Travelogue?

At it's heart, this blog, which replaces grolsons.com ( see the previous post), is a travelogue. I have been remiss, and have not recorded anything of note, nor noted anything of record, from several trips. Mostly, I guess that has been because said trips have been rushed, and, while somewhat enjoyable, sandwiched between piles of "keeping up" with work.

While my wife can tell me what I have done, and where I have been, and how I have enjoyed it, it seems that in my own mind the trips blur together in my mind, in much the same way that my tertiary languages, Spanish and French, seem to. (if I envision my memory as a series of drawers, "trips" are in one drawer, and "words that are neither English or German" are in another.)

If I keep a journal, I can look back on what I have done, and remember. Sometimes I enjoy taking the time to do that, and other times I can't be bothered.

This itinerary is so low key, I will take time to record my thoughts, whether or not related to actual events of this trip. Events that I plan will include large swaths of time sitting poolside, sipping a beverage.

You know, maybe this is not a travelogue after all.

The death of grolsons.com

As an overseas teacher in the mid 90's, full of pride in my moderate HTML coding skills, I created a website to use as a teaching tool with my students (international school hard-copy resources being slow and hard to come by at best and unavailable at worst), as a hobby, as a professional recruiting tool (resume, references, and philosophy posted for potential employers' access), and most of all as a communication (family pictures and narratives of our adventures) tool to reach our families back home.

 It worked great on all fronts, and was a positive asset at a job interview or two. However, Web 2.0 caught up with it: Facebook, Blogger, and Google tools have effectively usurped, replaced, and made obsolete all of the functions of that website. My HTML skills, failing to grow, had also become obsolete.

While having a domain, and our own email through it was kind of nice, we decided about five years ago to let the domain expire, and acknowledge that the grolsons website had served its purpose and by now just seemed pretentious. Auto billing and sloth (well, that's harsh--how about "inattention")kept it alive.

Until last week. You can now search "www.grolsons.com" and instead of finding pictures of my kids when they were much younger, will find a domain expired notice and ads for cheap mortgages. Also, if you email any of us at an address ending in @grolsons.com, you can rest assured that we will never see it.

Though we made this decision years ago, my wife's initial reaction ("hey, my grolsons email does not seem to be working..."), even though she uses her yahoo account almost exclusively, was one of shock and dismay. The same as the reaction from my older son, who has long eschewed his grolsons email account, and who has been quietly slightly embarrassed by the website. Arlee put it this way: it's like a friend or relative was diagnosed with a terminal illness and given a few weeks to live, then, they fight it and live well for years. You are unprepared, shocked, and saddened, when the day finally arrives.

"Well, you've known it was coming," is no solace at all. So let's have a moment of silence for grolsons.com. If you want to email me, use my gmail account. And if you want to see family pictures, friend me on Facebook. If you want to hire me: I'm not looking for a job right now; I have a great one.

And let's remember together that everything and everyone is indeed temporary--and make the most of it.

My partner and my pride

That's a line from a song I wrote, called, creatively, Paper Anniversary Song, for my wife Arlee on our first anniversary.  Perhaps some day, I'll post an mp3 of it.  I remember it moved her to tears.  I don't think it was my singing that made her cry...

It was some 18 years ago.  I have a hard time resolving that with my perception that not so much time has passed, but I guess it has.  A teenager, a tween-ager, three cats, five countries and two careers later:  I still feel the same.  I don't always do as good of a job, showing it.

The lyrics are like this:

A year ago this night, I took you for my bride.

It's been a glorious flight; it's been a joyous ride.

You're my love and you're my wife, and you're my soul and you're my life.

I don't know where I'd be without your love guiding me:

I'll always love you, my graceful blushing bride.

I'll always love you, and hold you by my side.

In 1993 our two lives joined as one.

We ran to Hawaii; our adventure had begun:

Lava rocks in piles of three, an offering to a deity.

Lahaina Harbor on Maui--we scaled a mountain, swam the sea.

I'll always love you, my graceful blushing bride.

I'll always love you, and hold you by my side.

Our love together grows with each passing hour.

Like a living rose--the opening of a flower.

Lightning bolts and buffalo; ice-skate grace, your cheeks aglow

Bless all that you've given me:  a family that is poetry.

I'll always love you, my graceful blushing bride.

I'll always love you, my partner and my pride.

I was going to add a verse, each year, and in fact did that for awhile, but somewhere along the way I lost track; the song was just getting to be too long and the verses honestly too corny.  But these, I repeat whenever I sing it for her, with the changed last verse line--it was originally "Of all that you've given me, best are cats and aardvark poetry (which was kind of an "inside joke" and, well, goofy-sounding.  Even with the change, the teenager cringes, as he does when I sing him the song I wrote for/about him when he was six years old and just becoming a big brother.

All that to come around to say:  my "partner and pride" has started her own blog, to write about writing, and to post installments of her novel in progress.  I am proud to sign up as its first follower.

Despite the fact that she is a passionate, and a good, writer--with more than one completed but unpublished novel under her belt--or, perhaps because of that fact, she is shy about sharing her writing, about "putting it out there."

But, you can now check her out on http://arleeolson.blogspot.com/ and read about A Wiener Dog Advent, which will have one installment each day of Advent.  Fun, huh?

My eyes

My eyes are 47 years old and myopic by design. They have endured a variety of corrective strategies including progressively thicker glasses, rigid, gas permeable, soft, and extended wear contact lenses, and eventually, thirteen years ago, 8.5 diopters of LASIK correction. While subject to disconcerting glare and reduced night vision, they are corrected to 20/20 or so, in good light.

Sometimes.

That's the thing.  Variable dependability.  I'm not sure if it depends on how rested I am, how hydrated, how relaxed....  Some days crisp and clear.  Today, blurry.  It is the same with reading glasses.  Most days I don't need them, but some days...I really, really do.

I was just thinking today it is like that with everything.  Some days, my mind, my emotions, my sense of efficacy and even self-actualization, is, well, 20/20.  And some days, one, or more, or all of those things, are, well, blurry.  And I'm not sure why that is.

I'll be honest:  today, blurry.

I guess, what keeps us going is knowing when its blurry--just wait, and it will probably clear up again.

In the meantime, I'll try not to run into anything.

That sure went fast

They say: Time flies when you are having fun. Well, I am not entirely sure if I have been having fun or not. But, time has sure flown. The milestone has passed; we have finished our first complete school year here in Bitburg. (I still have a month, almost, to go before my own vacation, but the kids and teachers are done as of Friday.)

It felt much shorter than our year in Casablanca, in fact, it is funny to think that we have been living here in Germany for now the same amount of time we lived in Morocco.

I'm working the same hours, and with the same intensity, with a steep "first year" learning curve. I am surrounded, as I was in Casablanca, by wonderful colleagues.

But, somehow, things are different. I know my family is happier here. I'm enjoying the bratwurst. And the Bitburger. The kids at school are super, on the whole.

Maybe I am having fun.

Sleepless

I have developed a new sleeping pattern which I am evaluating for effectiveness. OK, I've already evaluated it: it is NOT effective. Here's how it works. At about 8:30 or 9:00pm I collapse, exhausted from the day, and fall blissfully asleep. At about 12:00 midnight or perhaps a bit later (or, earlier the next morning, if you are into technicalities) I snap wide awake. Now, my family is fast asleep (except for my fourteen year old son who has adopted the sleeping habits of a vampire hamster) and I am reluctant to do anything noisy like watch TV, do last night's dishes that we lazily left for later, or vacuum the sofa. Also, it turns out that while wide awake, I am unable to muster a genuinely alert mental state that would be useful for actually catching up on work, or paying bills, or doing taxes, or anything that requires actual decision making of any caliber.

At least I am catching up on light reading.