The Mandelbear's Musings

... so I still haven't done a full con report -- it's been almost a week -- so in the interim I'll just refer you to last week's "Done Since 2025-05-25" (posted on Monday) and "Thankful Thursday" posts. The only parts of the trip it doesn't cover very well are the songs we sang ( "Millennium's Dawn" deserves full S4S treatment), the hotel (the breakfast and dinner buffets, included in the room price), were noteworthy), and the travel.

Right. The travel. Tips:

• Don't leave anything in (travel guitar)Plink's case -- it could delay inspection (and did, at Hamburg).
• On arrival, stay in the plane until somebody tells you that your wheelchair is ready. Hamburg again.
• If you don't look disabled (like m, for example), take a cane and hobble out of the plane with it. This is especially true for Schiphol -- the Dutch tend to be ablist.

Yesterday N, m, and I had a good band practice/conference, including more tweaking on "Millennium's Dawn", scripting for several songs that still had only two-person arrangements, and harmony arrangements because we finally have someone in the band who can reliably sing harmony. We're also going to want a keyboard. Or two, since m is leaving tomorrow for Seattle.

Health-wise, I don't think I'm doing all that well, so it's a good thing I have an appointment with a cardiologist soon, as well as with an oncologist.

If you're interested in word origins, check out the Online Etymology Dictionary, which includes some fascinating articles as well as the dictionary entries.

( Notes & links, as usual )

A pretty (surprisingly) good week. Considering everything that could have gone wrong... Okay, pretty good if you ignore US politics. But I've spent the entire week in The Netherlands, so I don't have to worry about it until I get back, except at night when I can't get to sleep.

Lots of walking. Which I haven't been logging for some reason; I may have to go back and correct that manually in the file (but not this post). But I've been getting in a decent amount every day except Friday. (My goal on $G Fit is 3,000 steps/day. I don't always reach it, and hardly ever hit $G's goal of 150 "heart points", which represent minutes of "vigorous" walking, but don't take hills and stairs into account. Seattle is full of hills like the one just east of our house, and Dutch houses are nororious for their steep stairs.)

Let's see... Sunday and half of Monday were about travel -- we arrived at 8:15, took the train to Leiden, and checked in at the Golden Tulip (within sight of the station) somewhere around 10:30. After dropping our bags there, we went with j to his new apartment. It's gorgeous vaulted ceiling, wood (pine?) floors, and up a flight of steep stairs.

Tuesday we checked out and dragged our bags up those stairs, then went out with j to buy housewares. Then we took an Uber to our hotel in Den Haag. Which was expensive, but we didn't want to have to get our bags on and off trains. It would have worked fine except that the hotel is on a street that's closed to auto traffic. Oops. After that we took public transit everywhere -- dead easy once we got used to it. The OV-chipkaart works sufficiently like the Seattle area's ORCA card to be familiar.

Wednesday we vegetated.

Thursday we went to Leiden and got j a nice used e-bike. Heavy, but that's what the motor is for. Good place.

We went out again for groceries, because j's Albert Heijn is better than the one across from the hotel. Still has some weird gaps. I have not been able to find either distilled water or chewable calcium carbonate antacid. Not at the local drugstore, either -- they carried distilled water but it's been out of stock all week, near as I can tell. WTF?

Friday we went back to Leiden to help j bring home a second-hand table. The shop is marvelous -- I'm assuming we'll be back from time to time. N and j carried the thing home -- a half-dozen or so blocks -- while I wrangled doors and so on. Naturally it picked that time to rain. Getting it up j's stairs was arduous (for N and j -- I stayed out of the way).

My bladder is behaving itself so far. My back and hips a little less so, but I'm managing.

Link of the week: David Attenborough's Natural History Museum Alive (2014) - YouTube (AKA "David Attenborough's "Night at the Museum".)

Not a link to the thing itself, but Everything, Everywhere, All at Once was a really fun movie -- I watched in the plane on the way over. Hard to describe -- just see it if you have a chance.

( Notes & links, as usual )

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is New York and Leiden.

Naomi and M make it to New York. Things promptly go sideways...

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is In case you were wondering... (why the Chicago to New York post is late).

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Oakland and the Zephyr.

Next, Colorado and the Midwest.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Who Knows Where the Time Goes?.

Yeah, I know, it's been a looooooooooooong time. We've all had other stuff to deal with. But N is going on a trip tomorrow -- across the country by train, then flying from New York to the Netherlands. So it's time to go sideways once again!

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Postcard from Florence, July 2022. You're getting a postcard, a day late, because Naomi's been taking care of two sick kids and I spent yesterday as a zombie thanks to a COVID booster (Moderna, bivalent). Bivalent apparently means that it can kick my butt twice as hard.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Traveling With a Guitar. It's been hanging out on the sidelines since sometime in July, waiting for a day when the planned weekly post didn't get finished. That would be today, when two kids' first day of school and three cats' vet appointments collided somewhere along Aurora Avenue.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Ay-yi-yi-yi, The Open Road is Home.

We take a break from the Italy trip report to tell you about the road trip, which is finally happening even as we speak. I’m writing this from a Best Western in Barstow, California. If all goes as planned then we’ve got two more days till we get to Albuquerque...

It's immediately followed by a Bonus Post – Photos from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, because the Aquarium deserved a post all by itself. If were reading this blog before 2012, you'll know that it was a frequent weekend destination for me and my family while we were living in the Bay Area.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog (following last week's out-of-order interruption) is St. Peter and St. Christopher, recounting N and j's visit to St Peter's Basilica in Rome, followed by a bit of an adventure getting back to their hotel.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Another Country. The world's smallest country, as a matter of fact.

I'm not sure why this is coming out so late -- the GoingSideways post came out Tuesday. Well, better late... It's been a weird week.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Scattered Chunks of Antiquity. N and j visit Rome's Jewish Quarter and Piazza Navona, and encounter random bits of history in between.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Last Steps (Italy). Read about how N gets ready for a month-long trip.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Traveling With a CPAP.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Frankly, It’s a Truck, wherein C finds, buys, and names a pickup truck.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Putting It Together -- planning continues for both the Italy trip and the Colorado trip.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Lime Soda.

Am I frustrated at all of the obstacles? Yes and no. This kind of adjustment and adaptation is really the essence of my Going Sideways method of travel.

[...]

Travel plans are like battle plans: they never survive contact with reality. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

What does that have to do with lime soda? You'll just have to read it to find out.

[...]

Meanwhile, here's a bonus signal boost: Fiction: Mushroom Chat by dialecticdreamer, written in response to my prompt on her latest Magpie Monday.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Catching Up to Now - getting caught up with the recent past, and plans for the near future.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Shipping Out -- Naomi's visit to the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam.

I don't seem to have signal-boosted the last few posts in GoingSideways.blog -- time to fix that.

Impenetrable is probably the best post so far:

It sounds so much like a fairy tale, doesn’t it? First there’s a long climb, high into the steep and scary mountains. Then you hack your way with swords into a place called the Impenetrable Forest. And it’s all in order to meet a kind of gentle giants who live nowhere else in the world… giants who are almost, but not quite, human.

Cut and Run, wherein the consequences of Breaking the First Rule finally catch up with her.

At that point, the determination which had kept me going through six hard days of illness gave out. Screw it, I thought — why am I still pushing myself? I’ve done all the things that were most important to me here. I’ve visited rhinos and I’ve boated on the Nile. I’ve seen chimpanzees up close, and gorillas have walked up and touched me. I’ve gutted my way through three different camps despite severe illness just because there were a few things I didn’t want to miss, and I haven’t missed a single one of them. Now I am DONE.

And today's post, On the Water, wherein Naomi starts the last leg of her trip, visiting her oldest friend in Amsterdam.

Right now, as I write, I am touring Amsterdam on a boat. I am also living, for the week, on a boat. Different boat. Amsterdam is very big on boats. This happens when your entire city is below sea level and therefore most of it’s built on piles just to keep it out of the water.

The latest post in GoingSideways.blog is Trip Diary: Breaking the First Rule.

What first rule, you wonder? Well, they do depend on who you ask. My mother’s first rule was always, “Never hit anything that’s harder than you are,” and a good and sensible rule it is. Thankfully, I didn’t break that one; thataway lie broken bones and concussions. But I did do something maybe even stupider. I broke the first rule of international travel, the one every tourist hears the moment they announce their first expedition beyond the boundaries of their own country (at least if they live in the west)...

For the last couple of months I've been working with pocketnaomi on her next crazy project -- a travel blog called Going Sideways. It just went live about an hour ago (as I type this). You may have seen it referred to as GS in my weekly "Done Since..." posts. We're starting off with a bang -- Naomi's 6-week trip to Africa starts on Wednesday.

The blog is called "Going Sideways" because if you have chronic health problems getting in your way you may have to sidestep them, but they shouldn't keep you from having adventures altogether. (The subtitle is Epic Journeys with Medical Baggage.) Our mascot (see icon) is a crab named Chance, because crabs walk sideways.

Naomi is the principal writer. I'm the WordPress wrangler and social media manager, though I'll also write the occasional post, mostly about my travels with Colleen.

The big event this week was Mom's 95^th birthday party (her actual birthday isn't until the 28^th). About a year ago, when it was still in the planning stage, she'd asked me to write a song for her. Needless to say, I was blocked. A few weeks ago, all I had were a couple of lines and a vague sketch for the rhyme scheme. I got on the plane Thursday with those two lines on a piece of paper. And no pen.

It actually went more smoothly on the netbook. By the time I got to Mom's I had two verses and the start of a bridge, minus a couple of lines. By Friday night I'd taken out the lines I was stuck on (having decided that trying to rhyme three lines in each vers simply wasn't working), finished the bridge, and added a repeat of the first verse.

The song, Ninety-Five Years, came off surprisingly well.

The plane trip was hard on my back; a hot bath and naproxen helped. (But I had neglected to refill my naproxen bottle, so I'm going to have to get through today and tomorrow on nothing but hot showers and stretches. Ouch.)

I've been having fun catching up with relatives (including several cousins once removed that I didn't even know about), and did a fair amount of singing last night after dinner.

Aside from that, it was a fairly productive week at work (what little there was of it), and I had a good night out with Colleen last Sunday).

Well, "Ship of Stone" didn't win Best Classic Filk Song (again), but it wasn't because of my performance in the Pegasus concert -- I turned in what was probably my best single performance so far. Hopefully I'll be able to post a recording soon. I'm still mildly boggled by the amount of positive feedback I got.

I need to practice more -- the fact that I was able to perform off-book helped a lot. And record. It's time I started working on Amethyst Rose again. Past time.

Not as many conmversations as I'd like, but a few, and a couple of new people. (Whose names I don't remember.)

Uneventful trip. I ended up getting a limo because there wasn't enough room in the van for five people, their luggage, and a scooter. We did manage going to the hotel, thanks to a full-sized SUV rental.

Packing was disorganized; I managed to misplace my laptop charger (in the side pocket behind my folding cane), so I bought an overpriced one in the airport. I don't mind too much; it's one of the new, tiny iGo's that I've had my eye on for a while. It has long enough cords that I can just leave it in the rolly. Next time I need to pack either a lightweight backpack, zippered tote, or sling bag to go under the seat with my laptop, magazines, and snacks; next to the CPAP. (Which gives me a good excuse to put both Rolly and Plink up in the rack.)

On the other hand, having Rolly partly packed ahead of time helped quite a bit; I'll be making that an ongoing practice.

Links in the notes.

Did I mention that I hate roller coasters? This last week has been one.

Tuesday started out great -- Naomi picked me up and drove us down to Cortiva, her massage school, which was having a free clinic day. I had two lovely massages, concentrating on my back, shoulders, arms, hands, and calves. N's new GF was there, too. We had a couple of nice talks.

Then at 4pm I was in a suspiciously small meeting with Ryan, the manager in charge of the Disney ID group, who had hired me back in October. Sure enough, there had been a surprise budget cut. My last day will be March 8th.

Same day as the house closing. Oops.

From there it was all downhill; I gave the bad news to our real estate broker, who at first said to go through with it anyway, and then had second thoughts. Thursday I spent packing, trying to work from home, fielded a phone call from a headhunter and a phone interview with Limelight Video Platform. (I now have three headhunters and one company recruiter working on the problem, and it looks as though there won't be much more than a few weeks of gap between jobs.)

I also spent Thursday getting more and more fragile and frazzled; by the time we got to the airport I was pretty much a wreck, and by the time we finally got in to the hotel and got to bed I was seriously depressed.

Sometime Friday morning, while I was out at Fry's buying a new power brick for the netbook (I'd brought one; I just didn't realize that it was still set up for Colleen's Dell), I got a call from the mortgage broker, Kathryn, who said that the deal was still on. She'd explained to Dave that, although Disney had terminated my contract early, I was still employed by the contract agency, KForce. SHE UNDERSTANDS!

Now, if only the underwriter understands. That's still a risk, and I'm not going to be comfortable until I have the keys in my hot little hands. It could make my last day at Disney rather interesting.

And we could still end up with no house, and a pile of new furniture in our living rooms. If that happens, Naomi wants to build. I think that could work, but only if we can figure out ways to cut the price drastically; a first cut put the construction costs at around $700K, which is about twice what I'd feel comfortable with.

This old spectacled bear is, I'm afraid, also a skeptical bear.

But, after spending much of Friday afternoon chasing down pay stubs and bank statements and emailing them to Kathryn, I felt much more relaxed. Margaritas, prime rib, and hugs from friends completed the process, and it looks like I'll actually be able to enjoy the con.

Did I mention that I'm at Consonance this weekend? I apparently hadn't mentioned it before, leading to several people wondering whether we'd show up this year. There were times when I had my doubts.