| What Floats to the Top is Not Always Scum |
[01 May 2009|06:06pm] |
- Our friend who was attacked two days ago is doing much better - conscious, although still intubated and in the intensive care unit. However, he's getting a look-over by a specialist (worries about the throat swelling), with an eye to taking out the tubes and putting him in a more ordinary bed. This, by us, is Progress.
- Today, the First of May, Labor Day in these here parts and a day off, I've spent calligraphing like a mad-woman, trying to get the 合気道 calligraphy for our dojo just right. And, I think I got it. *phew* Mr Sweetie has helped with the scanning and cut-and-paste (I calligraphed individual characters on single sheets, then we put them together in a larger file), and I should now send it on to the very nice dojo-member who had actually delayed putting in the order for a couple of days, to give me time to come up with a calligraphy piece we're both happy with. (He'll probably scratch his head and ask, "So, what's so different about this one?" when I send him this new one and he has a chance to compare...)
Small break while I attend to a small e-mail errand, then, eh??
So, it's actually been, oh, something like three weeks since the previous update? Yeesh- More and more of my library is turning into a social history documentation archive - the spring break at uni was 2 weeks long, and we would be going to Italy for the second week. In between the necessary study for Japanese, I dusted off a couple of my old, old, old volumes on learning Italian - apart from the very personal time-binding mental bombs, there were some rather more universally accessible - like references in dialogues to being able to smoke in a cinema (holy cow!, that seems like from the '60's, not the 80's!), or, rather more predictably, payment for items in Italian lire, rather than our lovely and convenient Euro.
- Bit of a spring-clean with the hakama I own (that would be plural, which the Japanese word doesn't inflect to indicate) - the best day is when one is otherwise feeling a bit in need of a duvet day, since it's all mindless work, from the removal of the back-boards (the koshita), which means you also get to puzzle out sewing back up the emptied fabric bundle - don't want it unravelling in the wash! After washing, I make sure the pleats are properly set, by getting the hakama to an iron while the fabric is still semi-damp. Despite my feeling less-than-optimal, Mr Sweetie remarked that I seemed rather industrious, with all this activity.
- A new hazard of owning a mobile phone: forgetting to turn the damn thing on the one day a dojo-mate tried to get in touch. Ah well, at least it was not urgent, and we could catch up with one another the following day at training.
- The focus on the Japanese study has left me slightly out of touch with my local environment - to the tune of feeling, while taking a walk with Mr Sweetie on the Easter Monday, that I had not seen much of Our Town for a very long time, long enough to notice a lot of those little changes that otherwise pile up unnoticed.
- Typically, a long trip to anywhere involves the packing phase the day before. And, these days, the internet research phase, too. Apart from some of the transportation info we needed, I happened on a discovery of wifi in Bologna, with no need to even be a resident. Whoo hoo! Also, on the theme of pre-trip discoveries, we found that our intended suitcase had developed a problem with one of the locks - after futzing with it, Mr Sweetie made the brilliant move of finding a similar suitcase in our collection (we bought these when we first moved from the Netherlands, to take all our extra bits then. There were a lot of extra bits...) and swapping out the clasp/hinge with a non-broken one. Yay! Pre-travel crisis averted!
- How very odd, too - being able to compare the Piazza Maggiore square with the main square of Our Town. Piazza Maggiore predates our own by a couple of centuries, and is comprised mainly of government buildings, next to cathedral and one of the first seats of the famed University of Bologna. Our Town's own square is more jumbled, being mostly individual houses lined up in rows around the square, with the ground floor being dedicated to a business - café, shop, bank... In the end, I still rather like our little square, but decided the main thing I enjoyed about Piazza Maggiore was it's sense of gravitas. You don't get that much anymore these days.
- Fresh pasta, made on the premises, cut to order while you wait. €3.60 of goodness for two people, aaaah!
- Visited some more "old friends" in the catagory of places I haunted 25 years ago, and - fabulously - discovered that Italians still do the very, very thick ciocolato. And, this time, I finally got around to asking what product I had to look for in the supermarket. So now, we have some here in the house... actually, for "some", read a lot. Mr Sweetie and I, on an afternoon we spent doing our own things individually, both went into grocery stores, and... you guessed it. Still, we figure, that gives the household one drink of ciocolato per week for a whole year. If we're that careful...
- After the difficulties of Japanese, Italian - while still a language not my own - is a comparative doddle. Especially as I'd had the chance this trip to review some basic grammar and stuff. I only popped out with "Hai!" two or three times this trip, not the rather excesssive amount of the previous time. While I won't say I own a good knowledge of Italian, it was nice to be able to follow at least some conversations in the bar - I just love eavesdropping and listening to how people say things, convey those everyday little messages we have for each other. Mr Sweetie's patience was tried, in that he's more someone, when travelling, who wants to "do" monuments, museums and the like. Me? Walking through streets of "other" architecture, and people watching. Still, Mr Sweetie is gracious enough to thank me for my "work" when speaking in Italian in places where no one speaks English (or is uncomfortable enough that they're relieved to discover they don't have to), while I'm just so pleased that, despite some hand-and-foot work making up for my linguistic shortcomings, there are doors that open for me that won't open for other Americans. And? I even got to do aikido in Bologna - definitely a new experience, as I wasn't even near the notion of doing a martial art back when I was living there as a student.
- Re-entry to normal life was last week, and predictably a bit "ugh".
- We did soften the blow of returning, by going to a kind of book-arts sellers' exhibition. We did not emerge unscathed: I got a rather large and Very Nice brush to do Very Large Calligraphy with. Plus a couple of more modest brushes. In the end, we spent enough that the seller, a rather friendly Chinese man living in Brussels, heaped us with a variety of gifties - some stick ink, a rather large roll of rice paper, and - after carefully asking if I would mind (!) - a brush that had been broken by some passer-by's child. However, the head still wrote quite nicely (he let me test it), and I declared myself ready to care for this orphan. (And, since, I've had the chance to re-glue it... perfectly serviceable!)
- This past week of class has been... odd, due to a variety of eruptions of Real Life: my own work in class has slowed to a crawl, as we've really reached my limit, so I had to e-mail the teachers to let them know, I wasn't being feckless, I was just spent. Then there was a major conference taking over our spaces, and a not-inconsiderable amount of security work. However, we evaded the biggest disruption by something even more pressing: a teacher had a sudden family emergency, and hence class was cancelled. It left me feeling rather at odds, instead of relaxing into the sudden release of time, mostly because of the cause.
- A very sad ending to this entry - one of my favorite holidays since getting to know Mr Sweetie has been Konninginnedag - Queen's Day, in the Netherlands. It was a moment of letting hair down, and - in Amsterdam, certainly - indulging in whimsey as well as garage-sale activity on the street. The Dutch royal family seemed to be a counterpoint to the British one, jumping in and having fun, getting kisses from perfect strangers, giving lifts to similarly unknown people on motor-bikes. That's likely to be no more, after someone drove his car through a crowd watching the Dutch royal family travelling in an open top bus. Apparently his intended target was the royal family itself, but his own track ended when his car crashed into a war monument. Meanwhile, 5 people died, with many more injured, and the innocence of the day has been destroyed, given that security around these people will be much intensified.
Things seen along the way: http://www.malleusdelic.com/eng/home.html (silkscreen posters, very rock-music but wow!)
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