For your "How to Be a Jackass" Kit

Handy!

Free to Be You & Me (and to Post Drivel)

Ah, the freedom of a doornail-dead blog. I can natter to my own pesky ego and pretend successfully that no one else is reading. Here, beloved ego -- here's a charming tale of something that happened to me on the subway a couple of months ago.

I was riding in the very last car of the #1, as I always do in order to get a seat, and a bunch of youts, as Joe Pesci would say, got on and started doing that teenage boy thing where god forbid they should actually sit together. A couple sit on one side of the car, and a few sit on the other (with the two groups carefully staggered, not directly across from each other), and a couple more just casually swing on the poles and bars like kids at recess, oscillating back and forth from one anchor group to the other. They were relatively subdued at first, then as the car emptied out they gradually got a little bit louder, and a little bit louder, and a little bit more. Never totally rowdy or anything, though.

I sat in my seat at the other end of the car and read my book, ignoring them completely, and they ignored me in return (in compliance with the unwritten social contract of the subway). By the time my stop rolled into view they were practically the only ones left in my car (one or two other stragglers, but that's all). I got up, gathering and stowing my various belongings, and just as I got off the train one of the youngest in the pack (he couldn't have been more than 16, although he looked about 12), swung around the pole closest to the open door and yelled, "Hey, show me your titties, fatass."

Hmm. Is it just me, or is this sending, shall we say, mixed messages? At the very least? He wants to see my tits, but he also thinks I'm fat? He wishes to both insult me and gain a sexual favor at the same time? Perhaps not the most promising approach to take. But of course, if we put on our "annoying nitpicky feminist" hats it actually makes perfect sense. In truth, he only has a single goal -- to humiliate me -- and both halves of his statement work seamlessly toward that objective. The first part is designed to remind me of my own sexuality (which as a modern American woman I am supposed to feel a reflexive shame for), and the second part is tacked on to make me feel fat. It's a one-two mindpunch.

I waited until the doors closed (so he couldn't jump out on the platform and beat me up -- I'm not a moron) and then, without looking back, flipped him off over my shoulder. The howls of outrage! That was not the proper reaction (I was actually breaking the unwritten social contract of the subway) and boy howdy, but he was pissed. Called me a bitch. You may have a point there, sir.

Inconvenience Stores

Practically every corner in downtown Sydney features a convenience store. Some of them are 7-11's (and I have to say that it's a disconcerting feeling to spend 29 consecutive hours traveling only to step out of a taxi half-way around the world in front of a 7-11), some of them are tiny airless tombs (with the proprietor sealed behind industrial glass) which look as though they belong in the South Bronx rather than cheerful sunny Sydney, and some of them are just "City Convenience Store"s, whose incredibly generic logo looks like a cross between movie set dressing and... the 7-11 logo, suspiciously. The latter are the most common, almost reaching the density of Duane Reade's in Manhattan (although not quite). On one corner we came to, there were actually two of them, diagonally across from each other, in the grand Starbucks marketing tradition. L. went into them both, as part of his ongoing personal quest to find a Dr. Pepper in this strange, yet familiar land. The first "City Convenience Store": nothing. The second (diagonally across the street): the only Dr. Pepper to be found in the entire country of Australia.

While he was jousting at prune-juice-flavored windmills, I made a few observations of my own:

#1 - Australian commercial contests are not quite as challenging as American ones, apparently.



Wow, Rock Paper Scissors! That's a tough one. What are the odds against me, 200,000 to one? Say, what do I win if I can crush you with paper twice in a row? Take that, giant-with-hands-of-rock. Nobody expects the paper ninja!


#2 - Australia is approximately 60 years behind the American South with respect to racial stereotypes.



Um, is that... are those... chocolate candies... shaped like... little black babies? Holy crap, they are. And are they really... they can't seriously be... named... "Chicos"? Can they? Oh dear lord. They are and they can. Obviously this isn't considered horribly racist here because... because why not, now, exactly? Because they don't have any hispanic people to speak of? Oh right, sure, because the name is the worst part of this, obviously. Okay, deep breaths. I just need to see something familiar to make me feel better, I need something comforting to snap me out of this knee-jerk liberal panic, where is it....

Aaaaah, there we go. Same great (chicken) taste, but better (chicken) for you! That's better. I feel much more at home now. These people are just like you and me after all!

The period of nothingness is regretted.

So, apparently the way to abandon a blog without guilt (well, without excessive guilt) is to blog while travelling, then you can tell yourself that it's a travel blog, so therefore you only have to blog while travelling. This system works beautifully for a while before inevitably breaking down when you don't blog the next time you travel. But I am nothing if not perverse, so I will now proceed to blog retrospectively about my travel now that I am safely home (and no longer faced with hotel charges of $29.00 AU per day for internet access).

Mission statement: there will be no big, sweeping social and political generalizations about Australia (not that I could stand to read myself blah about them if there were). Besides being seriously beyond my pay grade, those types of semi-profundities are hard to come by when one is in a country that's just similar enough to the US to feel vaguely familiar. Now, I can only speak to my own experience, but I have been on trips where I felt as if I had been dropped on the surface of the moon and this, sir, was not one of those trips. Instead of being another world, Australia is an absent-minded walk down the wrong cul-de-sac in your suburban development -- everything you know is there, but the proportions are all wrong plus which you have a nagging feeling that something is... off, for lack of a better word, but you're not sure what. In that situation, what stands out are the details. Chicken-flavored potato chips, for example. High-end gourmet honey-mustard-soy-sauce-chicken-flavored potato chips, even. It's all details, baby, here in the world of non-travel travel blogging.

To start, here's Detail #1 -- the full text of a correction published in the August 23rd issue of The Cairns Post (Cairns is a medium-sized city in sub-tropical northern Queensland -- the Fort Lauderdale of Australia, basically):

"An article in Tuesday's The Cairns Post incorrectly stated that the suspect in an attempted abduction at Edmonton was driving a four-wheel-drive with a black boar tied to the roof. The vehicle actually had a black boat on its roof. The error is regretted."

The Gulbenkian Museum of Random Labeling

Calouste Gulbenkian was an Armenian oil tycoon, and a devoted art collector. He practiced a philosophy he called "tithing for art" -- he spent ten percent of his income on things of beauty. Boy I wish I were rich enough to do that. He lived most of his life in Paris, but in 1942 he decided maybe it wasn't such a good idea to be a rich Armenian in Paris -- he wasn't Jewish, but he was swarthy -- and started making plans to leave forthwith. Unfortunately nobody wanted him, despite his riches -- England and the US both refused him entry. Portugal was the only place that would take him. That worked out well for all concerned, though, since he loved it here so much that he never moved out of his hotel room -- he lived in the same suite, in the same luxury hotel in Lisbon, from 1942 until he died in 1955. When he died he bequeathed his entire art collection to the government of Portugal, in gratitude, and they built an entire museum to hold it. It's a beautiful museum, in a beautiful park a few subway stops away from the center of Lisbon, and I was in a beautiful mood when I went out there today, since I haven't been to any museums yet on my trip (Portugal not being a big museum country in general).

The Gulbenkian is arranged chronologically, and has a small but important selection from each historical era -- Egyptian funerary statues, Greek coins, Islamic textiles, etc. The very first room I walked into was the Egyptian room, and I was enjoying it thoroughly until I came to a very odd case. There were four objects in the case and a label with four different items listed on it, but the items on the label did not seem to match up with the objects in the case. The label said "female figurine", for example, but the object in the corresponding place in the case was a black and white stone bowl. Curious. Even curiouser, these labels sounded familiar, like I had read them before. Sure enough, I checked and found that the exact same label also existed on the opposite side of the room, next to a case whose contents it did describe. So then I had to decide whether to potentially make a scene or not. So awkward, you know, when you notice something wrong but don't know whether it would be tacky to correct it or not. Usually it is tacky to correct someone's mistake, but would that stop me?

I finally decided in favor of being the squeaky wheel (not a huge surprise for those of you that know me) and went over to the guard. "Desculpe, fala Inglis?", I asked (Excuse me, do you speak English? -- the most important phrase in any tourist's vocabulary, in any language, bar none). He shook his head and motioned me to the ticket desk. I screwed up my courage and approached the heavily-eyelinered woman at the ticket desk to say "Desculpe, one of the labels is -- wrong?" She said, without missing a beat and almost as a friendly challenge, "Show me." I took her to the room (leaving behind a bewildered line of people waiting to buy tickets to the museum) and showed her the two labels and she spent an inordinate amount of time examining them, as if to prove to herself that they were indeed identical and that one of them did indeed fail utterly to describe the contents of the case it was supposed to be describing. She squinted at the black and white stone bowl for a very long time, as if trying to convince herself that it was not in fact a female figurine, perhaps just a very subtle, abstract one. Finally she said, "This room was closed... they found a... something that eats the wood? A bug, we must kill it. When they reopened... they must have moved the case but not the label." When did they reopen the room, I asked? A week ago, I was told. A whole week with a duplicate label on the wall of the most prestigious museum in Lisbon; I was the first person who had noticed. It was funny and annoying at the same time -- I actually really wanted to know what kind of stone that black and white bowl was made of, and now I never will.

The Return of Carlosh (featuring the debut of Jacqueline the Vagabond!)

I'm drinking beer in an internet cafe in Lisbon right now, but I'll still be blogging from Coimbra (pronounce it Queembra) this evening. Just go with it; it's the internet, right? Time and space have no meaning here in cyber world. Except for the time I have to kill before dinner, that is, which allows me to complete a story which just gets better and better. Hey by the way, if anybody's reading this could ya drop me a comment? I'm all the way across the world blogging my little heart out here, and I'm starting to feel like I'm throwing electronic messages -- in shiny electronic bottles -- into the Atlantic and watching them float out on the tide.

Before Carlos and I parted the night before last, we heard a lot of fado. And it was wonderful fado, but it wasn't Coimbra fado. Coimbra fado is a specific genre in Portugal -- like St. Louis jazz instead of New Orleans jazz. Since Coimbra is the university town of Portugal (commonly referred to in the guidebooks as the Oxford of Portugal, except that the university here has 30,000 students -- imagine a cross between Oxford and San Diego State instead), Coimbra fado is all about loooooove. Unlike Lisbon fado, which is all about how life sucks and we might as well all kill ourselves. Coimbra fado is traditionally sung only by men (since until relatively recently, all the students were men, of course), addressed to the ladies of the town -- basically, the songs are all written by frat guys trying to get lucky with townie girls. About fifteen years ago a woman recorded an album of Coimbra fado, and when it was released there were actual riots. They had to pull it out of the stores. Since then, I believe that things have eased up a little bit, but only a little. So anyway, when a woman started singing fado at the Diligencia bar I asked Carlos if it was OK for women to sing Coimbra fado now -- he told me a) yes, but b) this wasn't Coimbra fado we were hearing, it was Lisbon fado. I asked him to let me know when we heard some Coimbra fado, and he said regretfully that given the particular people performing that night, we weren't going to (we did hear some beautiful Brazilian and African songs, though, along with a version of Dire Straits' "So Far Away From Me"). At the end of the evening he gathered his thoughts and said to me, very carefully and politely, "If you would like, and more important -- and this is very important -- if you agree, I take you to hear Coimbra fado tomorrow night." I asked where, and he said "A Capella". Well, A Capella is the other big fado place in town, also recommended in all the guidebooks, and I had been planning to go there the next night anyway. Why not go with Carlos? I arranged to meet him at a restaurant down the street from my hotel at 9:30.

After a day spent touring Coimbra (which I won't get into here, you can read a damn guidebook yourself if you care), I took a nap and a shower, ate dinner at an Italian restaurant (an American can take only so much ham without a break), and turned up to meet Carlos. When I got there he was deep in conversation with a good-looking woman at the next table, slim in jeans with long dark hair showing a few strands of silver. He turned to me, beaming, and said,"Boa noite! I am so lucky. I find two beautiful American women in two days! Who would believe?" Who would believe, indeed? Her name turned out to be Jacqueline; she was a bartender from Oregon who was also traveling by herself. Now, not a lot of women travel through the Iberian peninsula by themselves, especially American women, so we bonded a bit. She seemed very youthful and independent (I think the gray was premature) and we started comparing notes -- of course she turned out to be a huge fado fan, and of course she wound up joining us to go hear the fado. That's just the way it goes when you meet complete strangers in a foreign country. We chattered about this and that for a while (turns out she used to smoke Nat Sherman cigarettes too, when she used to smoke -- of course, even though we both quit years ago we both had one of Carlos's cigarettes at some point in the evening -- fado bars are just places where you have to smoke. Please don't tell on me! I'm in Europe, it doesn't count.). Carlos couldn't really follow our English, but he obviously didn't care -- he just sat there beaming back and forth at his two beautiful American women. When Jacqueline used the word "vagabond" to describe herself he was struck by the word and made her define it and repeat it a few times. Then he pulled out a notebook and wrote a poem about a mysterious vagabond on the spot, sitting at the tiny table in the bar listening to fado. When the singers started to take a much-needed break he asked them if he could say something. Obviously familiar with him, fond of him, and accustomed to gently humoring him, they graciously said yes and even provided dramatic background music on the guitar as he read the poem aloud. At the end of the evening he gave both Jacqueline and me a book of his poems, and insisted on driving me home and walking me to the door of my hotel. Adeus, Carlos.

P.S. -- Jacqueline told me about an absolutely wonderful fado bar she went to in Lisbon and made me promise to go there. She said, "You can't miss it." Wonderful, except she couldn't remember where it was. She did know where I could possibly find someone who might be able to tell me where to find it, though, and this is what she told me. I reproduce it here as verbatim as I can manage (not that I could make it any better by embellishing it, that's for sure): "So you go to this corner in the Barrio Alta, it's on the corner of the Travessa da Queimada and the Rua do Norte. There's a restaurant on the corner, but don't go in -- you can't go in, anyway, because it's closed for renovations. But there's a man working outside there, his name is Vicente. Ask him where is the fado bar at number 38 -- tell him Jacqueline sent you!" Wish me luck!

Carlosh

Can I just say, for the record, that not having certain important keys -- like, oh, the ' or the - or the @ -- where I'm used to having them on the keyboard is driving me completely bazoo. On the other hand, the free government-sponsored internet access here rocks. It's always busy, of course, but you don't have to wait -- you just put your name down for an appointment and come back later. Apparently they have these things all over Portugal now. I've got a half an hour, so this will be a good writing exercise for me, since normally I take forever editing and re-editing.

So let's talk about how I met Carlos (don't forget the "ish" sound on the end). Last night I took the high-speed train from Porto to Coimbra and things were just not going my way. It was one of those days you sometimes get when you're traveling when you just want to curl up in a ball and be magically transported -- Star Trek style -- home to bed. The hotel was a dump -- I'm never taking Rick Steves' recommendations for hotels again, by the way, he said it was "delightful" -- the people there were very nice and the place was scrupulously clean but it was up a lineoleum-covered staircase above a '70s-era hair salon and the room smelled like old sweat. It was already 9 o'clock and I was exhausted (in a side note, there's something wrong with the l on this keyboard and you kind of have to whack it to get it to work, so that last bit came out "9 o'cock" on the first try -- hee, I'm nine), but when I set out for dinner I decided to look at a couple of other places first. I lucked out and found a better hotel -- the room is teeny, but it's modern and doesn't smell, but then I had the incredibly awkward task of fetching my bag from the first place and telling the very nice people I wasn't going to stay there after all. Have I mentioned it was pouring rain throughout all of this? The drizzle finally manned up and got aggressive on me. So then I went to the guidebook-recommended cafe, supposedly the best in town, only to find a sign on the door "Closed October 1 through 15", or actually the Portuguese equivalent thereof, of course, but even I can figure that much out. So then, almost at the end of my rope, I managed to find my way to a fado bar I've been looking forward to (it's in all the guidebooks), in the vain hope that they would also serve food. (Fado is the Portuguese blues -- the national art form. Beautiful music -- like jazz, but not crappy modern jazz, the good stuff. The singers all close their eyes and throw their heads back and look like every word is just ripping their hearts right out of their chests.) And there I found food, and fado, and Carlos. Carlos is a middle-aged poet who hangs out at this bar, and we struck up a conversation (well, he struck up a flirtation, I struck up a conversation). Now I know I should have been wary, and I was, but within five minutes I knew he was harmless, and within ten minutes I realized why -- Carlos is the Nick of the Diligencia Bar in Coimbra, Portugal. For those of you who never met my old friend Nick, he was one of the first people ML and I met in New York. He was an East Village fixture, a retired actor who made it his mission to hold down one end of the bar at the old St. Mark's bar, drinking white wine (which for him was permanently at the "old" price) until he got drunk enough that he and the entire bar reached a mutual decision that he should head for home. He used to come to all our Halloween parties wearing the exact same red Indian embroidered shirt, leftover from his hippie days. It was a gesture on his part, the Halloween equivalent of wearing a sign that says "Costume Here" around your neck. The St. Mark's is long gone now, of course, and thanks to the tender loving care of the VA Hospital, sadly so is Nick. I miss him whenever I happen to think about him, and Carlos reminded me of him, which made me sad and happy at the same time. One of Carlos's poems was hanging on the wall of the bar, and he took it down and translated it for me, writing it slowly and laboriously in my travel journal with my help on the occasional word. Here it is.

We have not defined spaces
Because there is no-one who can define them
But we are not defineable
We meet always everywhere a friend

Girlfriend or boyfriend
It depends on who speaks
The origin of the word is not important
What is important is what we meet of the sublime

There is a place in this town
Where nostalgia seizes intelligence
We live always an eternal youth
When we live the ambiance of the Diligencia!

Cause you got mad issues

So imagine that all the wineries in the Napa Valley were required by law to ship all their wine to one place to be aged and bottled -- someplace small and picturesque, near the ocean (for purposes of easy world-wide shipping) but not a city. Someplace like, say, Tiburon. (If you've ever been there, the mental image is a good fit.) This place would naturally become a huge tourist draw, since going there is basically the equivalent of visiting all the Napa County wineries in one fell swoop. Then imagine that San Francisco, the big city just across the bridge from this little tourist town of Tiburon, had been ruled by a dictator for 40 years. A dictator who was not only a conservative Christian like George Bush, but also an economist, god help us (he has two reasons to think he knows what's best for us better than we do). And as a consequence, it wasn't exactly the San Francisco we know and love. It was more like Oakland, or even Detroit -- if Oakland or Detroit or both had been superimposed on the San Francisco hills and fog and the remnants of the lovely old buildings. Now you've got Porto. The restaurant I ate octopus in last night was playing American R&B for our dining pleasure, and one of the songs had the refrain "Cause you got mad issues..." Poetry, really, and I couldn't help giggling over how apt it was for this screwed-up city. The guidebooks all say that European Union money has been pouring into this place over the last few years, and although I'm not normally in favor of expensive political boondoggles, in this case I have to say, hell yeah. Keep it coming. If anybody's earned a little pork, it's the good people of Porto.

So today I went to taste some -- yes, it's a cliche, but what can you do -- port. Yummy. I learned a lot, got a little drunk and saw the world's largest wooden barrel (it holds 100,000 liters). But I won't bore anybody with the history of port -- the interesting thing was what happened on the way back. I blundered into a huge group of teenagers in yellow t-shirts who were gathered on the Vila Nova de Gaia side of the River Douro (across the river from Porto proper). There were a number of slightly older types wearing a bizarre uniform of all-black, topped off with a billowing black cape. The Black Capes were herding the Yellows up and down the waterfront, much as one might attempt to herd cats, with periodic stops so the Yellows could all face the river and chant very loudly, all jumping up and down and waving their right arms in the air in unison. Their chants were almost songs, complete with harmony, with the women and men taking different parts as if they were a choir. I heard something that at first I thought was an echo, until I realized that across the river in Porto an equally large group of people, all wearing red t-shirts, were swarming down the street toward the riverfront all chanting at the top of their lungs and waving their arms. Once again, just one arm. I guess if you're going to jump up and down and chant in public you've got to be reserved when it comes to waving your arms around, otherwise the whole thing spirals completely out of control. Now, this is not a narrow river, mind you. This is like, the East River. If the East River were deep in a gorge, with cliffs rising on both sides that amplify and bounce sound back and forth across it. The Reds all lined up on the river's edge precisely opposite the Yellows, and they proceeded to chant back and forth to each other. Different chants, too, not always the same one. Sometimes they politely took turns and sometimes the two chants played off of each other, almost like counterpoint but distorted by the time lag across the river. It lasted a good long while. I took the opportunity to cross the bridge so I could get a better look at the other half of the show. Once I got close enough I realized that for some reason, the Reds only had one or two Black Capes chaperoning them. I guess they didn't need as much herding as the Yellows. Or maybe they did, since at one point a few of them started to wander off. When he saw that, the head Black Cape immediately barked a reprimand, and instantly every single Red bowed low to him and stayed down. He yelled at them for a while and then they all started walking, still with the top halves of their bodies bowed low and their faces parallel to the ground. When I saw that, I knew -- this was an initiation of some kind. The vibe was unmistakeable -- if we had all been in some shitkicking town in Alabama, he would have been yelling at them to fry like little piggies. As it was he let them stand up straight after only a couple minutes. Wimp. The synchronized chanting and getting yelled at and running up and down the riverfront was still going on when I got tired of standing in the drizzle and left. I did notice, while I was there, that the Reds all had a url on the back of their t-shirts, so when I got to the Internet cafe I looked it up. Sure enough, it led me to the home page of the good ol' Associação de Estudantes do Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto -- according to Babelfish, the student association of the Porto University of Accounting and Administration. Yes, they were accountants. Student accountants, anyway. I can now say that in my world-wide travels I've been entertained by chanting mobs of Portuguese accountants. Apparently freshman initiation is the same the world over.


Click on the photo to enlarge and see the teeny yellow shirts on the other side of the river.

On the road again

Here I am, traveling by myself once more. Haven't done that in a while. I have that old "I am an intrepid explorer of the old world" feeling again. I also have that "my god, my legs are screaming in pain" feeling again. Medieval european cities are steep, yo. I gotta get my head back in the tourist mindset and pace myself. Just because it's only 1/2 mile away doesn't mean ya should rush right over there, cause it's probably actually 1 mile total, 1/2 horizontal and 1/2 vertical.

I'm in Porto, Portugal, where they make... sherry? Vodka? No, of course it's port. They invented it. And then they named the city after it. And then they named the country after the city. Can you imagine if you lived in the city of Beero in the country of Beeristan, where you worked all day proudly selling authentic, made-just-like-it-used-to-be Beer to tourists? How weird would that be?

I have a lot of deep thoughts [tm Jack Handy] about the poverty here and how it's not quaint old world poverty like I usually see when I'm touristing around but more like new world poverty. But those will be for my paper travel journal. I need something to write while I'm sitting in picturesque cafes, resting my aching feet. So instead I'll tell ya about my morning encounter with James Bond. Pictures will be added when I get back -- can't do it from here.

So I headed uphill this morning (everything's uphill here) in the drizzle (it's always drizzling here -- Northern Portugal is the Seattle of Europe) to see this church, the Igreja dos Clérigos. In Portuguese you pronounce the j like a j, unlike Spanish, and the final s always gets an "ish" sound. So say eegrayjah dosh clereegosh just to get in the mood (or go get drunk and come back -- the effect on pronunciation is the same). It's got this tower, the Torre dos Clérigos -- the highest point in Porto. Baroque architecture. Heading up the street you see the church from the back, it looked like a church. You could just see a piece of the famous tower peeking over the top (see below). Ya know, no matter how dutiful a tourist you are, after a few years you can't really recapture the excitement of your first few churches.


I came around to the front and instead of a baroque bell tower, there stood a 200-foot-tall Pierce Brosnan, wearing a tux, holding a beer and smiling sexily down at me (or perhaps the sexy look was because he was squinting, since his head was 15 stories above the ground).


It seems as if the exterior of the church is being renovated, and (this is just a guess, mind you, but I'm betting it's a good guess) apparently the local brewery is paying for the renovations, with a marketing assist from James Bond and his tux. Swear to god, the entire exterior façade of the church and the entire front of the famous tower is covered in a gigantic beer ad that makes the billboards in Times Square look like Post-it notes. It was awesome. Nothin' in the guidebooks about that, for sure. I laughed and laughed. And I took way more pictures than I would have if you'd actually been able to see the church. Had to get Pierce from every angle, you understand. And they say Americans are tacky and materialistic. Can you imagine if Budweiser sponsored the renovations of some historic building and wrapped the whole shebang in a giant Budweiser ad while it was going on? Let alone a Catholic Church? Obviously Americans aren't tacky and materialistic enough. We gotta get going on this, the bar has been set pretty high for us. But then I guess if you manufacture beer in a city named for port, you have to resort to some pretty extreme advertising.

Back in the 21st century, somewhat worse for wear

Made it back from our wacky medieval camping Pennsic trip. Completely exhausted. L. is returning the rental car today (w/bonus 9 lbs of dirt). More later when coherence returns and many loads of laundry are done.

P.S. -- Sars ran my letter on nail polish in the Vine! Internet immortality.... it really is good nail polish, also.