Still editing photographs from the trip. Nothing new on this page, but if you look at the Photo Gallery or the Honeymoon section you’ll see some cool new stuff.
I’m not halfway through yet.
The good news is that I don’t have to pet the cat anymore. I’m sitting on the sofa and she’s sitting next to me, sitting up on her hips, not in the way you normally think of cats, and is now content just putting her paws on my hand. This makes editing photographs challenging.
I’m reminded of the old LBJ line about Walter Cronkite’s shift on Vietnam. This isn’t exactly that, but the premise is similar. When President Obama loses Rolling Stone, he’s got problems:
Like the attacks by Al Qaeda, the disaster in the Gulf was preceded by ample warnings – yet the administration had ignored them. Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even before taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency’s culture of corruption. He permitted it to rubber-stamp dangerous drilling operations by BP – a firm with the worst safety record of any oil company – with virtually no environmental safeguards, using industry-friendly regulations drafted during the Bush years. He calibrated his response to the Gulf spill based on flawed and misleading estimates from BP – and then deployed his top aides to lowball the flow rate at a laughable 5,000 barrels a day, long after the best science made clear this catastrophe would eclipse the Exxon Valdez.
What’s happening in the Gulf is heartbreaking. It is economically, environmentally and culturally devastating. And there’s enough blame for everyone. And a lot of people deserve it. But the fingers are starting to point to the administration and, let’s be honest, this group isn’t that good at image or body work. Oh they’ve benefited from an admiring media, but now that a few journalists on the beat are doing journalisty things this is going to get ugly, in a hurry.
And a lot of people deserve the blame. And none of it will fix these precious, delicate, important places. Now that Rolling Stone has come around to that others will soon follow. Working in this White House won’t be much fun, I’d guess.
I’d like to contribute an idea on how to stop the leak. By taking all of Hollywood’s tapes of the upcoming Twilight movie reels and stuffing the film in the hole we might be able to slow this thing down to a trickle. We’ll also have the added bonus of not having to see the movie later this month. And just think of the positive publicity for the franchise. And we wouldn’t have to watch the movie!
site / Tuesday — Comments Off on What day is it? Who am I? 8 Jun 10
When I get all of that under control I’ll have plenty of other things to share from the trip, too. There’s an hour of video to produce from the ship excursions. I brought back a ton of things to scan, too. I figure I can carry this through the summer.
Monday — Comments Off on Did I mention I had 798 things to read? 7 Jun 10
It took two days, fairly constant, dedicated days of reading, to chop my RSS reader down to just a few dozen items. But I also waded through all of my Email, too, so it has been a productive two days, I suppose.
We made cheeseburgers tonight. Brian came over to watch the series finale of 24 with us. He turned us onto the show at the start of the fifth season. Somehow we managed to watch all of the back episodes between DVDs and syndication since then — and now all of those Nina jokes make sense! — and have always enjoyed making fun of it with Brian. We realized this evening that we’d never had a 24 watch party with him, so this was fitting.
And the finale was good for what it was. It did the jobs it needed to. It had a few minutes to satiate the anger-management crowd, it wrapped up what turned out to be a good plot for the season and gave Jack an opportunity at redemption (even as they did the Dark Knight ending) it had a few howlers. It wasn’t excellent great, but the endings for this show have always been awkward.
I’m certain that if a movie weren’t in the works the last 30 minutes of the show would have been entirely different. Seems I’m not the only one. So now we wait for the movie.
Nothing else to wait for here. I’ll be editing honeymoon pictures starting tomorrow. I wonder how long that will take.
I didn’t sleep nearly as long as I thought I would. I was fully prepared for a 22-hour Rip Van Winklian experience.
As has been the custom for a while now, a big day of travel requires a day of staring at the walls. I did laundry and started catching up. After the 17 days out of the country I have more than 150 Emails and 798 items in my RSS reader through which to navigate.
I spent all day on that and, well, at least I’m making a dent. I’d post links, but most of them are now a bit dated.
But I’ll give you this, mentioned yesterday, the Small Things I’m Looking Forward to At Home list.
Private dining tables with space between you and the next customers
Evenly paved roads
Not walking everywhere
Cheeseburgers
Drivers who obey a few of the traffic laws
Being in a structure that isn’t moving
The gym
These aren’t criticisms, but rather appreciations of our own routines.
It will be nice to relax a bit more in my daily travels. It will be lovely to have a private conversation at dinner. Every we were was very compact. We walked on so much marble and gravel and cobblestones that we wished, after a day or two, that we’d brought a pedometer — and ankle braces.
I’d longed for cheeseburgers very early on, which is ridiculous because we were eating incredibly delicious meals everywhere we went. Still, you just want a cheeseburger. We’re grilling out tomorrow night.
You think traffic is bad in your town? Drive in Istanbul.
I’m ready to be stationary. Aside from the last night in Rome we have to think hard back to the last time we weren’t inside something that was conveying us one way or another. This, isn’t a bad thing. We had perfect seas for the entire trip, on only one night could you really feel the ship swaying at all. But sitting still has its own pleasures.
As for the gym, I mentioned the food, right?
Wendy came over for dinner tonight. She wanted to go to Olive Garden. We just came back from Rome, and so we laughed at her.
I mentioned the Auburn people we met in Rome, Athens and Pompeii, but it was still nice to hear a familiar accent. Maybe that should have made the list.
Speaking of Auburn people, did I mention that the guy in the stateroom next to ours was an Alabama graduate? Small world, indeed.
So I’m trying to catch up. Expect this to be a very redundant read until I get back up to speed. But enough about me: How’ve you been?
honeymoon / weekend — Comments Off on Returning home (or: How Kelly almost stranded us in London) 5 Jun 10
On the one hand, it doesn’t take weeks to do this like it did, just a few generations ago.
But then again, this is one long day.
We caught a cab from the hotel to the airport, which is just outside of Rome. There is a fixed fee rule for cabs in Rome, so at a certain point you just pay the maximum. The hotel called us a cab and we were picked up by a guy in a suit and a Mercedes Benz van, which seemed a bit odd, but the price was right.
And riding to the airport — rather than walking to the train station, fighting luggage, exiting the train and then figuring out the airport — was absolutely the right choice. Our flight out of Rome was around 10 a.m. We left a bit late, but with no problem. From Rome to London is just over two hours. We had a small layover at Heathrow, but our plane couldn’t find a place to park. So we waited on the tarmac at London. And then we moved to another space.
We breezed through the first two stages of airport hassle with great ease, but I realized that was foreshadowing.
British airport security operates under a model of dispassion and inefficiency to which the TSA aspires. Somehow we packed a snow globe in the carry on luggage. You couldn’t just see that through the x-ray machine, but have an hourly worker go through every nook and cranny of the luggage.
With a grim, humorless determination she found compartments we didn’t even know existed in our suitcase. The snow globe, which was for Kelly, got left behind and is no doubt making someone in London very happy tonight. (Sorry, Kel!) This story goes on and on, but the big concern was that our plane back to the U.S. was running out of patience. We’d actually gotten off the plane in Rome with only 10 minutes to spare before our connection. That layover had suddenly evaporated.
But, someone with British Airways said, our next flight was delayed as well. We stayed in security — not in the line, but waiting to go through our luggage — for about 20 minutes. And then when we had to catch an airport shuttle. And then we had to hustle down the terminal. And the plane was still sitting there, patiently waiting for us. The crew were still wearing their smiles.
We got on the plane, they buttoned up and we took off. For our in-flight entertainment this plane offered an on-demand video system. I watched Robin Williams’ latest HBO special.
When you laugh out loud on a plane people tend to give you long looks.
So I toned it down a bit, following up with Sherlock Holmes. It was decent enough, but ultimately forgettable in that special way that comes with a lot of Robert Downey Jr.’s movies. I suspect the inevitable Moriarty film will be a worthy sequel.
I watched I Love You Phillip Morris, which hasn’t even been released in the U.S. yet. Jim Carrey is brilliant and this is probably one of the better comedies of the year. Just watch the trailer.
If it ever gets into the U.S., and you like off-the-wall dark comedies, you’ll probably enjoy it.
I finished the flight — yes, the trip takes this long — with Invictus. Well, I almost finished Invictus. Don’t spoil it for me! They were in the final match, just after the stirringesque Matt Damon speech to rally the troops when the flight crew began making their landing announcements. They turn the screens off for the PA system, and they were a bit wordy and redundant. I believe I could have made it if they’d made just one less anouncement.
And now I’ll never know what happens.
It was still late afternoon when we landed in Atlanta. We, as Americans, have been in four countries in the last two weeks. The one the most difficult to enter has been our own. You land and grab your checked bag way too easily. You make it through passport control where a nice gentleman welcomes us home. We are instructed to drop off our checked bag for another inspection. We are instructed to go through another set of metal detectors.
I asked one of the TSA agents the logic, just to hear the answer. It is, of course, unreasonable to assume that this TSA agent knows where I’ve been, but I’ve passed through two airport security stages today and haven’t left either controlled environment. Basically, the answer goes, is that they don’t trust the security at London or Rome (take that Allies). They don’t know where we’ve been, the “standards” of those airports or the “quality” of the security there. So, TSA figures, you’ll just pass through security one more time.
We walked through metal detectors to exit the airport.
And this will sound sarcastic — but after 17 days in Europe and Asia Minor and having compiled the Small Things I’m Looking Forward to At Home list and a day’s worth of airports I mean it to sound sincere — I love this country.
We finally made it out of the airport, having worked out this security issue and realizing, yes, it makes sense. The downside being that the airport’s design and not the policy itself. The TSA agent’s charming answer, though, “So we can keep you safe,” still annoys.
Our friend brought our car. She lives on the opposite side of the town, which could be an extra hour or more in Atlanta, but she set us up so we could head home straight from the airport. We have thoughtful friends.
My goal was to get across the state line before darkness, which we just barely did. My thought was that when the sun disappeared I’d start dragging, which I did. Fortunately we only had an hour to go. The last bit of road was no trouble. We made back to Birmingham, Ala. from Rome, Italy in 22 hours. I unpacked, threw the first load of clothes in the washing machine and, now, I’m going to sleep for a really long time.
