Der Feuervogel aufersteht.

I went to Tromsø, Norway, for almost a week with a writer friend (from Codex). She got there the day before me (because airfare was better for her that day), and my flight didn't get in until 10 pm on Monday (because I had 4 hours in Oslo airport, so boring). Our goal was to see some northern lights, and we definitely did. This year is the peak of the 11-year solar cycle, so it's the best opportunity.

On every bus or minibus, my companion and I were the only people wearing masks. Covid or not, I've started to enjoy not getting every damn cold or other respiratory virus that's going around.

Tuesday we went on a minibus nature tour around Kvaløya I think, then we went to a fancy place for dinner (Mathallen), which was the indulgent meal of the week (at 1450 NOK for a 5-course meal with a beer and a glass of port). On the way back to our lodgings, we saw northern lights over one of the mountains across the sea.

Wednesday we took a much larger bus trip to a Sami reindeer farm, where we got to feed reindeer (and pet them if they let us -- they are SO SOFT in their winter fur), eat soup (we're both vegetarian, so neither of us tried the reindeer one), and learn a bit about Sami culture. We were supposed to go sledding, but the weather has been too warm, so the conditions were bad, and that was cancelled. After that, we had a hot tub on a boat (in the harbor). It was extremely cheap and extremely sketchy, but we had a nice view of the sea and the mountains from the deck. I don't remember where we had dinner. I think we had bread at the apartment? I think it was too cloudy to see anything in the sky.

Thursday we went to a bakery for second breakfast (coffee! cinnamon roll!) and then on an excursion to the southern point of the island (Sydspissen), walked along the shore until the wind was too much for me, went on An Adventure in a public woods/park, then opted to stop in the university museum because it was heated and not obscenely expensive. There were exhibitions about geology and the Sami, including one from the 70s that hasn't been updated (or translated into English) and looked a bit problematic. That night for dinner we went on a little cruise (max 12 guests) out into the sea to watch for auroras. Dinner was vegetable soup or salt-boiled cod with boiled potatoes and carrots (very traditional Norwegian). I had the fish, and it was really nice. Caught that morning! The guy who runs the tour lives on the boat and is a fisherman, and he pays a chef to do dinner. We ate while he sailed us out away from the city lights, then we saw some nice auroras.

Friday morning we slept in a bit then went to a coffee shop for second breakfast and picked up some groceries for an early dinner (semi-fresh tortellini with pesto calabrese), because Friday was the new moon and the day we booked our minibus aurora hunt (which left at 6 pm). They drove us a good 90 minutes away from Tromsø to a mountain by a fjord, where there was absolutely no light pollution.

The sun and the atmosphere cooperated so much. The lights were SO bright that you could see well enough to walk. You could see them DANCING. At some points, you could even see the colors with the naked eye because they were so strong. I took a zillion photos, and hopefully some of them turned out well. The fancy camera app I don't know how to use had a lot of graininess, but the native pixel camera app did a lot of smoothing, so some of them came out weird.

I still need to clean up the 50 GB of photos on my computer for duplicate, then I can offload these to my computer and figure out how to use Affinity Photo editor.

Saturday we had nothing scheduled, but we went to get lunch at the Palestinian restaurant (it turns out I extremely do not like fuul mudammas) and picked up semlor at the bakery (I forgot it's almost Lent, so now all the fancy pastries come out). Then I went over to meet Arctic Roller Derby. I only planned on saying hi and picking up merch, but I borrowed skates and joined them. It was fun! They're a very small league, and there were 2 newbies and the coach, so we did some newbie drills. Derby culture is such that when you travel, you see if there's a league where you're going and meet up or go to practice or something like that. So I can now say that I've skated with the northernmost roller derby league in the world!

Then we ate dinner at home (vegetarian meatballs like from Ikea with leftover calabrese) and started packing, because we both left on Sunday. (I came home; she's in Oslo.)

Sunday we went for a walk after breakfast then back to the bakery for another round of coffee and pastries, after which we went back to the apartment and chilled until it was time to go. The Tromsø airport is small and cute, and the only thing I bought there was a tiny bottle of Arctic gin. Her flight was a couple hours after mine, so she putzed around town or something until she had to go to the airport.

And today I had to work, and at some point I need to go to the plant store because my kalanchoe has bugs (aphids probably) so I need to kill them and repot it. I can't bring it into my room because it is extremely deadly to cats (I got it before I knew I could get a cat). There are a few shelves where I could put it, but they get no sunlight. I'm going to go see what I can do with some vinegar and Q-tips.

I'm going home for a few weeks in June, and in the middle I'll be off to Minneapolis for 4th St Fantasy. (I'm a very intelligent person and remembered that I have frequent flyer miles. Turns out it's less than 30k miles from Baltimore to Minneapolis and back!) Am I going to see anyone there?

On the way back, I'm stopping over in Reykjavik and spending 3 days there with my sister. It will be interesting. She hasn't travelled internationally since the early 2000s (maybe even pre-9/11), so I'm making all the spreadsheets and packing lists and all that, because a) it's what I do and b) it'll make her feel better. We're staying in a hostel because it's so much less expensive than a hotel, and that was an interesting conversation to have. (We're getting beds in a 6-bed women only room, which has a private bathroom, rather than one on the hall.) I asked her what she wants to do while we're there, and she was like, "I'll just follow your plans." Which from seasoned travellers would irritate me, but she's not a seasoned traveller, so I hope she likes viking museums. (I've also got swim in the public pools/hot springs/whatever on my list, because everyone says that's the thing to do.)

I've got half a mind to brush up my Old Icelandic, which would be about 75% useful for reading and 10% for speaking or listening (hahahahaha sound change), but everyone there speaks English anyway. (It won't be like when I was in Denmark and Sweden last year, when my Duolingo Norwegian got me through reading signs pretty well. OK, that and the fact that I spent 3 years learning dead Germanic languages and the various sound changes that occurred, so I used my German, English, and Norwegian vocabularies to make an educated guess on the Danish or Swedish signs, with reasonable success. But absolutely failed at pronouncing anything properly or understanding anything spoken.)

Tomorrow after class I'm driving to Atlanta and hanging out with Ally (Midnighter comics and ice skating boys), because she's driving me to the airport on Thursday.

Then I'm going to Austin for http://glac2017.weebly.com/ ! My poster arrived safely at the hotel yesterday, according to the postal tracker. I'm going to hang out with Laura, who lives there, Thursday afternoon before the conference, then there's a grad student gathering in the evening for dinner & drinks. The conference starts Friday at 8, bright and early.

(Ugh, they rearranged some of the panels, so there are some I want to go to at the same time :/ More than there were before. But it looks like there are a few mostly empty spots, so I might be able to work on memorizing Old Icelandic vocabulary...

Tomorrow I'm flying to Juneau for a National Geographic cruise. Anxiety brain is giving me all sorts of scenarios involving weather and flight delays (we have a 1-hour layover in Seattle) and missing the boat. Thanks, brain.

Heading off to San Francisco this week for Thanksgiving. Flying out at 5 pm and getting in super late, so I don't miss the last lecture of the semester in my Russian class. (On something really complicated and important: verbal aspect. Which the book explains poorly.)

Finished sorting all the things from Shatterdome ATL 2 (jaeger boogaloo) and repacking things for Ben's brother's wedding, for which we will be traveling longer than it takes to get to Europe yet not leaving the country.

The wedding is on Orcas Island, which is a 2-hour ferry from somewhere in the Seattle area, and the ferry station is a 2-3 hour drive from the airport. Then we have to get from the ferry to the resort. I seriously do not understand how anyone can live on a remote-ass place like that. I feel isolated in my semi-suburban town on the edge of a moderate metropolitan area.

So we're leaving here at 8:25 am and getting to Seattle at 1:25 pm local, then our ferry leaves at 7:20 or something. At least we'll have time to pick up some food for lunch-dinner when we get there. We only need to be at the ferry port 90 minutes beforehand.

What I have left to do today is clean the cats' water fountain and paint my nails. Then I need to pack my toiletries and other carry-on things in the morning.

Also, I registered for class at UNC this fall, where I'm taking Russian 101. Whee! I can get 2 semesters in before I start at UGA (if I'm accepted). ... I need to work on my application materials, but I'll do that after I get back from the wedding.

I've actually been here a while; I got into Frankfurt at 1:30, then I loitered in the train station until the next train at 2:53.

I got to my apartment, showered, ate dinner with my flatmates, and went out shopping. I have gouda, fruit quark, cream cheese with garlic, vollkornbrot with sunflower seeds, hanuta, and beer. I feel like I'm in Germany now.

I also bought the SIM card for my phone, so I'll post my German number in a separate locked post. Next I'm going to try to get this Surf-Card working.

Greetings from Martha's Vineyard, land of shitty wifi reception and cold wind.

I had my first one-on-one today with Teresa Nielsen Hayden. It was less terrifying than it could have been, and she gave me good feedback. (I know; she's an editor, that's her job.) Tomorrow I'm one-on-one with Bear, ack. I don't have my group critique until Wednesday.

Though I broke down in tears while giving feedback because the story was about a woman grieving for her dog (and also her husband), and a couple sections hit really hard. Like way too close to home. So that was a thing that happened. I started talking about the parts that were just spot on, and I couldn't. And I apologized for ugly sobbing in the middle of group :/ A lot. But I may have spawned a story to tell future students, about the student who started bawling and it wasn't even her critique! Eh.

Interestingly, this was at heart the same story I submitted, except hers was about a ghost dog in now-ish here-ish, while mine was about ghost war dead in 1917 Dresden. But hey. Using ghosts as a metaphor for the grief process. (I pointed it out, and Doyle said, "hey you're right, I didn't even notice that!" and then stated that the outline doesn't matter, but the execution does.

Have pages of notes and recordings of the lectures so far. My phone says it can record 176 hours, so I have a lot of space and don't need to worry much about clearing it out. Though I hope the sound quality is good.

I saw bioluminescent jellyfish! It was fucking cold, but magically glowing jellyfish!

I am terrible at Mafia and Thing. Somebody told me I was really quiet (because I wasn't really participating in the Mafia game), and that's something I haven't been called in a really long time. Though a couple folks said I was less garrulous than they expected from twitter. They'd just missed an epic wide-ranging conversation I'd been in (though I also don't want to dominate the conversation, which I know I can/will do).

I have been cured of scurvy, and I hope I can be cured of it again tomorrow.

And now I sleep, assuming the wifi works long enough to post this.

Spending some sister time until I go to Bethesda to meet someone for lunch.

I ran into Richard in the train station, and it turned out he was going up to DC with a couple friends for one of their bachelor parties. So I sat with them on the train, which means I didn't get as much reading done as I wanted to, but I'll have plenty of time Monday.

Agora was good. I tried Imam bayildi, a stuffed eggplant dish I've been wanting to try to a long time, and I had falafel. Yay falafel. It was perfect, actually, crisp outside, soft inside, and green from herbs. I love falafel.

Apparently the Safeway on 17th and Corcoran is called the Soviet Safeway. It seems to have earned the nickname.

I slept on a tiny loveseat, and it was actually fairly comfortable.

My sister is reading Marvel 1602, which I find amusing. She's also stopping to google everything, from Wanda to King James, which I also find amusing.

I'm going to ReaderCon, which is outside Boston, and I'm flying Thursday & Monday. I believe I have a room for Thursday night at the con hotel, but I'm looking for space Sunday night.

I don't need much space; a couch will work. My flight out is at 12:45, so even allowing 2 hours pre-flight, I won't need to be out at the crack of dawn or anything. I have no major allergy problems, but I will need to be able to sleep undisturbed lest I get a migraine. If you have allergy problems, be warned that everything I own is covered in cat hair.

I do not yet know how I'm getting from the con hotel (in Burlington) to Boston. I may be able to get a ride to Alewife, or even someplace more central, depending on the charity of others with cars. (There is reportedly a bus to Alewife, but it comes every 2 hours.)

I also do not yet know how I'm getting from the airport to the con hotel, but since my flight arrives before noon and con things don't begin until 8 pm, I'll have some time to kill in the afternoon. Possibly even toward 6 pm dinner, if people can be gotten together by then. (Boston friends, I haven't seen you in ages.)

I may enjoy playing tourist in your fair city, but I'll still have my luggage with me, which doesn't sound like a fun game in July. I haven't actually visited much of Boston, so that could be fun, as long as I can leave my bags somewhere. (They will be minimal, as I'm flying carry-on-only. But lugging a backpack around for 6 hours isn't my idea of fun.)

ANYWAY! If you have a bit of crash space I can borrow Sunday night and/or want to show me cool things in your city, let me know!

Hi!

I'm back from WorldCon! I blogged about it yesterday on my blogspot blog. I have 2 more posts to make on the experience, and I'll link all 3 later.

So, my taijiquan school hosted a pair of masters from China (one is Chinese, the other is English, but she lives in Shanghai and translates for him). One of my kung fu brothers studied with them while he was in China, so he organized the thing. (Master Wang and Master Rose were traveling in the UK, then Canada, then here.)

It was cool. There was a lot of lecture and some practice, but I learned a couple new ways of looking at things for push hands.

They had a little flyer for a camp they're doing the end of next November in Shanghai. Tuition is $2400 (for 9 days of training and some sightseeing, including room and board). Airfare will probably be around $1200, then there's the matter of a visa (fees, idk, $150?) So, like, close to $4000 all told. I don't have that sort of money.

Of course, I also have health issues, and I don't know how much sleep I'd be able to get. Breakfast is at 7, and there's classes until 9:30 (with multiple rest periods, so I could nap then maybe). Then there's the thing where I don't eat meat and I can't have caffeine. In Japan, I got by with telling people "Buddhist vegetarian," since to them no meat means there may be fish or pork or chicken in it :/ (The term is shokudou ryouri.) I don't know if they can accommodate that.

I do have contact information, and I can ask Master Rose these questions. The low sleep triggers migraines thing kind of sucks. I also like being able to eat.

So anyway. If they can accommodate my food restrictions and health issues, I'd probably try to find a way to get four grand. A friend of mine had success with indiegogo for tuition for a prestigious Shakespeare school; I don't know if I know enough people who'd do that to help (or what goodies I could award). I could probably ask Dr Jay if he could spread the word throughout the school or help me fundraise somehow.

But Ben was like "I wanna go too," not that he'd train; there's an option for going as a partner for $1600 (plus airfare). :P So then it's more like $7000. Gah.

I dunno, what do y'all think?

Wednesday morning, I drove up to Maryland for Thanksgiving. I stayed with my grandparents for multiple reasons: 1) my mom's guest bed is dreadfully uncomfortable, 2) her house is smoky and gives me migraines, 3) Grandpa's 87 and Grandma's 82.

They live in a retirement/assisted living apartment complex. They're in one of the retirement buildings. If they need to, they can move into the more assisted sections of the facility. They've been there 13 years, and they love it. Their apartment is cute, 2 bedrooms, 2 baths, living/dining room, tiny kitchen (there's a cafeteria on site).

Anyway, the drive up Wednesday was fine, if windy and periodically cloudy. I discovered that popping my sunroof decreases the sideways motion when the wind comes up hard. I didn't hit any traffic until Fredericksburg, though it persisted the whole way to 270. 495 wasn't as bad as 95. I got to NoVa around 2:30 or 3, then I made it to my grandparents' around 4:30. So a tad over 7 hours including 3 stops.

We went out to an Italian restaurant for dinner, then I showed them all my travel photos. We started with last summer's European vacation, then I paged quickly through the Berlin Xmas trip and Japan. Grandma said I travel a lot. As often as possible!

She gave me a bunch of stuff from Bath & Body Works, which always has a perfumey smell to it. Ah well. I also got socks. Grandma likes putting together little bags for us, and they've usually got shower stuff, socks, jewelry, etc in them. So I said, "yay, socks!" and she asked if I wanted more. She apparently just buys socks at the store when she sees them, and she sticks them in a drawer to either give to people or replace her socks when they wear out. So, anyway, I ended up with a dozen new pairs of cute socks. She also gave me a fleece vest, a sweater, and a velvety hoodie. And a copy of The Kite Runner. And a brooch that was her aunt's.

I also ended up with 2 bags of Nestle chips (1 milk, 1 semi-sweet) and a slice each of cranberry and chocolate pecan pie. (Let me tell you, chocolate pecan pie is fucking AMAZING. I bet it would be awesome with hazelnuts instead. Nutella pie? Hell yes.) Every year at Thanksgiving, Grandpa makes three pies: one either pumpkin or pecan, and two cranberry pies. He takes the pumpkin/pecan and one cranberry to mom's for dinner, and the other cranberry he eats for breakfast for the next week. Mom will eat the leftover cranberry pie for breakfast, too.

Thursday morning before we drove out to mom's, I sat with my laptop and wrote some more of my spy story. It's up to 2000 words, and I just finished the second entry (the one that was partway through in the last locked post). I'll see about doing more on that tomorrow. Today I've been catching up on teh intarwebs and doing laundry. Tomorrow I need to clean the bathroom, but that won't take all day.

I took mom most of a jar of sauerkraut from the farmers market. It's really nice, fairly mild stuff. Ben & I can always buy another jar, and I want to try it with caraway. Because I bet that would make it more awesome. Mom enjoyed it, and so did the grandparents. For years, I thought I was a bad German because I hated sauerkraut. As it turns out, I just hate the kind of sauerkraut that comes from bags in the supermarket.

My grandfather grew up in a German immigrant community in Pennsylvania. His father, who was born in Silesia (now Poland), had a friend whose house they'd go to that always smelled funky. They made their own sauerkraut in their basement.

So mom, G&G, my sister, and I all hung out at mom's for a while. Bin brought a quiche and some veggies for roasting (squash, beets, potatoes, carrots), I brought stuff for the sweet potato casserole which went over so well with Ben's folks last year (and equally well with mine this year; I xeroxed the recipe for Gram), and mom had everything else (except Gramps' pies). "Everything else" was a turkey, corn, green beans, rolls, cornbread stuffing, appetizers, and gravy. The only things I couldn't eat were the turkey and gravy (made with beef fat). Mom actually read the labels on the stuffing packages and determined that the Pepperidge Farms one was OK, but the Stove Top one had chicken something in it. Go mom? She just didn't read the gravy closely enough. (Which is fine; I'm not big on gravy as it is.)

We ate a bunch of food; everyone loved the potatoes. We sat around and talked while waiting for there to be room for dessert. All of us but mom talked politics and world news; thankfully no one there is knee-jerk Republican. Let me assure you that discussing things with my family is less stressful than with Ben's dad, because they don't treat living room conversations like they're Socratic inquisitions.

The grandparents are registered independent, which in MD (and NC) means you can vote in either primary. They think the current crop of GOP presidential candidates are really out there. I have no idea how I got to be the way I am--engaged with politics, interested in knowing about the world and seeing the world--growing up with my mother. She's completely uninterested in current events, news, politics, or traveling. I can't imagine being so completely isolated and insulated.

After dinner, grandma brought out this envelope from the Maryland Anatomy Board and asked if we had any objections to them donating their bodies to science. I think that's pretty awesome, even if it's a somewhat morbid Thanksgiving dinner topic.

Grandpa drove us back to their place, which was a little scary. (I mentioned that he's 87, right?) We talked a bit more before getting more sleep.

Friday morning, Grandpa made scrambled eggs, and I put mine on toast because I like them that way, dammit. We talked a bit more before I had to leave. I only hit a little traffic on 495 in Virginia, near the Woodbridge/Manassas exit. I left a little after 9 and pulled into my garage at 2:30, including 2 or 3 stops. Not hitting NoVa traffic makes a big difference. (Well, on the way up, there was more traffic on 27, and more cars at the stop lights, and I hit very little traffic on 27 on the way back.)

It was a lot of driving for a short trip, but, like going up for the 4th of July party, it was worth it. I'm not really close to my family as a whole, but Gram and Grampa have always been there. They're the reason I had clothes in high school.

If we had functional mass transit in this country, I'd go up more often.

- call grandparents about what we're doing for dinner tomorrow
- email mom about more planning stuff
- pack [clothes picked out, toiletries not ready yet; don't forget phone charger]
- email vet re Isis' blood sugar
- bake sweet potatoes & get 2 cups mashed to take up [start at 4:30 so only have to heat oven once]
- make gingersnap crumb topping
- make next/final attempt at alternate history spy story
- writers group @ 7
- get directions to grandparents' house

I think that's everything I need to do today... I've got all the refrigerated stuff I need to take up sorted in the fridge, and I'll put it in a cooler in the morning.

I'm not really looking forward to a 6-hour drive by myself tomorrow (and another on Friday), but my grandparents aren't getting any younger.

I actually got back Tuesday night, but the prospect of wading through a week's worth of RSS feeds and flist was daunting, so I played Gundam instead. Then yesterday I caught up on the reading part and played Gundam. Today I'm actually updating this thing then playing Gundam.
( this is long )
The Amtrak adventure, like the road trip adventure, is not one I'm looking to repeat. As much as I resent security theater and distrust the calibration of the pornoscanners (and their safety), flying takes a mere 2-3 hours (plus travel to & from the airport), and can be done on the same day. 16 hours each way is inefficient. If we had modern train service, real high-speed service like in Europe, the Durham-DC route would be 2 hours (per the Economist article I linked months ago), and DC-Boston 3, with the price to match, no doubt. (So flying would still probably be less expensive and shorter, but not by a significant amount once you factor in travel to & from the airport.) It was nice to see my sister, since I don't get to very often, but even so.

Next year should be fun!