. Sometimes you find interesting sculptures.

But more often, at least in Porto and Aveiro, you’ll find murals. There were a lot of them on the walls and they were fun to notice. These were in Porto, for example.

At the time I thought I was expected to know who the second one was, but as my education in all things Portuguese was regrettably thin he remained a mystery while we were there. A quick internet search just now reveals that this is the grandfather of the artist who painted it, however.

This one was in Gaia.

Of all of the murals in Porto, though, this one was the one I liked most. We must have walked by it a half dozen times, as it was on our route from the apartment to the downtown area, and I always stopped to look at it. My favorite of the portraits is about halfway down on the lower level. It’s called Cecilia and it was originally painted by someone named Henrique Pausao in 1882. I found an image of it online to put here so I remember it.

In Aveiro we stumbled across this archway on our way to the canal boats.

While on the boats we passed several tiled murals along the way. Our fellow passenger was not nearly as grumpy as her expression would suggest, but sometimes photos just turn out that way.

This one we saw just walking around.

And this one was on a plaza next to a small church, which it seemed to be advertising.

Perhaps the most interesting set of murals we saw was one that we went by on the staircase down from the upper level of Gaiai to the river. It’s a serious collection of stairs with landings every so often to break your descent and every time you hit a landing there would be one of these murals. These photos are arranged from top to bottom.

There was also a lot of 3D art around – sculptures, reliefs, and so on. Sometimes you’d just wander across a sculpture randomly on a street corner or on the sidewalk.

Or in a park that was set aside specifically for such things.

Or just protruding from the side of a building. The second one was on a wall that we passed on the way to and from the tile workshop, and the face sat about knee high off the sidewalk. The cigarette was likely added by a passerby and I have to say that it improved the artwork immensely.

The Half Rabbit is down in Gaia and it is one of the more famous sculptures in the Porto/Gaia area from what I could tell. Several bridal parties were lined up to take their group photos there so it was a bit of a wait to get our own photos without them (you can see one leaving in the last photo – they’re the ones in the uniform black dresses). It’s an interesting sculpture in that it is clearly a rabbit when you look at it from the front but from the sides it just looks like a collection of random detritus bolted to the corner of a building and it is pretty impressive how it all comes together when you look at it just right. Apparently it was sculpted by someone named Bordalo II (no word about the original Bordalo) from rubbish collected in the immediate vicinity and it’s supposed to raise awareness about sustainability, consumerism, and pollution but mostly it just looks like a rabbit and people say “Awwwwww” as they walk by so I’m not sure it is succeeding.

The Mercado Bolhão had its own sculptures on display on the third floor when we went back the second time. I suppose they were there the first time, but we didn’t climb that high on that trip so we cannot say. We were richly rewarded for doing so on the second visit, however. For one thing, there was this sculpture of a can of sardines. It's hard to see in this photo, but that sculpture is about five feet wide. Sardines are one of the things that Porto is known for and there is at least one stall at the market that sells nothing but brightly colored tins of sardines for those who enjoy them.

More impressively, there was the “Traditional Miniature Installation,” which apparently is something they set up every year at the Mercado. It’s a communal project created mostly by amateurs, according to the sign next to it, and you can get a pretty good sense of the city from looking at it.

If you look closely you can see individual landmarks. The tall building in the front center of the first photo is the Clérigos Tower, for example.

And if you look even more closely you’ll see things you can’t unsee no matter how much port wine you consume, and that’s just how art works.

There are a lot of odd statues in Porto, actually. This one was outside of a shop and it probably has something to do with what they sell there but I have no idea how.

And this one was outside of another shop that we passed on the climb down from the Miradouro da Vitória and I have even less of an idea how it might possibly connect to the shop next to it than the first one. But it was striking enough for us to stop and take a photo and thus spend time standing by the shop entrance, perhaps on a different day to wander inside, so I suppose as advertising it did its job.

I think the art I enjoyed most of all of this, though, was the graffiti art. Some of it was pretty well drawn.

I loved this one, though I have no idea who Pixo is. I’m glad they’re not dead, though. We passed this building several times and every time I found it immensely cheering.

Some of the graffiti was just graffiti, though there were a few pointed messages delivered.

This one, though, was my favorite. It was on the side of a building not far from the Cathedral, just as you walked down the hill toward the Casa Guitarra and the upper level of the Dom Luis I bridge, and there was just something about the way the lines flowed that appealed to me.

It’s a lovely thing to wander through a city full of art.