It's the first day of winter. Sadly, in Luxembourg that means 9 degrees and rain. I suppose I shouldn't complain about warmish weather, especially since I'll be gone to Romania in two days. Maybe with a bit of luck it will be below freezing so I'll be able to see some snow.

Thanks to the wonders of VoIP, since a week ago I have a phone number dialable from America: (253) 753-2106. Somewhere in Washington, but it dials through to my phone in Lux, no problem. If it's not used at least once every 30 days, it expires and I can't get it back, so if for no other reason than to make sure you don't have to reprogram your cell phone, take this as an excuse to call once every full-- not blue-- moon. It seems to be more reliable than my blog, in any case.

For those calling from Europe, it's +(352) 27280232. I've also got one in Romania (ain't VoIP great?), but I'll save the space and not put it here.

So, what hasn't appeared in my blog, and has been going on for the last year?

1) I went to Sicily and climbed Mt. Etna during an active eruption.

2) I flew to America, bought a tandem bike, cycled from Boulder to central Kansas, and then flew back to Luxembourg with the bike in a small suitcase. Hellofa bike, those Bike Friday tandems.

3) I taught myself how to program in C.

4) I taught myself how to program microcontrollers.

5) Laura and I got invited to join a competition dance club. We don't dance competitively (we're light-years away from even wanting to do that), but we're surrounded by people who do, which rubs off better than we thought it would. Maybe that'll let us do something more than the traditional bridal waltz. Oh, yeah, speaking of that.

6) I gave Laura the engagement ring that my grandfather bequeathed her in his dying days.

7) I got involved, and then uninvolved, in a radio project. It took too much time. Great people, and I wish them the best, but I needed to focus on my PhD.

8) I got invited to join the university's sustainability group. It takes just as much time as the radio, but I can't really turn down something like this.

Other things, certainly, but I don't remember them right now. I'm a little tired, as I had to take Laura to the airport this morning (she left first for Romania), so my thoughts are a little foggy.

All the seasons bests!
posted by K at 12:36 PM

4 weeks in America, and boy are we glad to be back. Don't get me wrong, we enjoyed our trip, but we still missed home and the saner life we live here. And our cat. We missed our cat. Who apparently, judging by his effusive cuddliness when we got home, missed us just as much.

Wow did we do a lot in America. As my last blog entry indicated, my arrival in America wasn't the happiest in the world. The days in New Jersey were long and sad. No one will ever understand why my cousin did what he did, and time will only partially heal the wound: the scars will never go away. Others have said far more intelligent things about this tragedy, and so I will refrain from adding anything else.

After the stress of NJ, Laura and I went with my parents to some much needed calm in Kentucky. In Kentucky, we did just about everything there was to be done. We destroyed my parents' insulation value of the attic by removing hundreds of cardboard boxes. Boxes that had been collecting since the 70s, and had certainly been a not-unsubstantial insulator. We filled up two vans' full with all the broken down boxes. Sadly, I didn't really think things through until right the end when I realized that large, clean, good quality boxes are gold for anyone who is moving. I put an add on Craigslist and within days had 4 or 5 emails from people wanting to pick up the boxes. Well, at least the ones not reused were recycled. (China's richest woman made her fortune by sending empty boxes back to China to be recycled into new boxes.)

While in Kentucky, my parents and we wandered off to the gorge one night, where we made a fire and cooked hobos. I have lots of pictures, but I'll probably never put them online, so just trust me that it was pretty cool. We wandered off another morning with my friend Eric Payne to meet up with my dad's friend Jimmy Hayes for some more fire building, this time on an outcropping. Again, cool photos of people being crazy, but nothing that will make it online.

We also we to Cincinnati. Ho-hum. Cincinnati is like every other featureless American city. Skyscrapers and suburbs. Full to cracking in the daytime, and a ghost-town at night. Well, not *every* other one. Washington DC, Boston, NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle stand out. But that's about it. No, America's charm is not her cities, America's charm is her people.

We also made a trip to Shakertown for some excellent cornbread sticks, a couple trips into the city for shopping, we got to see Eric a few times along with his darling son, Franklin, and me up with some of my old friends from high school, Scott Sherrod, Christina Boggs, Jon Winburn, Glen Murray, and their significant others.

In fact, Laura and I spent one evening with Scott and Christina at Christina's parents' house. We spent most of the night talking after Scott gave up in frustration after being beat by, well, everyone at set. It was a good conversation, both for its depth and constructiveness, as well as for the fact that Laura participated in two uniquely American moments. 1) Hearing that all the America's problems are because of the lawyers, and that someone ought to shoot them all, and 2) that all the world's problems can be solved by shooting everyone else. Of course he was kidding, but it was still funny.

Sometime before New Years' we started thinking about where we wanted to spend the 31st. We settled on DC, but had a problem: nowhere to sleep! Enter craigslist and couchsurfing.com. We posted our needs and sure enough found someone. Not right away-- in fact in the nick of time, on the morning of the 31st-- but it worked out. Now, how does one get from KY to DC in time for festivities when at 9AM no one is even packed? By air, of course! Dad lent us his plane-- an unbelievable event in itself-- and away we went. 520km from KY to DC, and it only took us 2 hours. In fact, counting ground time to get to the airport, load the plane, and refuel, we only spent 2h45m. Not bad! In fact, we got to DC with enough time left to visit the new Air & Space museum annex, the Udvar-Hazy Center.

After a two hour visit to this phenomenal museum-- in fact it's far more of an exhibition hall than museum-- where we saw the Enterprise, America's first space shuttle; the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb; the Global Flyer, the airplane that Stephen Fossett flew around the world; the Pegasus, the first and only human powered aircraft to cross the English Channel; an SR-71; a Concord; and so much more, we went back to the house where we were staying and prepared for a night out on the town. Laura and I found a New Year's dance (as in ballroom) party where we practiced our new-found dancing skills. Laura was asked by all the guys to dance. I was asked by all the gals. When Laura told the guys she was new to dancing, they said, "No problem, we'll teach you!" When I told the gals I was new, they said, "Oh."

The following morning, after a rather late start, we drove back to DC and visited all the sights. The Capitol, the museums (thee Hope Diamond!), the Mall, the memorials, etc. We also saw the White House, and Laura was quite unimpressed. "That's it???" she said. Yup. That's it. A small, unimposing white house sitting on a green lawn. You could even see inside some of the rooms through the drawn curtains. Tough to believe that that little house represents America in so many people's mind.

The next day, we flew down to Charlotte to visit Bruce Chapman, a guy we met in France. We met Bruce through Greg, my pilot friend in Dijon. I swear, they're like twins separated at birth. All they can do with there time is think up (hilarious) practical jokes to play on just about everyone. He was a hoot! We visited downtown Chicago, chatted a lot, and did another quintessential American activity: viewing nature through the window of a car. Although at this particular petting zoo, "nature" physically entered through the window and demanded to be fed. I've got some cool photos of Laura feeding a giraffe through the sunroof of Bruce's Ford Explorer.

The evening before we left Charlotte, I got a hold of another long-lost friend, Julee Baber. Off to Nashville we went! Julee is working in children's theatre and is getting married to Ross (forgot his last name). I don't know how good she is at directing (it would appear pretty damned), but she's a phenomenal interior decorator. For an engagement present, I took them flying over Nashville at night. Sure, I just about crashed the airplane on takeoff because of a poorly set trim-wheel, but I recovered from the incipient stall while the airplane was only 1m off the ground (soft-field takeoff practice, anyone?) and away we went. Nashville really is quite pretty from the air at night. All cities are. A much less stressful landing ensued and then, once again we chatted away the night.

Laura and I had a great time with them and upon leaving pronounced them the sanest Americans we met in all the trip. Which isn't saying much, I suppose, since they actually permitted me to take them flying.

A couple days after returning to Kentucky, Laura and I went with Alix to Chicago. We spent a week there, and had a great time. It's a neat city, and Laura especially like the El. We got to all sorts of museums, zoos, parks, and whatnot. Also, we bought way too much extra stuff. Fortunately, we were able to smuggle it all through customs.

When we got back, bad news. Anne-Claire, our wonderful next-floor neighbor, was moving out. Oh, no! Well, she's only moving to the other side of the city, so we'll survive.

I'm certain there were so many things more, but I've run out of time to tell them.
posted by K at 8:31 PM

My cousin Steven Montalbano killed himself yesterday. I don't know why and I don't know how. It seems that it was the aftermath of an argument with his girlfriend which ended with her saying she would never let him see the baby.

I'm not sure what would have made him do this to himself. At the risk of saying the obvious, suicide is never about just one thing, there's never just one factor. I wasn't close enough to him to know what was going on in his life that drove him to such despair.

Adieu, Steven, toi aussi.

(The world is surreal. I'm trying to change my airplane tickets and when I explain to the Indian at the call center that I would like to change my flight reservations because of Steven's death, he says, "I'm very sorry." When we end the call, he just couldn't help himself, the programming was too strong. "Have a very nice day, sir.")
posted by K at 9:48 AM

I've been kicked out of the country! That's a new one for me. I just got a letter saying that my tourist visa is expired, and I need to tell them where I'm going, being understood, of course, that where I'm going isn't "Luxembourg".

Of course, I own an apartment, I have a job, and even a work permit, so I really never had a tourist visa to begin with. Plus I've been here 18 months, which is a little longer than the 3 month tourist visa anyway. We'll see how far this logic gets with the administration.
posted by K at 10:20 AM

This weekend, Stockholm was taken over by the French. I don't know what subliminal messages suggest they all come to Stockholm at once, but I swear over half the country was there. You couldn't turn the street corner without hearing someone speak in French.

Laura and I walked ourselves senseless. Every day we did at least 8km, and probably closer to ten. We took a long stroll through the Skansen, the world's largest outdoor museum. Definitely worth a gander.

We also went to the Vasamuseet, a museum dedicated to the Vasa, a Swedish flagship vessel that sank minutes after being launched in 1628. Turns out she was too top-heavy because of the cannons and narrow draft that prevented enough ballast from being loaded on board. The brackish waters protected and preserved the ship for 333 years, although the sulphur that has impregnated the wood due to bacterial action in polluted waters is rapidly destroying the ship. The upshot is that in 50-100 years, the ship will no longer be viewable in unaltered state.

As it is now, it's incredible. Just walking into the museum you get an idea of what an effort they have gone to in order to preserve the ship. In the specially-designed museum building, there are five (5) doors that protect as much as is humanly possible the indoor atmosphere from outside contaminants. The museum has one feature, and one feature only. A giant 64-gun ship propped up in dry-dock. Incredible. I look forward to going back some year.
posted by K at 1:36 PM

Everything's fine, but we're both a little tired after being in the emergency room until 3AM. Laura had some stomach cramps that were so bad she for all intents and purposes collapsed at the dinner table. Ick. Prognosis? Stomach cramps, with a prescription for pain killers the next time it gets that bad. Useful, that.
posted by K at 3:55 PM

Good news/bad news. The good news is that we got Gonzales. That makes three down (Rumsfeld, Rove, and Gonzales), all the rest of them to go.

The bad news is that two people I met in Dijon died this weekend in a light-twin accident out in Vannes, a medium-sized town on the coast of Brittany, not far from where Benjamin Franklin landed in France as the colonies' ambassador to France. From a first look at photos and based on witness accounts, it would seem that the airplane lost power in one engine and flipped over before the pilots had time to do anything about it. They crashed in a field right next to the airport, a field that, if they had only had one more second to get their wits about them, was so long and straight and clear that they could have just bellied in. Tragic, really.
posted by K at 11:23 AM

Why I love Europe: because when you wake up and find a dead pig sliced in half in your mailbox, it's not the mafia trying to send a message, but just the local butcher's sale flyer.
posted by K at 9:11 AM

One of the problems with electric cars replacing gas cars is how to tax them. Without the tax revenues from the gasoline tax, there will be a major budget shortfall for maintaining roads. (Of course, the I-35 debacle makes one wonder just how much maintenance has been done with our tax dollars...) Electricity cannot be taxed in the same way as gas because it's impossible to ensure that everyone pays their fair share.

I worry that the governments' solution will be to install a tracking device in cars, such as a GPS, in order to count the number of kilometers driven in a year and base the tax on that. While it would be a very fair way to do it, I'm concerned about having a black box in my car that I cannot control, cannot remove, cannot modify, and cannot contest. This kind of invasion into our privacy is exactly what I wish to avoid. I can't see how the data would not be misused at some moment or another.
posted by K at 5:08 PM

I suppose it's a function of my age, but I have less friends dead from natural and accidental causes than from suicide. I just discovered that Chip Cheng, a friend from my time at GSP and later the man who beat me out for 1st place in Science at the Kentucky State Governor's Cup, recently committed suicide. It's stunning to me to think that so many people I know have taken their own lives. But I suppose that if you're going to die before you reach 30, suicide is one of the most common ways.

Not that knowing that solves anything. It's a crying shame and my condolences go out to his family.
posted by K at 3:00 PM

I have a friend who is going through a difficult time because she's being faced with single-parenthood. It gets me wondering. A woman has the right to choose what she does with her body, be that bringing a baby to term or aborting it. However, what rights does the man have here? Does a women have the right to bring a baby to term if the man disagrees?

It's an important question. If the woman doesn't require the man's participation, than it shouldn't inconvenience the man materially to have a child somewhere in the world. (Of course, legally this isn't always the case. In fact, in some countries such as France a child has the right to demand money from an unknown father, even after the age of 18.)

Material inconvenience, however, doesn't at all take into account the man's feelings about having progeny. So does the man have any rights to act on his feelings? Many instances can be found where an anger caused by someone else's actions has no legal standing. I am very angry when I see a soccer mom driving her SUV to the grocery store, but I, of course, have no legal right to do anything about it. So why should a man's choice be any different?

If a woman were to somehow harvest a man's DNA, through the use of hair or fingernail clippings perhaps, would she have the right to inseminate one of her own eggs and have a baby? If the man had no obligations whatsoever to the mother or child, would he have the moral right to protest? I don't think so.

Of course, this is pure ramblings about what could happen in the future, but I find it interesting to contemplate these now.
posted by K at 10:12 AM

I've been perusing a book called "The Complete Book of Intelligece Tests: 500 Exercises to Improve, Upgrade, and Enhance Your Mind's Strength". It's one of those books of lots of mental puzzles, only this time it gives itself a big title so as to convince you that simple mental games aren't just for kids.

I keep flipping past the sections I'm not so good at to go right (in other words, don't get everything right) to those where I can get 100%. This seems to me rather silly, as I'm intentionally going past things that I might fail at in order to shoot right ahead to the the things I can already do. Isn't that defeating the point?
posted by K at 5:04 PM

I'm not sure how utilities work in America, but I get the feeling that you pay per kW/hr consumed, and that's that. In Luxembourg and France, at least, that's only half of it. I just got the final bill for our time at the previous apartment, and in the 9 months we were there we were charged 54E for electricity and 74E for access to the service.

This is a terrible way to do things. It means that I have diminishing financial impetus to reduce my electricity consumption. If I went completely solar and wind, I would still have to pay a pretty hefty sum per year for... nothing. Now, since I feel quite strongly about the environment, I'm going to reduce my usage as much as possible anyway. However, others might not feel the same way, and since they won't pay as much attention to the bill they'll never notice that those great new energy efficient bulbs are saving them a bundle in kW/hr because of the huge fee for hookup and meter rental relative to the energy consumption. Instead, they'll just notice that those fluorescent bulbs cost them a lot more than the regular incandescent kind.

Shortsighted bureaucrats...
posted by K at 3:21 PM

Laura is a like a little child, although not in a bad way. Rather she represents the curiosity and rapid learing that are the hallmarks of youth. It amazes me how much she has learned and evolved in the past year, and it amazes me even more that so much of what she has learned I have known and taken for granted for a long time. There are many examples of this, but our new cat is the perhaps the most recent. She had never played with a cat and string before, didn't know that they love yarn, didn't know how to pick one up without making it uncomfortable, and other things. (Needless to say, she knows all these things now, and the cat loves her to death.)

What's bugging me is wondering about all the things I don't know but that she does and takes for granted. Laura is a very smart lady, one of the fastest learners I've ever been around. During her 25 years of life before she met me, when I was learning about cats and cars, about computers and planes, what was she learning about? What must she know that I know so little about?
posted by K at 10:15 PM

Run for the back! According to Popular Science, http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4219452.html, the back of an airplane is the safest place to be. Sort of. If you're only talking about crashes where someone actually survives. And assuming that technology hasn't changed survival odds between now and the 1970s.

Which, considering the way airplanes are built, it probably hasn't. I wonder if there is any safety engineering at all that goes into crashes? Aside from ensuring that everyone is relatively close to a door, is there even anything they could do? Even if you could make an airplane that didn't tear apart on impact, everyone would be dead as their hearts detached from their aortas due to the sudden deceleration. (That's the real reason why Gwen Stacey died, by the way. Not that neck-snapping junk they talk about in the comic book.)
posted by K at 5:22 PM

It's amazing how badly people misunderstand me and what I want. For instance, I bought an induction hob/range-top on ebay. During shipping, it somehow got crushed to pieces and completely destroyed. The package was insured, but what was insured: the price I paid for it (actual value), or the price I would have to pay to get another one of similar condition (replacement value)? In this case, the price I paid was quite a lot lower than it was worth-- around 200E lower-- due to one of these rare situations on ebay where something sells for quite a lot less than it's going price.

I think in this case, since the package was insured for up to 500E, that it is fair for the shipping company to replace the object, and not simply refund the price I had paid. This isn't so unusual. If your dear old aunt sells you her classic car she never drives anymore for a token $1000 and then someone hits you and totals the car, you would get the value of the car from the insurance company, and not the token $1000.

What I don't understand, then, is how Laura could be so crass as to accuse me of trying to take advantage of the situation and the people by wanting a replacement hob and not just my money back. With a replacement hob of like condition and age, I can cook as I wanted. With my money back, there is no guarantee that I can ever buy again what I had bought for so little money. When someone I respect so much questions my sense of propriety, I cannot help but ask myself if I am not seriously morally compromised. And yet, I know that there's nothing wrong with wanting, at the end of the day, to have paid the price and received the merchandise promised.
posted by K at 11:10 PM

We're nicely settled into our new apartment, now. Everything is going well. We were lucky enough to have moved during the soldes week. Soldes week is when everything in France, Luxembourg, and Belgium goes on clearance sale at the same time. Apparently it's illegal for stores to put things on sale (in the American sense where prices are dropped) except for twice during the year, once in January and once in July. We've managed to stock the apartment with lots of little goodies, from crockery to plumbing tools to an induction plate. Fun stuff. I guess. If you like to cook and build things. Fortunately, I like both.
posted by K at 12:28 PM

Two new acquisitions in as many days. First off: on Sunday, we got a cat! There's some debate about his name, but for the moment I'm calling him Quark. Just like every other cat I've ever had or house-sat. This time Quark is a largish medium-haired black cat with three splotches of white on his underbelly and chest and two little pips of white on his rear paws. I've never seen that before on a black cat. It's quite the odd effect because I keep on imagining that he's stepped in something.

He's always got the biggest eyes, I've never seen a cat stare so much in my life. It's not that the orbs of his eyes are so big, it's that he's always looking at things with his eyes wide open. Almost as if he were in a perpetual state of startlement.
He’s about 12 months old. We were worried about fitting a kitten to an apartment. There's no way for a cat to go outside, so all my experience with cats across my life doesn't really apply. A kitten would have been more fun, but this one was already trained, has a good personality, and seems to be a good fit to a smallish apartment. He already lived his first year inside, so maybe another while inside wouldn’t bother him.

We found the cat with some lady who already had two kids and just couldn't keep up with the amount of cleaning necessary. She was charming, and told us that if ever we had to leave for a long time, she would happily take the cat back into her 4th floor apartment where it has never been outside either. He's already litter trained, and the lady gave us everything she had: litter box, litter, food, papers, carrying cage, etc.

He spent it's first day hiding behind the couch. Normal for a cat that’s just been transplanted to a strange house, with strange people (buddy, have you ever got THAT one right), and strange languages. He didn’t move from behind the couch for the first day at all, not even to eat or use the litter.

It was funny because when we came home yesterday, we could push the couch forward and he would rush to our hand to be pet, but he would refuse to come out. When I picked him up from behind the couch and plopped him in his litter pan (designer litter pan, chic!), he darted back behind the couch. Whereupon he instantly came back to be pet again. Almost 24 hours to the second after arriving, he decided to walk out and start exploring.

He apparently doesn't scratch things (although he's making a beeline for my plant!) and he's not too curious. I somewhat regret the curious part, (he wouldn't push open the bathroom door, he just stared at Laura until she did it for him), but that's probably for the best in an apartment cluttered with fragile things.

And a tendency to look into the distance with the classic cat look of "Hey, what's that?!! I'm going to go investigate!" and then... turning around for another pet. I've never seen a cat ignore that look before. It's disconcerting. He should try acting more normally.

Second off: we just bought an apartment! Well, we signed the intent to buy, which isn't quite the same thing yet, but it's a good first step. We found an apartment near the train station, 30, rue du Fort Wedell, which is almost a perfect fit for us. The apartment itself isn't too big, only about 630 sqft.-- of which not all is usable because it's a mansard-- however, the building's 350 sqft. attic belongs to us, as does a 100 sqft. room in the basement that I can use as a small work roomj, and a small closet on the stair landing outside our apartment where we can keep such things as brooms, mops, kitty litter, etc. That means storage space galore, something no one ever has in Europe. That means that our 630 sqft. is 100% usable for living, since we don't have to canabalize living space for storing things.

The apartment is newly renovated, with a front door that's so bomb-proof they tell us we'll have to cut out of it's frame if ever we lose the key. It's a nice looking door, but it's obviously designed to keep the hot side hot and the cold side cold. Our kitchen is fully equipped, and is done in the "American" style, which means that the kitchen is open and simply separated from the main room by an island. It is a nice effect, and sets itself up perfectly for barstools. And there's a back shelf visible from the main room that runs the entire length of the wall. It's a perfect setup for my bottle collection. I think I'm back up to 35 some different bottle of alcohol. Not quite as high as the 55 some bottles I had in my glory days before leaving the US, but I'm certainly starting to get a good selection. I think for the housewarming party, we'll make it open bar and request that people bring a bottle of something weird and different that we would never have had.

Th renovators will repaint the apartment in the color of our chosing, and they're also going to run ethernet cabling to my specifications so that the apartment will be truly modern. We even agreed that they would install a bar on the private walkway in front of the building where we can chain up our bikes.

The neighborhood is somewhat interesting, too. One neighbor is a upscale yuppie bar, and the other neighbor is a toxicology clinic. I bet we're buying in one of the more lively quarters of Luxembourg. Not that anything that passes for "lively" here would be seen as such in any other city. It's a sleepy town.

I'll post some photos of both the cat and the apartment once I get some good ones to show.
posted by K at 3:22 PM

I went to Susan's funeral this weekend in Dijon. I left not knowing what to expect, how the atmosphere would be. It's always sad when a special person is lost to the world. However, Susan had a year to prepare for the end, and she spent that time wisely. She was one of the most energetic, outgoing, and friendly people I ever met, and she wanted to be remembered as a source of hapiness and gaity. She organized her own funeral ceremony before she passed away, asking that people do nothing more than come, eat, drink, and make merry.

Of course, it's hard to be at one's best after having lost a friend, but we tried, and we managed. It was more party than funeral, and a good time was had by all, even Susan's daughter, Virginia, and husband, Greg. She chose to be cremated and have her ashes scattered on the small creek that flowed through their yard, so after a small visit to the site along the bank, we conversed and drank the night away.

She left this world in a firey ball of energy, both physically and mentally. Susan, we miss you already.
posted by K at 3:15 PM

Last week was a sad week. I lost in less than 7 days my grandfather in New Jersey and a friend in France. It's always difficult to deal with death and dying. Susan Coller and my grandfather both had the luck and misfortune to know their death was coming. Susan had been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor of the worst kind. Undergoing an experimental American treatment, the French doctors judged it miraculous that she lived another year. She was as full of life as anyone ever was, and gave great meaning to the idea of seizing life and sucking the marrow out of it.

My grandfather passed away in the morning of his 64th anniversary. How he managed to stay with us so long is anyone's guess. His last years with us were passed in the nightmarish prison of his crippled body. He had a degenerative spinal disease that left him more and more cut off from the world, and yet, he persevered and stayed afloat. Rarely in my life have I met a man with as incisive and clear views and conclusions as my grandfather. He will be buried at West Point Military Academy in New York, where he went to college and later lived for many years after serving in WWII.

We will miss both dearly. They contributed so much to the lives of those around, and still had more to give. Au revoir...
posted by K at 5:48 PM

Laura and I are considering buying a house or apartment. I don't know why, we're probably insane to be thinking about it. Right now we have a reasonable790E/mo. rent in a good part of town that allows us to bike to work. Why we'd want to trade that for a 3,000E/mo. mortgage is a little hard to understand. Some of it must be because we're caught up in the euphoria of a possible housing bubble, but it's hard to deny that Luxembourg is growing and growing quickly. While it's true that there's plenty of space to build, I find it unlikely that the gov't will allow the space to be used to such an extent that housing prices crash. Moreover, when one sees the insane amount of construction going on in Kirchberg where we live, it's difficult to imagine that prices will do anything other than climb. Maybe not astronomically quickly, as they did these past few years, but certainly an upwards trend that won't leave us holding the bag. Or so we hope...

We found a cute "little" place in Clausen, one of the oldest quarters in the city, just down the road from the original castle that was the center of the city. Even better, it's only 1km from work! Of course, that kilometer is almost straight uphill, but that's to be expected-- it is Luxembourg after all. The down/upside of this house is that it is in an absolutely deplorable state on the inside. Everything needs to go, without question. The cool thing is that this is an older house made of stone and brick, rather than the newer concrete debacles they keep building around town. Thus, we can really make some fun stuff out of it all, especially because there are old wooden beams as thick as your body that make up the floors and ceilings. That kind of thing can't be bought today anymore at any price-- there just aren't any trees that big left.

The down/downside is the price. Even in a deplorable state, the owner still wants 380,000E. That's not small change, not by anyone's book, and it will probably encourage us to just keep looking. We sort of decided how much we could pay per month, and due to those funny laws of compounding interest, the difference between 380,000 and 320,000 is much, much more than just 60,000E. Anything below 300,000E we can pay off in ten years or less. Anything more than that and the number of years we can expect before we're done increases, well, exponentially.

On the other hand, the location is beyond belief, and the house is quite big, by European standards at least. It's about 1500 sq.ft., plus authentic valuted wine celler and attic space, so there's plenty of space for all my junk. Plus, we can probably expect some serious help from Laura's family with any renovations we might eventually do. I've mentioned it before and I'll say it again; Laura's brother Dani is a woodworking whiz. There's nothing more I'd like than to set him loose inside the house and see what he can't carve, cut, and sculpt us up.
posted by K at 7:57 PM

I wrote this back in January, but never finished it. If I were to put it in the right chronological order with the other entries, no one would ever notice it, so here it is, three months after the fact.
******************************************************

I got back from Romania yesterday. I must say that this has been the most enjoyable trip to Romania yet. The country has made great strides since the first time I visited in summer 2004, and for the first time I could actually breath the air-- well, not quite, but more on that later.

A recap of the trip from first day to last. This isn't for you, it's for me, so that I remember things. If it seems long and boring, well, that's your fault, don't claim I didn't warn you. You're basically reading my notes to myself, so if you find nothing better than "5:05-- went to bathroom. No toilet paper", don't blame me. Now, without further ado...

Dec. 20th - Laura and I woke up at a mind numbing 5AM in order to pick up Stefan and Louisa and get us all to the Cologne-Bonn airport in time for the 9AM flight. Laura had shrugged off Stefan's offer to bring along his GPS-- there really wasn't room in the car for one thing more-- so we did it based on my memory alone.

Now, my memory is a pretty good thing when it comes to directions, but it only serves to get me to the point where I'm close enough to have signs for the rest of the way. How was I supposed to know that the signs took me on a 50km detour? What can I say? This is classic for Europe, and doubly so for Germany. European road engineers are sadistic devils who love nothing more than to assume that every person who comes into a region is from the region, and thus doesn't need signs. In other words, they make their signs for the people who don't need them. Sigh...

In any case, we made it to the airport in plenty of time, especially because the airplane was late. Speaking of the airplane, we did something weird on the flight to Bucharest. We went directly there. See, the airplane was supposed to go to Brussels first and then go on to Bucharest. It makes a sort of loop, starting at Bucharest, going to Cologne, then to Brussels, and then back to Bucharest. Except this time, we didn't go to Belgium. I didn't know they could reschedule airplanes like that in mid-air, but they did.

The landing was normal, but the taxing was weird. First off, we back-taxied down the runway. This is most definitely not something that normally happens in commercial aircraft operation. Then we were met by a Dacia Logan with a flashing light clamped onto its roof, not the normal kind of car one expects to see at the airport. Not that I'm going to complain, our "detour" when we left Cologne saved us two hours, so we had time for this kind of weird stuff.

The rest of the day was spent at Laura's friend Cristina's place in northern Bucharest. Not a particularly eventful night, we just ate and then went to a bookstore (What is it about my family that the first thing anyone in it does when they go to a new city is head straight for a bookstore? Even when they don't speak the language?). I got to park Cristina's car in the weirdest little spot I've ever squozen into, but she was happy, telling me that I'd saved her life.

Dec. 21st - After an incredibly late start-- the beginnings of a trend that was broken only once during my entire two week stay-- we moved operations to Laura's old place, somewhere in the very center of Bucharest. The new apartment had all the amenities, such as running water and electricity, but somewhere someone forgot to tell the builders that running water is most useful when three conditions are met: 1) you can turn it on AND off, not just on, 2) the drain leading from the sink should be attached to the rest of the plumbing, and 3) the sewage plumbing in the house should actually allow water to pass.

At least the electricity tasted good.

We made Tiramisu that night. It was good. So good in fact, that I wound up making it later on for Laura's parents in Craiova. We also had some pasta in a white sauce, and it was good too.

Afterward, we left. Laura and Irina went to go hang out with smokers, I went to go hang out with non-smokers. Taking the immaculately clean subway, I wound up somewhere in Cringas, a Bucharest neighborhood that made Laura and Irina cringe at the thought of setting foot within, but one that I found perfectly normal. Well, as normal as Bucharest could be. I met my friend Florin, who I had met when he studied in Dijon along with Laura, and we talked until the wee hours of the morning. His girlfriend got off work at 2AM (She's a lawyer. I didn't know they worked such late shifts.) and we chatted until 5. He showed me the film The 25th Hour which I thoroughly enjoyed, although with all the NYC references and jokes I see why many people don't get the film and subsequently don't like it.

Sometime that morning we finally turned off the light, which leads me 3 short hours later to...

Dec. 22nd - The very first thing I did that morning was go to Carrefour. I don't know why, but to me Carrefour is the symbol of everything being copescetic. It's the world's second-biggest supermarket, right behind-- you guessed it-- WalMart. Something about walking its hallowed aisles makes me feel at ease, as if I were at home in the world. Or maybe the fact that I place going to a supermarket on my list of tourist activiites shows just how neurotic I can be. You decide.

Anyway, Carrefour was impressive. It had the kind of lines that only capitalism could produce. Communism could make one line for bread stretch around the block. Capitalism takes that and adds a large screen plasma TV for good measure, and multiplies it by 40 cashiers. Through wit and cunning, I only waited 20 minutes to buy a kitty litter box, Laura's Christmas present.

Later in the afternoon, having safely returned to Irina's place from my outing, I met up with Laura where we wiled away the last hours and ate the last Tiramisu before catching a train to Craiova. It was a bit of a pain to catch because, being Friday before Christmas, there wasn't a taxi to catch for the life of us, we had to take the metro. Normally, this isn't such a bad thing, but Romanian escalators work about as well as Romanian plumbing, and we had two very large suitcases with us and three smaller ones. Strangely enough, all my luggage fit into one of the smaller bags. The rest of it was all Laura's. Why one girl returning home to her parents' place needs 3 bags more of luggage than the boy without a single article of clothing awaiting him is beyond me.

After a short 2 hour trip to Craiova in a not incredibly disgusting train, we were picked up by Laura's father in his Dacia 1310. I later found out they got the car brand new 17 years ago, and since then it's been through 2 engines, and any number of repairs. This was my first time in it, however. I can't say I was shocked to discover that there were no rear seatbelts-- the taxis in Bucharest don't have them either, but I was shocked to discover that it had a choke. A choke! I mean, sure the car is 17 years old, but that means it was made in 1990. Of all the cars I've had in my life, only one was younger than 1990, but every last one of them had not only a cold-start valve, but fuel injectors to boot.

With a vroom, the massive 1.3L engine sprung to life and we pittered down the road, making sure we drove in the potholes because the road was flatter there. Once home, we got home and socialized with her parents and brother and girlfriend and then started pulling out the Christmas presents early. Laura and I had gotten them a large number of tools, as they just inherited a house out in the countryside that they were going to renovate. We bought them a circular saw, a cordless drill, a corded percussion drill, an electric sander, and a big box of drill bits and attachments. Her father and brother were tickled pink. Now that they had all these tools, they just needed something to work on...

Dec. 23rd - They made me drive the Dacia today. I can't say it was a miserable experience, but it was definitely a chore. Between getting the fool thing started-- a choke!-- and actually putting it in gear it was nigh impossible to get going anywhere with stalling it. Still, I managed, and learned that the quirky 4-speed H shifter layout-- with backwards down and left-- was actually not aligned to the car, but was canted off at a 15-degree angle, meaning that the shift from 2nd to 1st is about the same motion you would make shifting a regular car from 2nd to 3rd. That's confusing. Worse, since the shift from 1st to 2nd requires you to go down and left, and so does reverse, it's quite easy to put the car into reverse instead of second gear as you're going forward. Don't ask me how I know that one.

The Dacia has seat-belts like in older airplanes. There's a lap and shoulder harness, but the belts don't actually retract, they're just adjusted to a close enough size. This means that the seat-belt never fits right, because you can only adjust the belt with the door open, but in order to make it tight you have to be sitting down. Worse, whenever someone else drives they change everything, as simply sliding the seat forward or back knocks everything out of whack. Not that it matters, as the laws of physics (and common sense) don't apply to Romanian drivers. Laura's father's and brother's way of wearing the seatbelt was simply throwing the buckle across their lap. And I do mean throwing. No buckling involved. Just letting the buckle dangle off to the right somewhere between the two seats.

I tried disfiguring myself that night when the car battery died. They had been having problems with the battery, and her father took it inside everyone night in order to charge it overnight. During the afternoon, Laura's brother had left the lights on and had drained the battery, setting us up for a problem once the night got cold. That night, after having met up with Laura's stageiare Adrei, we went to a large super-market, for some food. After we got back out to the car, it refused to start. I tried jumping it with someone else's car, but to no avail. The car refused to even acknowledge that there was another battery attached. All the lights were off, even the inside dome light. Because the other people were blocking the way and traffic was building up behind them, I quickly decided that it was a bad idea to keep trying. And what a good idea that was. Upon removing the jumper cables, I noticed that one of them was quite hot. I marveled at this and that's when I noticed that, on this car, the red wire went to the negative terminal, and the black to the positive! Good lord, that came close to blowing up the battery in my face. Fortunatly, it really died, or else I would have been in for a nasty shock, no pun intended. I know this was my fault, but the parking lot was dark, I didn't have a flashlight, and who in their right mind connects red to negative and black to positive???

Anyway, I went inside and bought some new battery clamps to replace the one broken off by another kind man who thought he could help us, and then we waited for Laura's dad to get there. We wound up being able to start the car by pushing it, and that got us 98% of the way home before the car died 20m from home. All's well that end's 98% well.

Dec. 24th - Laura gave some money to her dad and he got a new battery. After that, we spent the day finding a Christmas tree. They were expensive. The one we got wound up costing just under 50euro, but Laura was very happy with it as it was the first time in her life that she had had a bushy Christmas tree, and not a scraggly one. Her parents too. They said that they'd never seen such a beautiful Christmas tree in their lives. After that, I don't really remember what happened. I think this must have been the moment when I started falling very sick. It was the same old, same old reaction to smokers: me blowing my nose as if it were a ship's horn.

Dec. 25th - Christmas time. The morning started with the exchanging of gifts, just like in America. (I'll remind you that in France they open their presents on Christmas eve). We doled out the rest of our presents, got a few in return, and met with her uncle and cousins. The rest of the day was somewhat of a blur as I was still sick.

Dec. 26th - still sick, but only in the evening. This day we headed out to "the countryside". Now, for me, I've always understood the countryside to be something far removed from 99% of humanity, where you see one house every 2 miles, and everything else is farms. In Romania, when they talk about the countryside, they mean any habitation that's not a major city. So, in this case the countryside was a neighboring town 40 miles away where her grandparents live. Hightlight of the trip? Having them explain an outhouse to me. Come on guys, some parts of Romania might be backwards, but not any more than parts of Kentucky!

Dec. 27th - Today we went to Pratiker, a German home improvement store that had opened house in Romania. We bought some door latch mechanisms for Laura's parents' apartment. The old one barely worked anymore, and the door handles all drooped at odd angles that were closer to vertical than horizontal. While we were there, we picked up a new kitchen faucet for the apartment, one of those nice ones that can switch between spray or stream and where the faucet head is mounted on a long hose so you can take it out of its socket and maneuver it around.

What was eventful about this shopping trip was the way we left. In Romania, no one lets you return anything for money. At best, they'll give you store credit. Now, this isn't particularly useful to us, as we don't live in Romania so we'd never get a chance to redeem the credit, and Laura's parents would never go there on their own. So I decided that it didn't make sense to buy the 40E faucet without knowing if that was a good price and whether we could even fit it into the existing sink. I told Laura that we should go see a manager and tell them that while we respected the way they wanted to do business, we wanted to just share our opinion of how things could be better. That's what I said we should do. What happened was something different. Laura wound up in an argument with the people at the welcome desk.

You see, I was supposed to talk to them with Laura being my interpreter. The problem was that she kept adding things in Romanian, things I wasn't saying, and then responding to the employee's comments without translating them back to me. This meant that I became totally lost in the conversation and couldn't really add anything useful. That's why it's a big no-no when doing direct interpretation to add anything, anything at all, even the smallest nugget. I know it makes sense to add things that seem logical, but the people speaking back and forth through the interpreter don't know that those little nuggets were added in, and so the non-verbal communication, which becomes much more important, starts reflecting realities that the other person doesn't understand. I can't complain too much, though. Laura got her message across, and they promised to refund our merchandise in case we didn't want it. It seems that even in post-Soviet countries the customer can be king.

That night, we visited a half Romanian, half Palestinian friend of hers. How to put this...? I never get why when I'm in Romania with a group of people that all speak English well, they have a nasty habit of slipping into Romanian. I hesitate to call it "rude", after all I'm visiting their country, not the other way around. But it's terribly distressing when you're left on a couch for two hours to listen to other people chatter on in a foreign language you don't understand. The first 15 minutes it's okay, you try to listen and you learn a lot. But after this first quarter hour has gone by, the conversation moves on to other things and your brain sort of saturates on the intense energy required to listen when not understanding. So that was the evening, me staring at a kid play with his toys while three English speakers ignored me. Bleh.

Dec. 28th - I was supposed to go to the countryside, but didn't think it was a good idea considering how sick I'd been. So today I spent the whole day indoors working on the sink with her parents. They were so happy about the new faucet. The old one came with the apartment and refused to turn off without you first turning it back and forth like a combination lock. More often than not, people were lazy and simply didn't turn off the faucet at all. So her father and I set out to replace it. Laura excused herself from the apartment for the afternoon, and left her dad and myself together, to somehow make ourselves understood with a combination of pidgin English, pidgen Romanian, and clicks and screeches when nothing else worked. After many hours of false starts, the day finally culminated with me wedging my entire body underneath the kitchen sink while I tightened the final pipe fittings and nuts and bolts. Her family found that hilarious, as it was sort of like one of those tricks where the Chinese man folds himself in half to fit into an impossibly tiny box. But I don't care, it worked, and now they're the proud parents of a brand new, modern faucet.

As the day turned to night, I fell sick again and retreated to the bedroom. I guess that when the sun is up, I feel more energetic and there are more things going on, letting me fight off the sickness more easily, but once night sets in and the world slows down, I no longer have the energy to keep going. I had taught Laura's family how to play Hearts, and the evening culminated with me going delirious, as I threw down my cards and proclaimed, "They're all mine!" when nothing could have been further from the truth. I'll never live that one down, as the expression on my face, and on everyone else's as they tried to understand just what sort of drugs I was on, was classic.

Dec. 29th - Countryside again. This time I went to the countryside to visit the house recently inherited by her parents. It's to the southwest of Craiova, very close to the Bulgarian border. This trip was just her father and myself. Again, we managed to communicate as we could. I certainly had picked up a bit of Romanian, enough to understand simple concepts. We chatted a bit in the car. It's funny how we take for granted the ability for the English mind to so easily understand foreigners and their accents. In fact, it's only thanks to a lifetime of listening to these silly accents that we come to understand so easily what people want.

I wouldn't be surprised if her dad had in his life met another foreigner who tried to speak Romanian, but I would be surprised to find out that he'd met more than 5 of them. Oftentimes he didn't understand what I was saying because I mangled the word too badly, and he didn't really seem to know how to make an effort to understand. It wasn't for lack of desire, just lack of knowledge. I don't think he's ever sat down and thought about what words a foreigner is likely to use, or what a foreigner would like to learn based on mangled expressions. I tried to learn how to conjugate verbs, but neither of her two parents ever understood that when I repeated two or three conjugations for a verb and then trailed off after having started with a new pronoun that what I wanted was for them to finish the conjugation. For instance, if someone said to me in bad English "I am, okay. He is, okay. You...?" I would understand that they want me to finish the sentence for them.

I digress.

The house in the countryside was nice. It was a small three room farmhouse, with outhouse out back, and a couple small shed/barns. There was a cat and a dog, too. After this short visit to their house, we drove down to his brother-in-law's bar. In an odd coincidence, both men grew up in the same small village, even though neither met till they married their respective wives. What was weird about the bar, was that it, too, had an outhouse. I can't imagine how bad that must smell.

Dec. 30th - The only day of the entire vacation we woke up before 10AM. We had to, as we were setting off for the Carpacian Mountains in central Romania. We rented a Dacia Logan off of Laura's mother's collegue's brother's taxi service. Yup, we rented a taxi. And, yes indeed, people really did try to get us to drive them around town.

Dec 31st - I have never had so much fun sliding in my life. There was a hill. And this hill had aspirations. Aspirations to be a mountain.

After all that insane real driving, they were driving those bumper cars around like old ladies. I have never, and I mean never seen a bumper car driver slow down in order to avoid a collision. What's the point if you don't hit other people? I figured that Romanians of all people would know how to crash and burn, but no, they were docile as could be. The world never ceases to surprise.

****************************************
I was going to write more, but then I lost track of things. For anyone who soldiered on this far, I hope it provided some small enjoyment.
posted by K at 1:23 PM

I am Anna Nicole Smith's daughter's father.

Just in case you were wondering.
posted by K at 3:41 AM

I think I will be going back to America in just a few days. My grandfather has been ill for a long time with a mysterious spinal cord degeneration that the doctors never knew how to explain. I almost can't remember seeing him walk. The years have taken their toll, and last year Christmas I was very happy to see him again. From what my mother says, he hasn't long left with us.

I can't say I'm surprised, we knew this was coming. As my mom said, he's dying from old age. I can't imagine how he must feel, and I'm very sorry for my grandmother. I don't know what she'll do without him. They spent 60 years living together, how will she continue apart? Will she continue? I don't know that I want to think about it. Sometimes the most beautiful things in the past are the most tragic in the present.
posted by K at 3:53 PM

New car! Well, new for us, at least. It's a 2003 Daewoo Nubira 1.8GPLi CDX that we're getting for a song. Something weird about Daewoo being rebadged Chevrolet (yes, Chevrolet!) during 2003 and this being one of the last cars sold with the Daewoo grill. Even though it's a 2003, it first hit the road in Dec. 2003 (which normally would have made it a 2004, but as I said the cars were being rebadged at the time) so it's only three years old. Definitely the newest car I've ever owned. Laura and I are flying down to Marseille tomorrow to get it. I'm carrying more cash in my pocket than I've ever seen in my life. All is good, because the weather here is blustery rain.

Pictures:
Front left
Front right
Back right
Back left
Interior
posted by K at 9:56 AM

Cars are apparently as easy to break into as ever. Not counting the numerous reports of people's cars being broken into and stolen with laptops and emergency brake maneuvers, it seems that cars are still vulerable to the old coat-hanger. Fortunately, this time, the information resided with the good guys, as I was able to open my car after Laura locked both sets of keys inside. It wasn't even that hard-- just pulling the front door handle from the inside unlocks all the doors. Matt Stacey's old Datsun 210 was a hundred times harder, as there I had to loop the coat hanger around the little knob that used to serve as a door lock.

All this is lucky for me, because when Laura locked my keys inside my car today at frisbee practice my Xanita took me maybe 15 minutes, 10 of which were just figuring out the right way to approach the problem. I'm pretty sure that next time I'll have it done in 5, and if I were really motivated, could design a tool to get it done in under thirty seconds.

Good thing I don't worry about car theft or else my peace of mind would be shot now.
posted by K at 8:43 AM

I got stopped today by customs agents as I was leaving a gas station. I wasn't at the border, although in Luxembourg every highway is near a border. They asked me who I was, where I was going, blah, blah, blah. Then they didn't like my answers and searched my car. This is worrisome to me. I did nothing wrong, had no reason to be suspected of anything, and yet they searched my car and my stuff nonetheless. They were very kind and curteous about things, and honestly I think I prefer to have my car searched by European policemen than to even have to talk to an American one, but it still bothers me that a customs agent can search my car once I am fully inside the border. I suppose it's better than having to stop at all Luxembourg's borders and go through customs there (intra-Europe borders are no longer controlled), but still...
posted by K at 10:37 AM

Two intersting things: 1) I just got 50 neodymium super magnets. Oh, joy. This will be fun. I'm going to try to make a CVT out of them.

2) In the box for the magnets came a small sachet marked "blacksocks.com". Inside the packet, there are three small black socks of indeterminate material. They feel as if they were made out of rubber. On the back side, it's marked "Jelly Candies with Cheese-Flavour". That's right, the Germans have invented cheese-flavored gummy bears. _Why_ they did that is a question for the ages. I, for one, will sleep better at night knowing that science never stops.

No, I haven't eaten one yet. If anyone wants to try them, I'll mail them to you.
posted by K at 4:03 PM

I listened to the results of the American election on Luxembourgish radio. It was impossibly hard to figure out exactly what they were saying, but I did here the two words "Democrats" and "gewinnen" a lot, and the equally beautiful "Bush" and "gelosen".

They're building a three-storey prefabricated university building right outside my window. It's rather impressive to see all the modules be lifted into place. One thing I didn't understand is why the electric sockets haven't been put in place yet-- I could see the dangling wires coming out of the wall. If the buildings are prefab, couldn't they have put in the sockets, too? The mysteries of building construction escape me.
posted by K at 9:43 AM

I was just told by one of the staff at the university that they call me "The Surfer" on account of my blond hair. I was flattered, but I explained that a more accurate nickname would have something to do with frisbee.
posted by K at 12:11 PM

Classic: http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Bonaparte

Since it's the uncyclopedia, it'll probably change faster than you can imagine, so read it now before it's too late. If I had been drinking milk, I would have blown it out my nose. As it is, it's one of the funniest things I've read in a long time.
posted by K at 1:33 PM

Classic: http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Bonaparte

Since it's the uncyclopedia, it'll probably change faster than you can imagine, so read it now before it's too late. If I had been drinking milk, I would have blown it out my nose. As it is, it's one of the funniest things I've read in a long time.
posted by K at 1:33 PM

I just got off the phone with a Goodyear application engineer in Nebraska. He suggested that they return my call, to which I replied that I was in Luxembourg. "Huh," he said, "I thought I had detected a hint of an accent."

...

...

...grumble, grumble
posted by K at 7:33 PM

I've started a new project page: http://eissq.com/HyDoR/

It's for my hybrid motorcycle project. I hope to have something to put on it every day. I'm going to try to structure my day around research and then proper note-taking of said research. To that end, the site could be dynamic, as one day I discover something and the next day I discover it's completely false.
posted by K at 1:57 PM

Ouch. Looks like Dad outdid me.

Looks as if I'll be getting current again sometime soon.
posted by K at 10:29 AM

A school south of Boston just banned tag and other sports involving running during recess. http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/18/1442218 Honestly, this disturbs me more than Iraq. I've long thought that America lacks heros because we've all been indoctrinated that there are others who fight for us (police, army, Rambo). I can't help but feel that it is exactly this sort of policy which encourages lack of understanding of what personal responsability and sacrifice mean.

In other-- more sane-- news, I finally got my car back on the road. Instead of buying an Xantia 330E fuel pump from Citroen, I got one for the Citroen Xsara (slightly more modern than my Xantia) on ebay for only 15E including S&H. Within 10 minutes of having it in my grubby, little hands, I had sawed off the piece of plastic keeping it from sliding into the original pump's place, plugged all the connectors back in, and started my car up. THe engine took off first try. Hallelujah!
posted by K at 11:51 AM

I just got done watching Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth". Quite the powerful movie, I felt, and I hope that Americans listen. It's especially graphic when Al Gore discusses what _will_ happen if the Antarctic or Greenland ice packs melt. In fact, I have to say that I agree with everything he said in the movie, and that none of it is extremism, unverified, speculation, or otherwise. Watch and listen, please.

I also felt very heartened by the ending. He made the very good point that we have already overcome one global climate problem: the ozone layer. Maybe everything isn't going down the drain after all.

Something else remarkable is happening in America, too. I was reading the posts by soldiers in the war theater, http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/, and noticed that they use the metric system to describe things. What does this portend for America and that hellish system of measurements? Surely we have only to wait one more generation before we can finally communicate intelligently with the rest of the world.

And if you haven't been there to read what the soldiers say, you should. It was Gary Trudeau's idea to give the soldiers a place to express themselves. Some of it is good, some bad, but it's all very haunting. You can forget that there is a war going on because Foley is more important than another dead 'ricain. But it's there, and for some 200,000 unfortunate Americans, and many millions of Iraqis, it's very real.
posted by K at 4:23 AM

I wiled away my night playing Civ IV. I only take half the blame for that. I went out on time to the bus stop, even early in fact, but no bus. Last bus of the night, and it didn't come. Or it came so early that it had to have left early, a situation unacceptable but all too common in Luxembourg. Sigh...

Buses here are maddening. They add more routes, with less people, and more buses. It's not uncommon to see buses empty, and it's not uncommon for me to find myself the sole rider in a bus going back to Bridel. From an energy/pollution/time standpoint I and the world are actually better of not taking the bus.

I went to a colloquium yesterday on housing prices in Luxembourg. Apparently, housing has doubled since, oh, hmmm, 2003. Wow. Talk about missing the boat. What was odd was that the goverment representative said that Luxembourg-ville actually had a net decrease in inhabitants, falling by 3,000 from its 79,000 high in the 1970s. I have trouble believing that prices doubled, to in excess of 5,000E/m^2 at the same time as population actually dropped. I think they're miscounting pretty badly. Probably missing immigrants, interns, and the like.
posted by K at 9:16 AM

Luxembourg's 24HCD has started. We've a relatively humble showing of only 7 people (well, humble compared to last year when we had 37 or so.), but they're hard at work, and I'm happy in the end that it took place here. I had misgivings- look on a map and calculate how far the following are from Luxembourg: Nantes, St. Lô (in Normandy), Zurich (!), Dijon, and Namur. Okay, Dijon and Namur were reasonable. The girl who took the train from Nantes to get to Rouen and then drove for 7 hours with some other participants was just crazy. No, really, she is. Crazy. But she's cool, and she draws incredible stuff, so I guess she's allowed to be. However, I think my misgivings were misfounded, as everyone here seems to be very happy to be here and drawing. I had proposed last week moving it to Lille in an effort to make it more accessible, but the general reaction was, "We don't care, we've waited too long for this year and nothing is going to stop us!"

Pictures to follow.
posted by K at 11:05 AM

My new bécame

I can't wait to get it back to Luxembourg and pull that giant, gas-guzzling, pollution spewing engine out and replace it with an electric motor. I'm not sure yet, but there might even be enough space to turn it into a hybrid. Now that would be cool.
posted by K at 10:05 AM

I spent last week in Trieste at the SISSA Institute. It was a wonderful week spent mostly doing science and lazing about the city. It was a surprising city, as the buildings make it look as if it were heavily inhabited, but apparently many of them are empty, and some haven't even been rebuilt since serving as a ghetto in WWII. Trieste demographically is the oldest city in Italy. We liked it, though.

On Wednesday, Laura went back, leaving me to finish up work at SISSA.

A few thoughts:

Expense accounts are bad things. Since I eat everything in sight, and since I love eating Italian food so much, I simply couldn't resist overindulging myself. And, heck, since it didn't cost anything, overindulgance became positively epicurean.

Italy is fun and I think it's my favorite place in the world.

Italians who speak English are about the funniest foreign speakers in the world. Funny in a good way. I love their accents.

Everyone loves legos, and they especially love legos when they're doing scientifically interesting.

On Friday, I flew back into Hahn airport-- inbetween Trier and Mainz-- where Brendan and Reija whisked me off to Erlangen for a frisbee tournament with Mother Tongue. A frisbee tournament that we actually won! The oddest thing was, though, that I didn't feel very different having won vs all the other tournaments where we didn't. It's not that I didn't feel good. Au contraire. I felt very good, but then again I always do. Maybe that was it. Just going to the tournament is such an exhilarating time that I don't really care if I win or lose. Winning and losing are dependent on the team, which isn't something I can control. What I *can* control though, is how well I play. And as long as I play to the best of my abilities, I can't think of any better way to spend the weekend.

I discovered allsimps.com. What a wonderful way to waste a day.
posted by K at 8:14 PM

It's been awhile since I lasted posted. Has anything happened in my life? I suppose, as each day follows another. But it was summer, and summer in Europe is always slow. People flit in and flit out, as each heads off to vacation in his or her own la-la-land. If I had things to do and were getting things done, it would be infuriating. As it is, it's more of an excuse to not have results than any real reason for the general slowness that typifies my days at work.

Speaking of work, I'm off to Trieste on Thursday. I have been invited by the SISSA to demonstrate my table at a science day. Not perhaps the most glorious of reasons (I seem to keep telling people I'm giving a seminar. Which isn't false, but it perhaps encourages false impressions), but I'm taking it nonetheless. Why not? After all, they're paying for everything, and even urging me to stay around an extra week, just to meet the lab researchers and visit the region.

Aside from that, frisbee took off, although lately it's been a bit disappointing due to the lax turnout. I guess that's to be expected, what with half the (best) players going back to college in some other country. I shouldn't complain, though, as having 30 different people show up, with many a day in excess of 20, is not quite failure. I only need to work on retention rates now.

I think I can make a linear drive out of legos. If it works, I'll post it here.

Anything else?

Had a housewarming party at Laura's new apartment. Everyone liked her apartment, and everyone liked my chocolat fondu. And I made those little cinammon tortilla chips that you get at Pizza Hut. Mmmmmm-mmm, good. Oh, and some bread with lardons and olives. That was a really spectacular loaf. I'll have to make it again later. For those duly equiped with a bread maker, here's the recipe:

In order:
350 gr of water
1.5 cc of salt
1 tbsp olive oil
350 gr white flour
300 gr multi grain flour
Enough yeast to make it rise properly. It's a light loaf, like French bread.
Use a 900g French bread cycle.
You can put it in the following right away, or wait for the beep.
150 gr of green or black pitted olives
200 gr of lardons (If you can't find these, which you probably can't, just substitute with uncooked bacon. Remember that the baking cycle will cook everything, so no need to precook it. You might tear it into smaller pieces, though)
posted by K at 10:49 PM

The first every Hat Tourney deLux is now officially over, and the results are positively inconclusive, except to say that my teams didn't win. All in all, it was quite fun, with a healthy roster of foreigners (6 or so made it from far away places). The local turnout was a bit disappointing, with only four newbies showing, but that's okay. They'll be there next time around.

A big hearty thanks to the Mother Tongue team, which much contributed so many players to the tournament that one could almost have believed that they had brought their own team. Kris, Philipe, Toan, Rod, Brendan, Wayne, April, and myself. Mother Tongue _was_ the disc.

So, 18 people in total, which let us play three-team, sloppy-fun 5-on-5 with one sub. After playing a total of three games, we switched teams up, and did it again. The overall results are unknown to me, but I think we kept them on a sheet somewhere. Maybe. And maybe even with team players on it. I don't remember.

Oh, well, time to go play frisbee again. 45 minutes to get there, and I need to swing by the grocery store and eat.
posted by K at 5:12 PM

It turns out that my first Ultimate Frisbee team in all of Luxembourg, Les Frisbees deLux, is in fact the second team! Flying Red Rocks Kayl, www.frisbee.lu, beat us out by a whole year. No hard feelings, though, the more the merrier. I'm just as glad I didn't know they existed, or else I never would have made a team in Luxembourg city.
posted by K at 11:28 AM

I should be working, but I'm playing Go instead. Don't really know what to do right now. I've got projects, but am waiting on parts. It's a lack of foresight on my part. I'm amazed when I see things like Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy. He shot the last scene first. He knew at the end what he wanted. He had such a clear vision that he could order most everything years in advance, and get it right at the end. He saw it from alpha to omega.

Myself, I have trouble seeing beyond 5 o'clock.
posted by K at 3:37 PM

Well, I made it 28 years without dental work, but now no more. I went this morning at 8AM to get a cavity taken care of this morning, one discovered because of my little fracas at the frisbee tournament in Belgium.

Thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, the dentist opened my mouth, took his rotary drill, ground out the cavity, filled it in with glue, and shooed me on my way. The only hiccough was that the cavity was deeper than he'd anticipated, but not so deep as to touch a nerve. So without anesthetic, and without a droopy mouth and tongue, I was at work before 8:30.
posted by K at 5:37 PM

I just got back from a tournament in Arendonk, Belgium, a sleepy little town with more soccer fields than inhabitants. I guess it's a dumping ground of sorts for sporting events in Antwerp, just like the Kentucky Horse Park is for Lexington games. It was quite amusing and we took fourth place. I'd promise to tell all about it, but we all know that I'd never get around to actually writing down the account. I'll probably post some video in the next few weeks, once I get it from the others.

Unfortunately, no one captured on tape the *ahem* brightest point of the tournament for me. The one where all I saw were stars and bright lights. When I got smacked across the head so hard it literally chipped a tooth. According to my teammates, who unlike me actually saw AND remembered it, the guy was a little out of control and stepped forward while throwing the frisbee, putting me in range of his quite massive backhand. Knocked me plum off my rocker. Oh, well, we won that game anyway, and thanks to the chip and the subsequent visit to the dentist, a very small cavity was discovered that had escaped undetected during my checkup in February.
posted by K at 1:17 PM

It's 10AM and it's snowing. Laura told me that at the same latitude, but in the southern hemisphere, this would be Antartica. So Luxembourg is cold. Which has been throwing a wrench in my plans to pick back up glider flying.

Last night I got in a woman's pants. And all it took was one dollar. In fact, there are two misconceptions in that sentence. First, I literally got in a woman's pants. Buttoned them up and everything. Second off, I won one euro, and not one dollar, on the bet. Nice to know I still haven't lost that girlish figure I've been working on all these years.

In other news, I've started organizing a 24 Hour Comics Day in Luxembourg. http://www.wifi-bourgogne.com/24hcd2006/. The website is great, done by one of last years participants. So, here we are again. This year, I'm throwing down the gauntlet and have got a special surprise. You'll find out about it sometime in the coming weeks.
posted by K at 3:34 PM

No real news, just a link to a website that offers a very interesting service. It's called jajah, and it lets you make a call at VoIP rates without having to actually use a computer to complete the call. Unfortunately, it still requires you to use a website to initiate the call, but that's okay. That could be done over simple dial-up, at the public library, etc.

www.jajah.com

You could use it to call me in Luxembourg, +(352)333545. (hint, hint)
posted by K at 12:35 PM

Joyous day, I just got the 24 Hour Comics Day Highlight 2005 anthology. Lison Bernet, one of my artists on 24HCD, was chosen for publication, and lo-and-behold, and she sent me one of her complimentary copies. How nice! And there, at the beginning of her comic, was a short blurb describing her comic and attributing the translation to me. Wonderful! I mean, I realize that this is completely paysan, but still, to see your name in print. And to see your words in print (I did the translation, remember?). Wow! That brought a big smile to my face. Thanks so much Lison, both for participating, and for the comic. good luck in whatever you do.

(And if you ever really want to thank me, you can name one of your now famous dishes after me. :)
posted by K at 10:30 PM

What? Two posts in as many days? Are the first snowflakes melting as they gently waft down to the ground of Hell? No, fear not, gentle reader, this is not a pace I can keep up for long. Most of all because all the news that was fit to print in my life was printed somewhere between yesterday's and today's message.

I've been on a do-nothing spree in Luxembourg, as I had the unfortunate luck to arrive at a time when everybody is on vacation, or galavanting about the continent on scientific outings.

So the last few days have seen me inside, cooped up in front of my internetless computer. Oh, how I miss the halcyon days of 24/7 internet. Soon, I hope, I will once again have a connection worth sneezing at. As it is, I had to set up my old Acer laptop upstairs and pipe the measely 56K internet downstairs via my wifi networks. Well, at least having been a wifi professional gave me some useful knowledge.

I've been studying Java lately. If anyone ever wants to learn something about it, I heartily recommend Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java, downloadable for free from www.mindview.net.

Oh, yeah, and my website detailing my master's thesis has had 15,000 hits since last week. People really liked it. I was pleasently surprised.
posted by K at 11:09 PM

I don't know why I never get around to updating my blog. I suppose it's because I want you to have expectations of quality-- that the blog is worth reading, even if there's very little of it to read. I suppose this is why I stubbornly hold to the list format of my blog. It makes it easy to pass from one post to the next without having to click one hundred times. It does seem to be getting a little long, though. I've considered using one of these newfangled web toys, like RapidWeaver or iWeb to make blogs faster and more efficient. Yet, each time I consider it, I am loathe to part from my list ways. Perhaps if I had long, well thought-out posts that expressed an opinion on something, and had a readership, it might be different. As it is, I have no idea how many people visit my blog in a given week, but I'm certain it's less than 10.

So much stuff I plan to do, and so little of it gets done. This is certainly what leads to a what could only be described as melancholy view of life. I feel good when I write on my blog, which begs the question, why don't I do it more often, then? One can only surmise that it's my profound fear of seeming dumb.

Of course, being dumb is also being human. Hrm...

Must be a balance somewhere in there.
posted by K at 1:57 AM

I just spilled a whole can of paint down my basement steps. Fortunately, I had just bought a DV camcorder to film it all after the fact. Oh, joy.

In other news, my websites got featured on www.hackaday.com.
Ball and Plate
Digitally reading analog dials
posted by K at 3:53 AM

Dad's been bugging me about this for a long time, so I'm finally getting around to updating my blog. It's been bloody forever, so here goes. Don't forget to actually read all the way to the end because I'm splitting up momentous events so that this one doesn't get too long.


Computerless: I've sold my computer. No, I'm not giving up Apple for good (although I'd love to give up their hardware. Never been so dissatisfied in my life over a hardware purchase), just getting rid of my PPC PowerBook now that the new Intel MacBooks are out. So I don't know what I'm going to do for the next long months. Go crazy?
Never! In fact, shortly afterward, I had a crisis and bought a new iMac. $1200 in America, and worth $1600 in France. So I’m hoping to sell it here for a profit once the new laptops come out.


Jaguar: the Jaguar is advancing nicely, albeit slowly. We've got the front frame completely off and are working on stripping the tub so we can decide just what to do with this sorry tub of rust.
Unfortunately, that’s all we did do before I left. Oh, well, at least the project has advanced. It’ll probably sit around another 5 years before anything gets done on it, but that’s the way of things. It was still a lot of fun.
Titanium: titanium is cool stuff. It turns out you can anodize it without any problem whatsoever, using commonly available household goods. For instance, Diet Coke and a 9V battery.


February 7th, Billy Wiseman: Funerals are good for gossip. My brother's long-time friend Billy Wiseman died from a drug overdose-- a lethal dose of barbituates. He was an odd man, insanely gifted in languages and trivia. I don't remember him well, but I do remember his massive girth at the table of academic team matches.
It was an odd visitation, marked for me more for the fact that I ran into people I hadn't even thought about in so many years. Prewitt Witherman, Byron Babs, and my old high school academic team coach (damned if I can remember her name). My academic team coach was the cream of the crop, able to fill me in on all the juicy gossip on those I haven't really seen since my college years. Take it all with a grain of salt, as it's a third-hand account. To wit:

Julee Baber: kinda cheating, I already knew about her, she's got one of those ridiculously easy names to google like, oh, say, SEBESTA. She's in Nashville, TN directing children's theatre, and apparently doing a great job. Of everyone I knew in high school, I think she's the one the most oft in the newspapers.

David Shearer: working a computer job with the Nashville prison system. Not at all what I expected for such a literary guy.

Cory Williams: living in Lexington with his wife, Amy nee Campbell. Working on a PhD at UK. I think their marriage surprised no one but themselves.

Carlye Burchett: Now married and living under the name Carlye Burchett Thacker. Pursuing a PhD in history. No surprise there.

Sasha Wagers: practicing lawyer in Lexington. Absolutely no surprise.

Amit Shah: entering his residency. No big surprise either.

Lisa Hicks: in Chicago.

Jon Kirby: in Atlanta married, in the Army, rank: sergeant. "What the hell???" is all I can really think about that one.

Anyway, that about wraps it up. I'm certain she told me other things, but I've forgotten them already. Really, this gossip serves no interest but to let an interested passer-by track down long-lost acquaintances.


Granddad: my grandfather is in a sorry state. He was admitted to the hospital shortly after Christmas. He has blood in his urine from, it turns out, seven kidney-stones in his one functional kidney. He didn't feel the pain from this because he is for all intents and purposes paraplegic. He's had a mysterious spinal cord degradation for as long as I've been alive, and it's been very sad to watch him deteriorate from walking on his own, to needing a cane, to needing a walker, to needing a wheelchair, to being confined to bed. He was a powerful man, and saw many things, and is still as alert mentally as he was when still a fresh West Point graduate in WWII. It begs the question, "Be it better to lose one's mind in a healthy body, or one's body in a healthy mind?"


Airplane flight: I had a hellacious flight to the US back in December, with them losing my baggage for eight days and me for one! Wound up in London, when I was supposed to be in Manchester. Oh, well.They’ve now lost my baggage three times in four and a half transatlantic crossings.
posted by K at 1:53 AM

Many things going on in my life recently. Since the last post, in chronological order:

I went to Dijon in mid-October to demonstrate my ball and plate table at La Fete de la Science, which is the French national science festival day. The project was a rousing success, and worked without a hitch, as long as you don't consider the occasional explosion of legos in all directions a "hitch". Great fun was had by all and I managed to program lots of neat new trajectories for my ball. To date, I can make it follow circles at different speeds (the computer can go as fast as it wants. The limitation is currently the power supply which doesn't produce enough energy for the motors), go in spirals, follow the edge of the table, and perform figure-eights. Everyone from the youngest to the oldest loved it. Jean Paul Gauthier, one of the two professors who aided me in this project, thinks we were the most popular of all the demonstrations in Burgundy. Now if only I could get Lego to believe it and send me some more legos...

Here's a bit of footage made by my American friend Greg Marshall of my demonstration. It's in H.264 format, so I suggest VLC or QuickTime for viewing it. If the sound doesn't work, don't worry, it's all in French.

The next weekend, I was in Pontarlier, a small town on the French-Swiss border, for the National Indoor Ultimate Frisbee Tournament. I played with BDM (Bon DiscManche, a play on "bon dimanche"-- good Sunday), a team that only exists twice a year, once for the indoor national tournament and once for the outdoor national tournament. They're all incredible players, so the team is quite strong and has already won these tournaments. I had played with them two years ago in similar circumstances, and they've taken to calling me "Jesus" and "The Savior" because I keep on coming through for them. I'm certainly not on their level, but I play well enough to play with them.

The weekend was quite action-packed and saw us suffer a humiliating defeat, 4-12, before coming back and going tit-for-tat with a far superior team that was not only all men-- we were co-ed with 4 men and 3 women-- but had ten people to our measly seven to boot. We wound up winning a crucial game 12-11 that kept us in the upper pool for the second weekend of the tournament, which will be held in the first quarter of 2006. I truly think that we've got a chance to win the national tournament because on the second weekend we'll have the entire team, and not just seven players. Since in indoors five players play on the field at a time, it makes a big difference in energy level when you've got only seven players vs. the teams that have eight, nine, or ten.

A little film that I hacked together of the most spectacular game, BDM vs. Flying Carpets, is here..

The weekend after that was Tout Saints-- All Saint's Day, a national holiday in Catholic countries. Laura had three days of vacation, so we went to Strasbourg to see Jerome Bernard, a French frisbee friend, fff.

However, before leaving Saturday morning for France, we made a little detour by Amsterdam. It was a crazy trip, made with the 19-year-old Russian Alexey behind the wheel of his mother's Volvo, driving like a bat out of hell. I think we made it to Amsterdam in 3 hours, at an average 160kph, even in the 100kph zones. We only went for the night, passing by Antwerp on the way back home at 4AM. Ostensibly the whole purpose of the trip was to go to Antwerp to get some suit jackets for Sergeui, Alexey's older brother that I met in Dijon a couple years ago, and some Diet Coke. Why we drove across half of Europe to pick up some of the ugliest blazers this world has ever seen (checkered lime green and white straight out of the 70s) and a 24-pack of Coke, I'll never understand, but it was fun and the conversation was good.

Once back and safely in bed, we overslept and didn't leave until late the next afternoon. So much for being early risers. Nonetheless, we embarked on our short trip to Strasbourg-- only 2 hours away-- and met up with Jerome. Not, of course, without getting lost along the way, multiple times. Giving Laura a map is like giving War and Peace to a newborn: she just puts it on her lap and stares out the window.

The nice thing about Europe, though, is that it's easy to navigate in cities because they always have canals and rivers passing through them. Just find the water that's going where you want to go and follow it. Works like a charm.

Jerome and I have a nasty habit of only talking about frisbee when we're together. Sports: the time immemorial activity for men, right? At least we're talking strategy and how we can play better, instead of rehashing games seen on TV. Nonetheless, this has a habit of boring everyone else to tears, as no one in their right mind cares about frisbee, not unless they play. Laura even refers to it as a "cult activity".

Last weekend we went meandering around the country-side as we headed off in search of the small grass airport just on the other side of the border in Belgium. We chanced across a castle in Septfontaines (Sevenfountains) that was obviously the object of a forgotten restoration attempt. Manning the battering ram, we burst in through the front gate (which, admittedly, was already broken open) and penetrated into the inner court. It was quite amazing to be all alone in a castle that was falling into ruin. Usually, they're barred off and you'd have to have a grappling hook (A purchase that would have paid off handsomely in Europe. Christmas present anyone?) to get inside. Here, though, we could sneak our heads in under the ancient oak door and go wandering on the castle ramparts.

So my current goals in Luxembourg are to advance in my frisbee catching robot plans and to make the first Ultimate Frisbee team in the country. I've already found two other players, and a couple others that are interested, so maybe we're not too far from having a first game. If the weather this weekend holds out, I think I'll try to put together a game.

Oh, yeah, and work on a PhD, too. Did I not mention that one?

P.S.: This blog isn't finished. I'll fill it in today or tomorrow. When this message is gone, you'll know that I've finished adding all the material.
posted by K at 12:01 PM

My Luxembourg address until Christmas:

25A, rue des Shoenfels
Bridel 8151
LUXEMBOURG

+(352)333545

In unrelated news, Laura made a grammar error last night that I find particularly well-suited to our modern life. She asked if we "have internet in the house". Now, normally this is an error, as you should say "have an internet connection", or the more acceptable, but also incorrect "have the internet" (A ludicrous idea in itself. The internet is, by definition, a grouping of remote computers. If these computers were in the house, as expressed by, "I have the internet in the house", they could hardly be remote, now could they? Of course, this sort of logic requires a modicum of intelligence and learnedness, so let's not ask too much of our country bumpkin neighbors, shall we?). In any case, to ask if we "have internet in the house" is analagous to asking, "Do we have water in the house?" or, "Do we have electricity?" In other words, it's become a utility, something that is such a feature of modern living that people will talk in awe about the days before everyone, even the poorest of the poor, had internet connections, much the same as when we talk about "running water" and "electricity". And Susan Summers will cry about how the poor, starving children of Africa (or Mars, who knows?) could be given internet for only $0.01/day.
posted by K at 9:34 AM

I am now safely installed in Luxembourg and have come to the conclusion that the Luxembourgois don't exist. They're all underground moles that only surface between the hours of 8 and 9, 12 and 1, and 5 and 6. Even then, you don't see them, only their hard, shiny, metal shells, bearing such emblems as BMW, Mercedes, Audi, and Jaguar. They swarm out of their garages in their houses, speed across town, and quickly dive into some underground parking before the harsh light of the sun dries out their skin too much. It is only with great conjecture and sophisticated guesswork that I have gleaned a sense of how the Luxembourgois must look.

Luxembourg has a peculiar tendency to put parking meters everywhere, even in little subdivisions where no one ever goes, and no one ever parks. You'll see a parking meter in front of a row of houses that are spaced as far apart as American houses, and nary a car in sight at 11:00 in the morning. Why this is, I can only guess. It does seem to have the effect of creating lots of garages in houses and lots of underground parking structures.

It's a sleepy little town of around 75,000 people, of which around 30% are foreigners. The European Commission has apparently had a major impact on this. It's quite beautiful, nestled in the bottom of a valley. Why they chose a valley to build their fortress is beyond me, but according to certain sources, it was considered to be the best defended city in all of Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. The old city is beautifully preserved, and with all the money flowing in, they're rebuilding and restoring what isn't.

The cathedral, unfortunately, isn't so spectacular. Dijon's churches are far more magnificent. In fact, I've seen more spectacular churches in small hamlets in Italy. That being said, you might as well poke your head in for a look if you're ever around. The beauty and awe of European churches is still present, it's just not in as abundant supplies as say, Il Duomo de Firenze, Notre Dame de Paris, der Munster dem Mainz, etc...

Luxembourg also has many magnificient bridges crossing from one side of the valley to another. This is because while the old city is in the bottom, the new city is up above.

The one exception to all this is the Kirchberg Plateau. Kirchberg is the Luxembourg quarter where the European Commission is located, and it is a planned cities. In other words, it's a subdivision that looks like an IKEA floormap. "Cars check in, but they never go out." It took Laura and I 3 hours to get to Luxembourg, 15 minutes to find her building (one of only two skyscrapers in Luxembourg), and 20 minutes of driving around and getting lost in order to figure out how to cross the road in order to get there.

Planned, yeah right. Looks as if someone forgot to "plan" for pedestrians. You know sidewalks, medians, walkable distances-- stuff like that. Trying to rollerblade in that area is just nightmarish. It sort of works right now because with all the construction many car lanes are closed and I can roll there, but good luck to me and my fellow wheeled bretheren when the construction is done.

Luxembourg is quite expensive, but manageably so. For instance, a month-long bus pass from home to Kirchberg Plateau costs 41Euro, which is quite expensive for a 4 km trip. However, this bus pas is good for all trains and buses in the entire country, not just those of the city. Of course, do remember that the entire country is only about the size of Lexington, KY, at 2500km2. Still, it's quite a deal and I sure wish I could have gotten a similar price in Dijon for all of the Côte d'Or.
So, on to a couple salient details of my life here so far--

As mentioned above, Luxembourg is a traffic nightmare and this was painfully evident upon our arrival. The Luxembourgois love their cars, and this gave us a lot of grief as we were trying to navigate the city, both to drop Laura off and to go around apartment hunting. I guess this comes from having some of the lowest gas prices in all of Europe (Gas prices which are now, even here, hitting well over $6/gal, so shut up and cope, you gas guzzling Americans.). In fact, the one serious inconvenient of our housing is that we're in a bedroom community and thus have to commute to work.

Speaking of housing, let me recount our apartment search. It all started off in September when Laura first learned she'd been accepted to the EU Commission. Within minutes, she and I hit up the web, looking for a place to stay, especially a place with roommates.

We found nothing. Zilch. Nada. None. Everything was either taken or so expensive that it was going to cost more than half our combined salaries (well, her salary, as I have none). We adopted a wait-and-see attitude. In the meantime, we continued to look for lodging with others in her group, as they were very much in the same predicament as us. No luck, as we were doubly stymied by the prices and the leases.

Let me pause to explain Luxembourg leases. No, first I'll explain French leases, and then on to Luxembourg ones. French leases are incredible documents that leve little to be asked for on the renter's side of the table. A landlord is required to sign a lease for a minimum of at least three years, but this lease can be terminated at any time by the renter with a three month's notice. (This is a million times more flexible than American leases, which are generally signed for one year, no more, no less, and have stiff penalties for early departure. Which is good, because oftentimes, the French gov't requires it's civil servants to move from one side of the country to another with very little notice, e.g. 3 days.)

The Luxembourg renting system is exactly the same as the French one, with one notable addition: if you leave in your first year, you must pay three months' additional rent, if you leave in your second only two, and if you leave in the third year of the lease, a miserly one month of additional rent

We're staying three months. Paying three months in penalties for three months of board doesn't sound good. So, apartments went out the window. Which basically left us with finding a boarding room.

Now, for any of you that would like to live in Luxemourg, and have a few hundred thou lying around, just buy a decent-sized house with lots of rooms and then let them out. At $400-$600/mo, three to four boarders can easily pay the mortgage, electricity, heat, and water, all while only taking up a fourth of the house, leaving you with all the space and money.
Anyway, back to our experience. Come September 30th, Laura sent out a plea to any and all of her fellow interns that might have a place on their floor where we could crash for a night or two. The responses were less than encouraging. In fact, the only response we received was on Sunday, a copy/paste from a recent ad put online.

Well, the ad didn't look so bad, 3 different rooms to let two at 17m2 for 400Euro/mo and one at 10m2 for 350E/mo. We tried calling the lady, and after several abortive attempts with my computer (Âllo? Âllo? Vous m'entendez???) we finally got through to her on Saturday morning. She said that she had already rented one, and that she had three more visitors to go for the other two rooms. Well, the 10m2 was far too small for the price, so we were really only considering the larger rooms. Still, one gone left us hope for the other. We asked her a couple questions about it, and based on her responses and the general "feel" I got while talking to her, we sent ahead and told her that we'd take the room sight-unseen. She said that'd be okay, but she had to at least finish with the people who had already made appointments. To do otherwise, she said, would be "Unscrupulous! Thouroghly Unscrupulous!"

Laura and I crossed our fingers and waited out the day with Greg in Couternon (a little village 4km from Dijon's center). We hadn't yet left for Luxembourg (we had originally planned to get there Saturday evening) and so we spent all Sunday afternoon haranguing the poor lady every hour-- "Is the room still available? Is the frenchman sufficiently late for the appointment for you to consider it less thoroughly unscrupulous to let us snatch it out from under his feet?" Well, finally at 6 o'clock the frenchman showed up, and took it on the spot.

Drat.

Nothing to be done about it, no place to live, no place to sleep, and Laura's stage started 14 hours later. We spent the night at Greg's place, drove to Lux in the wee hours of the morning, and each set out on our own seperate ways to find a place to stay. If nothing else, we could always sleep in the youth hostel for a couple days.

I found a newspaper of nothing but classified ads, called LuxbaZar [sic], and found quite a number of chambers for reasonable prices. Laura, from her side, found an updated list of people that rent to EU interns. Laura can make calls from her office, so she spent the afternoon calling anyone and everyone that might possibly maybe perhaps let us stay.
She winnowed the list down to three potentials, based on nothing more than their willingness to rent to a couple, and off we went at 5:00PM to go room hunting.

The first stop was in Beggen. Well, actually, the first stop was in the zoo they call a traffic mess at the bottom of the valley. The second stop was none too far away, precisely at the second stop light. The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth stops were also traffic lights. After that, I lost count. Now, why they seem utterly incompetent at timing lights in Lux is beyond me, but I swear this was the worst thing I've ever seen. Man O' War Blvd. in Lexington, KY is better than this.

So after much stopping and going, and getting lost more than once (Laura forgets to navigate once she starts talking.), we finally got there. After taking a quick stroll through the neighborhood-- and discovering the weirdest little pine tree ever, some sort of cross between a Christmas tree and a pinapple-- we rang the door bell.

A few seconds later, a squat little troglodyte cracked open the door and peered out into the glaring evening sunlight.

"Yes?"

"Hi, we're here about the room."

She led us to some sort of door which looked as if it should be left barred and chained at all costs lest the boogyman escape. The troglodyte then opened the door, releasing a wonderful waft of dank basement and mildew, and waddled down the steps. She showed us the white-washed barn door that was to open into our room, and clicked on the light. As the harsh light of a 10W lightbulb filled the room, and the haze of dust settled down, from what we could tell we were looking at a ricketly old bed with a bedspread stolen straight out of a 1970s clearance sale, a "cupboard" that could only be named as such because it was made out of boards and had a cup somewhere on it, and an impossibly small chair that would have better served to bind and gag some poor child than support my massive (70kg) frame.

Then she explained to us that they were building a new door-- "just as soon as the city gives us the permits"-- so that we wouldn't have to enter through the same door as the family. Oh, and that the washing machine would be moved upstairs so we couldn't use it anymore. And that all this would be done "without disturbing the renters too much".

I can't say we actually fled, but I do know that we didn't turn our back on her as we edged our way up the stairs.
The next location on the list was in Bridel; Bridel, like the cheese. The first thing I thought upon finding Bridel on the map-- we had to flip the map over because Bridel is so far from the city center-- was that there was no way on Earth we were going to live that far from everything. Still, Laura had made the appointment, and we were desperate, so off to Birdel we went.
Only geting turned around twice, we arrived in Bridel at a decent hour, found the address, and rang the doorbell. No one answered. We waited a minute and rang again. Still no one. I asked Laura if she were sure and she assured me that everything was correct. Except...

Aha! She remembered that the lady had said that the house wasn't visible from the street because of the big trees. Which was odd, because this house was only partially hidden behind some small shrubs. We looked around, and voila, a two-storey house nestled in the woods