I enjoyed Venice for the most part. It was small and quaint and the crowds weren’t as intense as many places we visited. We could actually get a glimpse and feel of local life rather than just a blast of tourist kitch.
Our rental was on the second and third story above a shop. The second floor was the tiny kitchen and one bedroom and the third floor the bathroom and another bedroom. Then there was a steep narrow ladder that led up to a tiny roof top deck. Our travel companion was not very trusting of the construction and refused to sit up there with us. I figured if it had clung to the roof for this long, it was likely to continue doing so.
These are some of the pictures I took from that vantage point.
One of my best photos is of this lone accordion player. He sat in that spot for a couple of hours every afternoon/evening and really put the final touches to the Italian ambiance.
This was a great spot to watch the life of Venice. We were off the main route to the tourist hotspots, so we saw a more casual group of people.
There was a small restaurant just a few doors down and the crowd was lively until almost 2am every night. Lively but enough to keep me awake. It was more like atmosphere. I know for a fact that I fell asleep with a smile on my face
We are back from our world travels and have recovered for the most part. It takes three or four days to really get back into your normal sleep pattern and home routine. I’m 95% back to normal and ready to get some work done.
I have yet to crack open my novel but am working up to it. I have some great ideas for later and will get to it eventually. For now, I need to get back into the day-job routine and make sure the I still have a income.
I have a total of 3302 pictures and videos to sort and edit from the trip and have barely scraped the surface. I will add a few here as a teaser. Keep in mind these are just taken with my cellphone. I haven’t posted any pics from the big camera and have high expectations.
Venice does not smell like a ditch – pleasantly surprised
I have failed to find ANY bad Italian food!
There are millions of steps here! My legs are tired.
The traffic is INSANE!! But I think every single Italian is a better driver than every American. I saw no accidents.
There are no malls. But there are little shops and restaurants on every corner.
I never saw a straight road.
The seafood here is amazing.
We found an Irish pub in every town we stopped in. I don’t need a Guiness every day, but I want to know where to get one when the need arises.
Venice by gondolaSpanish steps in RomeRoman ColoseumStolen Egyptian artifacts at the Vatican MuseumsDome of Vatican MuseumsExit of Vatican MuseumsColosseum and ForumSolerno
Now that the temperatures have cooled to the point where I’m not completely melting away, I’ve been spending a portion of my weekends working outside in my yard.
The project I completed this weekend was to install some stairs down to our driveway from the back door. We have a small porch and some wooden stairs to the ground but there was still a slope down to the gravel parking area. At one time there were stairs but they were removed to pass inspection to sell the house. We’ve put up with the stoney path for three years, but it tended to get slick in the winter and we’ve both taken spills on it.
My task has been to reinstall steps along the same path. I used landscape pavers left over from past projects and only installed them into the dirt rather than with concrete. We will be remodeling our back stairs in a couple of years and adding a breakfast deck so the stairs will be replaced with permanent then. At this point, I just needed some sturdy temporary steps.
I started at the bottom of the slope, dug out, and leveled a place for each step. I was very much making it up as I went along. I had a sort of plan and just made it work. I think it turned out alright and my wife is very satisfied. She now wants a handrail and I happen to have some old steel pipe that I can repurpose for that project. Details of that will be posted when complete. But next, I need to dig up an old foundation in my yard.
My very first experience of international travel was to Salzburg, Austria. I was working for an Austrian company, and they sent me to the headquarters in Salzburg for training. I studied German in both high school and college but had never tried it live – so to speak – and was excited. I was traveling with several other Americans, several of who had made the trip before. But I was the only one with any German skills at all.
Our hotel was close to old town Salzburg and not far from the castle. As soon as we were checked in, they all suggested we go to Planet Hollywood for a PIZZA! A PIZZA?? …in Salzburg, Austria. I was shocked and disgusted and ditched those losers as quickly as I could.
I mean, I’m in Austria for Chrissakes. The last thing I wanted to do was go to an American Restaurant! I wanted to experience Austria as Austria, not an Americanized vacation version.
I enjoy trying new things and I think this particular trip is where that kind of started. I was in a foreign country and in my mind that meant you try the local food. Why would I fly halfway around the world to eat something I can get at home? What’s special about that? Who wants to hear someone brag about eating a pizza in Salzburg? No one! I want to hear about the bier and the wurst and schnitzel! The real Austria.
So, I set off to explore the city on my own. I barely spoke the language, had no idea where I was going, and my cell phone barely worked in the country. Yet, I had a new camera and a sense of adventure.
I ended up walking down to the river and getting some great pictures of the Mozart Bridge on the path along the bank. The area had an amazing Old World feel and I was soaking it up. Then I found a little bar/restaurant nearby.
I sat at the bar and asked for a menu; it was in German of course. I wasn’t bothered because… adventure! I had no idea what I was ordering but I just pointed at something and ordered a beer. The beer was stronger than I was used to but lovely. However… dinner turned out to be a cold cream of tuna… “something”. I wasn’t sure what it was. All I could do was laugh at my situation. Of course, it was going to turn out to be something completely weird that I would never eat on purpose. And yet… it was delicious! It was by far the best mystery meal I have ever had.
I did save a picture of it. Maybe someday I’ll go back and find out what it is.
Now, I don’t recommend doing the random menu item trick. But… definitely explore the local cuisine. Travel to explore the world, not to experience what you can get at home. Foreign travel should never feel like a Disney version of a foreign country. It should be feel, sound, smell, and most certainly taste foreign. My wife and I like to go on food safaris to experience as much as we can. Even when we travel to new cities we want to experience it. We want to taste the local food and the local beer and eat at local restaurants. Foreign travel should never feel like home. It should feel like an adventure and new foods better be part of it.
Postscript:
After a search of my memory and Google Maps, I was able to actually locate the restaurant in Salzburg. Flavour…weinbar restaurant is still there and they still have the same dish on the menu. It turned out to be Vitello Tonnato, an Italian dish made with boiled veal in creamy tuna sauce which is served cold. I highly recommend it!
Our trip to Italy is a mere thirty days away and my wife is fit to burst! This weekend it really got to her and every once in a while she would reach over to poke me and squeal. She is SO excited!
Yeah, she is still a giddy schoolgirl at times and I appreciate it.
Our big task this weekend was to pre-pack our suitcases to finalize our wardrobe and accessory plans. Two pairs of pants, two shorts, swimsuit, three pairs of shoes, etc. along with all the expert travel accessories we’ve accumulated: vacuum pack bags for pillows, foldable spare suitcase for souvenirs, ponchos, adapters, etc.
We’ve done this a few times and we end up packing less and less each time.
We will check-in our large bag (only ¾ full) and our scuba gear bag. My carry-on will be a backpack with camera gear, guidebooks, and one change of clothes. Sheri will carry her backpack with travel details, laptop, all wires and adapters, and one change of clothes.
As I said, it is a month out from our trip. We do this so that we have time to order things we will need or, as in my case, time to break in the new shoes I just bought.
The basic fact is that I can buy almost anything I need on my trip at my destination. Why pack it all there only to pack it all back? Because, as Americans, we are trained to do it that way. We see our parents pack three suitcases for a week in the Ozarks. Movies display this kind of packing all the time, where the wife needs an entire bellhop cart for her luggage. It is ingrained in our images of VACATION! That is training is really hard to get over. But experience is starting win out.
In reality, I could go through the entirety of Europe with two pairs of shorts and a couple shirts. And as I get older and more experienced, I get closer to that ideal. Even now, as I write this, I feel the need to trim my packing a bit. I mean, how many pairs of underwear does a guy really need? Honestly?
If only we could capture The moment of connection The electric fire and energy All cosmic flowers blooming That moment That microsecond Before rinsed away By the wash of time Of thoughts and senses Living and life And forgotten Lines and lyrics And visions lost <sigh> For want of a notebook
We’ve probably all had those flashes of brilliance at completely inopportune times. The perfect lyric or book title or even snarky comeback that strikes while you’re in the checkout lane, or in a public toilet, or walking the dog two blocks from home. If only you could remember it you could prove to the world how absolutely brilliant you really are, but…
You never remember it quite right and you never ever have a notebook. Damn!
In 2023 I took a six-month break from writing in order to get a professional certificate (PMP for those wondering) but I’m now trying to get my creative juices working again. My current situation is that I find my brain full of ideas up to the point of actually putting words down. I enjoy outlining a scene or a blog post or even an entire novel plot. Yet, when it comes to actually creating the prose … my creativity locks up and lets me down.
Other than being creatively cramped, I find myself completely full of advice for ‘others’ to follow. I’ve got an endless litany of pointers and guidelines and tricks for the beginner or struggling writer. And yet … I struggle to take my own advice. The old saw about teaching immediately comes to mind: Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. I don’t want to be that guy; I’m not qualified to teach. I want to write.
The trick I’ve been foisting on others lately while failing to do myself is: Write yourself out of the weeds.
It is an extension of my most quoted advice: Write all the words, even the crap. Which is an exercise meant to get the gears moving and to keep them moving.
Writing your way out of the weeds is meant to take the gears that are now moving and use them to find a direction for your writing. Write so much crap that you eventually write your way past your block or hangup or whatever was keeping you from writing useable words until you can find a path through the weeds and back to the plot of the story.
Essentially: If you write enough garbage you’ll find something worth keeping.
Currently, I’m at the write-all-the-words stage. To be honest, I wish I was in the weeds; I’m still trying to find them. To be in the weeds you have to be writing, even if it’s garbage. I have yet to get to that point. Writing this post was a start and painful as all get out. But it is part of my working through the issue. And hopefully, create something I can post to my long-neglected blog.
Only more writing can lead to better writing. I’m hoping this is the start of more.
2023 started out well; I had goals that were moving in the right direction and felt good about things. But then halfway through the year, I heaped an additional goal onto the heap that completely upset the apple cart and forced everything else to a halt.
I made the decision to further my engineering career by getting my PMP certification. It is a professional project management certification that requires extensive study culminating in a three-hour exam. I poured myself into the task and expected to have it complete before Thanksgiving.
Well, that didn’t happen. It’s mid-January of 2024 and I’ve only now scheduled my test. It wasn’t that I didn’t study or gave up or anything like that. It was that life events and the ephemeral reality of time placed metaphorical chutes and ladders in my path. (two-week vacation, tiling my basement, large projects at work, etc.)
However, now that I have the test scheduled and the end of this particular task in sight, I can resurrect the goals I’d set aside, such as organizing my vacation pictures, the rewrite of my book, and this blog.
However, I’ve found that restarting a project or goal is much like getting back on a horse. It’s as if both you and the goal are reluctant to start. I’ve yearned to work on these things for months but held my back because I knew I couldn’t give them the time they deserved. So, now I find that I am still a little shy of jumping into the task too hard, afraid that I will be pulled away again, unable to give it the attention I want. I feel the projects shying away from me for the same reasons. I’ve avoided and ignored them for so long that they’ve gone feral.
It will take some time to get my goals tamed and myself refocused. But the last six months of concentrated single-minded focus on a task have taught me some valuable skills. I tended to spread myself too thinly across too many projects. I now realize that I need to concentrate on the single task at hand.
Today it’s this post.
So, here’s to getting things rolling again in 2024. I have a lot to accomplish.
We got back from vacation on Saturday afternoon and caught a breather before picking up the pup on Sunday. Two weeks is a long time to be away from home and I was ready to return. It was either that or I started looking for job in Montana. Sheri can work remotely but I cannot. So, we’re back and I guess it’s my fault!
This was the very first picture I took on this trip. It was a beautiful sunny day in Glacier National Park and we went for a bike ride around Lake McDonald. This is from a bridge over the river before we got to the lake. The clarity of the water just called to me.
I took almost 3000 pictures on our trip through Glacier, Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, Yosemite, and Alcatraz, so I have lots to show you.
So Many Words... 