To Germany

So... check out picasaweb.google.com/piqueen for the photos of my trip. I've spent one night here thus far and my system is still utterly and entirely out of whack. I left the evening of the 28th just exactly as the second horrible blizzard was moving in. When we boarded the plane the expanse of concrete was still just glassy with melted flakes, but by the time we taxied to position to takeoff, I could barely see out the window -- and what I COULD see was only white. We sat out there for an hour before we took off, which was long enough for the passenger beside me to reveal a large number of personal details whose revelation I intentionally did nothing to elicit. The airport was a miserable cauldron of exhausted and unhappy travellers who had waited too long and who knew they were apt to wait much longer. Here's a picture taken from the line waiting to get into the maze waiting to go through security, which I stood in AFTER I spent an hour and a half getting my bags checked.
This next picture was taken under the Frankfurt Airport somewhere, after the delay from Denver caused me to miss my connecting flight to Munich. In the three hours I had to burn there, I managed to get my passport stamped twice -- one saying I came in and one saying I left again, but I couldn't get the customs fellow to stamp it a third time. My friend Bernd met me in Munich and we got on the Deutsche Bahn (DB) straight back to Frankfurt, then on to Mainz, where it is currently 11pm (or 23).
Today we went to the Gutenburg Museum, where I saw the oldest objects I had ever seen -- handwritten Bibles from the 15th century. Johannes Gutenburg invented the printing press in Mainz in the 16th century -- Mainz has been around since 50 BC, and by the 1400s it was a big place on the map (though Munich did not exist yet at all). After that museum came some bread with cheese, then we walked to see St. Stephan, the church whose stained-glass windows were actually painted by Marc Chagall -- they didn't photograph well, but you can see them here: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Chagallfenster.jpg
After the church I saw what now rank as the oldest things I've ever actually seen in person: the remains of Roman ships, unearthed when the Hilton was being built in downtown Mainz. (There are two pictures from that museum on PicasaWeb, but the Gutenburg Museum was very strict about people not taking pictures.) Bernd says that Roman artifacts are underground so commonly in Mainz that construction projects have been known to pretend they hadn't found them, just so the contractors can get their work done.
An hour ago Bernd's dad blew out the candles on their Tannenbaum. I need very much to go sleep now -- tomorrow is Silvester, New Year's Eve, so it is doubtful that I will make a blog posting, but probably I should be able to get some more pictures up. Thanks for reading -- and may your Neues Jahr 2007 be exactly the mix of adventure and peace that you most prefer.

Whole Potter Set

Here they all are. The most recent one is the second row from the top, furthest to the left -- Catalan, brought to me by Ingma, the very generous significant other of a Spanish researcher by the name of Lalo Salmeron. My second most recent aquisition is the furthers to the right, the second row from the bottom -- Vietnamese, brought to me by Aaron Hart as he ventured across the world. I just finished a class in phonetics, the very specific diacritic system of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and Vietnamese uses what looks to me like a fantastically complicated accent system -- it must be a tonal language.

Linguistic Tetris Insomnia

If this blog gets posted, I will be amazed. The amount of time I spend writing blogs compared to the number of postings I’ve made -- it’s nothing short of embarrassing. I don’t know why that should be, given that I write and save files all day long, so one would think it would be no Herculean feat for me to upload a file after writing it, but it’s like the vortex that prevents hand-written letters from being mailed. I swear there’s an unnatural force that prevents me from addressing and mailing letters I’ve written. I have letters I wrote as long ago as high school that never saw the magic of a postage stamp, and it’s become rather an interesting collection.
Point being, I doubt you’ll read this. If you actually do, welcome to finals week.
My brain is utterly fried. There’s a fire in the fireplace and the music playing is the music that played soundtrack to my pledge to love Brian forever. It always derails me, and tonight derailment is a mercy. I keep involuntarily writing grammatical trees for these sentences I’m writing. it’s just like when my brain forces me to play Tetris involuntarily when I have insomnia, staring into the blackness continuing the mental activity (or repetition) that filled my day, same thing with tiny elements of Sudoku puzzles after spending an hour doing them.
Perhaps what I write keeps not getting posted because I read over it and decide nobody should read it, then I never work up the nerve to post it. I’ll bet that’s it. But diagram that sentence, man! Holy smokes! A subordinate clause using a relativizing pronoun, a transitive idiomatic phrase with an oblique locative and a complement clause and can’t o this anymore. I know that’s all wrong and I can’t get my brain straight. I just finished 7 hours of writing a final for my Morphology and Syntax class. It’s totally mad, but honestly it’s a rush. Being a 9 to 5 professional for five years got a tad slow; this is stressful, challenging -- and I’m being asked to describe like why categories should be defined if languages’ most universal trait is their tendency to violate their own rules.
Man, my sentences are long. I try to stck short ones in every now and again so your brain doesn’t have to get all convoluted just like mine is, but I can’t help it -- my sentences are just always long. I have to post this right now or I’m going to get unsatisfied with its quality and never put it up. The thing is that I have this poetry I’ve written in the bus over the semester, a set of poetry about stress and dissolution that I keep trying to type up and post on here, but I keep getting distracted. I have my puppy, my fire, my man in California, and the rest of the night to play Sudoku and eat cookies.
This picture is called Introspection, just in case some Colorado summer could brighten your day. God knows it could brighten mine.

At a coffee shop reading through the thousand pieces of prose and poetry I've typed up already, trying to find some clue as to how to approach the goliath task of getting paid for it, I come across this one in Spanish:
__________
Un arco-iris murmurando en mi mente

Me hace ver que la vida sigue

Respirando

Renaciendo en la sombra del invierno

Y creandose de Nuevo con el camino peregrinado de la tristeza.

-6/7/2002

_______________

A rough English translation, a couple words changed for flow:

_______________
A rainbow whispering in my mind
Shows me that life goes on
breathing
being born once more in the shadows of winter
and recreating herself in the peregrine wanderings of sadness.

_______________

The Collection Unveiled

So it only took how many weeks to post this picture? It's not even close to complete either; this shows 16 books and I have 25. These things are great; each one (or nearly) had to travel across the world to get to my living room, so I've decided that I'm making it a life goal to travel to the countries from which they come. That means that anyone who sends me a Harry Potter chooses a new country for my go-to list. At first it only mattered the language of the book, but now I don't care if I have duplicates -- the only important thing is the country where the book was bought (and that they're all the first one, the Philospher's/Sorcerer's Stone). Here's what I have now in the order they're on the shelf, which originally did have some systematicity I can no longer remember:
1. Scotland, thanks to Chet N.
2. Malaysia, thanks to Lynn S.
3. Czech Republic, thanks to Diana R.
4. China (Western format, from Taiwan), thanks to Ron C.
5. Croatia, thanks to Gordan and Malia J.
6. United States, thanks to Kelson A.
7. Finland, thanks to Brian P.
8. France, thanks to Bernd O.
9. Germany, thanks to Bernd O.
10. Greece, thanks to Heather and Brian R.
11. United States, Denver -- Greek, before I made the rule that US-bought ones don't qualify
12. Isreal, thanks to Banana B.'s mother whose name I don't know
13. United States, Denver -- Hebrew, before I made that rule, same day I think
14. Italy, thanks to Heather R.'s officemate whose name I don't know
15. Japanese, thanks to Jacob H. His gift was the original book that started the collection.
16. Latin -- bought in US, so... Vatican? -- thanks to Turtle T.
17. Poland, thanks to Brian P.
18. Brazil, thanks to El Pirata in Blacksburg
19. Portugal, thanks to Luis P. L. G. F.
20. Mexico, Oaxaca, thanks to me (and Ivan and Katie for inviting me to their wedding)
21. Puerto Rico, thanks to Maria F.
22. Thailand, thanks to Katie (whose last initial I am never sure of)
23. Canada, thanks to a Canadian fellow I worked with years ago and no longer remember well
24. Viet Nam, thanks to Aaron H. (I just got it this morning! It's utterly gorgeous!)
25. Catalonia (Spain), thanks to the girlfriend of Lalo S. (This book arrives next week with her.)

So! Yay! I'll take France and Germany to their homeplaces in December and 4 of my 22 destinations will have been reached -- the U.S., Oaxaca in Mexico, Germany and France. There are still so many countries out there! If you go somewhere not on here or if you have a relative who lives there, I'll pay for the book and transportation, of course, plus you'll get your name on here and you'll give me another lifelong travel destination. Right now the two I'm really hoping to get are Arabic from any country (which might not exist) and Korean, but I think the easiest ones are English from England or Ireland and all the other European countries not on here (Sweden, Denmark, Non-catalonian Spain etc.).

I'm going to post this before all my work gets erased again. Happy Sunday!

My Harry Potters

On a shelf in my living room live twenty-something versions of Harry Potter, each one brought to me by a friend or an indulgent coworker -- the internet would make it too easy, so there's been a rule that the books themselves must have traveled across the world to reach me. It has become a life goal of mine to travel to the home nations of all my beloved Harry Potters, and I will be shocked if I succeed. I am proud to present...

Tucker Time

This is Tucker, our new puppy. He's a Miniature Australian Shepherd, and he's a fantastic little guy. He just had surgery to be neutered and he's been a serious pain ever since. We found his breeder by googling mini aussie -- we didn't know they'd shrunk Aussies down to minis, but we knew we wanted the intelligence of an Aussie without the exercise requirements.

Maryanne does clicker training because the behavioral modification is fun to watch -- because it's a game Tucker loves too -- and both Maryanne and Brian are about equally disillusioned with electrical stimulation collar work, because while Tucker certainly pays more attention, he also hates doing it, so it isn't fun for anyone.

Tucker obeys sign and spoken commands for the most basic things he does -- Sit, [lie] Down, Come, Place (a command meaning he should go to his bed or another place in the room that is his), Crawl (army crawl), Ring the bell, and to a lesser degree Stand, Say Please (where he sits on his haunches with his paws in the air) and Tippy Toe (where he stands as tall as he can on his hind feet). For some reason Tucker's more responsive to visual gesture commands instead of spoken ones.

Tucker's favorite passtime is trying to get Niko, our 3 and 1/2 year old calico cat, to play with him. He fails. She doesn't detest him, she just doesn't think he's very fun to interact with -- her version of playing is being willing to run FROM him rather than planting her claws and spitting dangerously. I've not yet seen her initiate play, but I think she will eventually.

Brian and Tucker in Breckenridge 10/06