On to Europe

And so we have left the US once again and are now in cold, rainy England waiting to board a ship this morning for a cruise to cold, sunny Iceland and Norway.

We squeezed in lots during our two weeks in America. After my Dad's service, I stayed at my mother's and helped her pack her kitchen in preparation for moving to a different apartment in the Maples, the senior living community she and my father lived in.

They had a two-bedroom apartment that sat at the end of the hallway - as far away from the entrance as possible. She doesn't need the second bedroom and has landed a new place that is the closest apartment to the entrance, which will help immensely since the walk is getting more and more difficult for her.

We bagged some stuff for the charity bins, converted several VHS tapes to DVDs and generally got things as close as we could until the move in the middle of this month.

The Dyer women at the reunion

LK was several hours to the west during this week with Peg. On Friday they joined Sandy, Dave and Jordan and drove several hours south and west to the family golf outing and reunion that is held every year.  

 Judging by the activity on Facebook, it was a grand event and Linda returned with several pictures of the event. You can check them out at our Shutterfly share site here.

I like the one to the left of Peg with Sandy and LK.  Peg looked so fantastic in her photos. It's hard to believe these were taken just three days before her 93rd birthday.

 While Linda was celebrating with her family, I was taking the Ethan Allen Express back to New York. My mother made double sure that I didn't miss this train, and I was there with 20 minutes to spare. 

It is such a comfortable ride - quiet, scenic, no security checks, no seatbelts and you end up right in the middle of Manhattan without a taxi ride. I walked the few blocks to the Port Authority, caught a bus to Freehold and was back at Walt and Terry's within 90 minutes.

LK flew back the next day and we spent the remainder of the week sitting by the pool coping with a heat wave, with temperatures soaring into the 90s (mid-30s celsius) each day. And now we are in England in the middle of its wettest summer in history with the high today not much warmer than we would have in Hobart if we had decided to spend the winter at home.

I know. It's England.

But the whole point of coming here is to get on the cruise ship, and we will be doing that in a couple of hours. We've looked forward to seeing Iceland and the Norwegian fjords for ages. Should be fun even if it is a bit cool this far north.

Pockets and All

Red, my dad, died on St Patrick's Day, but we waited until June to have his funeral because so many friends and family members were not around in March. It turned out to be a good decision because there was a large turnout at the church with more than 100 friends, family, co-workers and even some of the people who helped care for him in his later years.

The pastor, Father Remi officiated. Remi is a short version of his name, and I think his parishioners call him that because they can't quite get their Vermont tongues round his full name - Remigius Bukuru Ntahondi. I suspect that for most of his 87 years Red never dreamed his funeral mass would be said by a priest from Tanzania. I also know that he really liked Father Remi, who visited him frequently. And based on his sermon it seemed pretty evident that Father Remi liked my father, as well. That alone says heaps about how much the world changed in my father's lifetime.

Funerals are sad affairs, of course, but I think having that much time between his passing and the service enabled most of us to be a lot less emotional than we would have been while we were still absorbing the loss. There were still plenty of tears, of course.

Aunt Nelly and Dad two years ago

My Aunt Nelly sat between me and my mother during the funeral, and almost as soon as she sat down she began sobbing. Now in her 90s, it must have been hard to farewell the last surviving sibling from the family of 4 boys and 5 girls.

But she's a Kennedy, and that means you couldn't keep her down for the whole day.

I delivered the eulogy, and in it I reminded everyone that one of my father's greatest loves was to make people laugh. I invited everyone to take a second to recall something he had said or done that made them chuckle, and I was not surprised to see so many smiles light up the faces of the people who had come to mourn my Dad.

It was at the reception that Aunt Nelly told me that when I said that, she had thought back to when Red was very young - probably third or fourth grade. As you would expect of a family of nine in Wallingford Vermont during the Great Depression, there was very little money to go around.

All of us kids were told in no  uncertain terms, Aunt Nelly explained, that we would get one cap, one coat and one pair of mittens for the winter so we had better not lose them if we wanted to stay warm. But one day young Red came home, crying his eyes out.

"Mom," he sobbed, showing his bare hands, "I've lost my mittens - pockets and all!!!"

My grandmother looked at him and quickly figured out what he meant. "Red," she said, "you go back to school right now. You're wearing somebody else's coat!"

And with that story from 80 years ago, we all had one more laugh with my Dad.

St Kevin of Thrifty

I spent the past week in Rutland with my Mom and am now back in Jersey with our friends, Walt and Terry, until we fly to the UK on the 5th.

There were certainly enough dramas getting to Rutland last Friday for my father's funeral service the next day.  We were booked on the Ethan Allen Express, the Amtrak train from New York to Rutland. It leaves Penn Station at 5:45, so we hopped on a bus from Freehold at 2:45 due into New York a little after 4 leaving plenty of time for a leisurely 10 minute walk to the train station.

Sounds like I left plenty of time in case of traffic jams, etc, doesn't it? Well, I didn't. Approaching the Lincoln Tunnel, traffic stopped dead and a battalion of buses lined up and began moving about 10 feet every few minutes. And then they stopped even moving ten feet forward for long gaps of time.

LK and I figured we were still sitting pretty with more than 90 minutes up our sleeves, but our sleeves were way too short. I've watched people's eyes glaze over as I describe all the details of our bus not moving much so I will cut this story very short. We exited the bus with less than 5 minutes to get to the train station. Not a chance of that, so Plan B went into effect.

We stumbled upon the Trailways ticketing office. I vaguely remembered that they served Albany so we went in to check. Turns out there was an express bus to Albany leaving in about half an hour, so we bought two tickets, made the easy decision that despite the obvious downside peeing in the bus station was still far more desirable than peeing on the bus, and headed to Albany.

From the bus station, we grabbed a cab to the airport to rent a car. There are about 6 car rental companies at the airport. Unfortunately there were no rental cars available at the airport. Remember, this is the capital city of New York State, and yet the airport was completely sold out of rental cars.

Hertz didn't have even No 1; Avis wouldn't try harder; didn't matter what my budget was with Budget; Dollar didn't want mine; National was national except for Albany; and Enterprise showed absolutely none.

So we were now only 2 hours away from Rutland but things weren't looking good for closing that gap.

Then the man from Hertz suggested I call Thrifty. They aren't located on the airport grounds, he explained, and maybe they hadn't run out of cars. Calling on their courtesy phone, I reached Kevin who quickly explained that they, too, had no cars available.

Starting to feel a tad desperate, I just as quickly explained that I understood this but could he possibly help me think of some other solution since I had to get to my father's funeral in the morning. Kevin put me on hold for a moment, came back and asked if I would be able to return a car the next afternoon if he rented one to me. Not a problem, Kevin, I said.

And so St Kevin of Thrifty enters our travel lore as one of the very good guys who took pity on us, helped us out and gave our potentially sad story a happy ending. So happy, in fact, that we arrived in Rutland only 40 minutes later than the train and with 3 minutes left to still buy a bottle of wine. Cue happy music and roll the credits.

Writing this reminds me that I intended to send Thrifty a note about what a great guy they have working for them. Of course, being me,  I have put it off for a week. So if I don't do it now, I probably never will. I am going to do it.

More about the time in Rutland tomorrow. 

Long Haul

Will you still need me?

Will you still feed me?

etc etc etc etc

I am starting my 65th year today at Walt and Terry's house in New Jersey as LK and I do our best to recover from our flight here.

As we are discovering, it is getting trickier and much more challenging to use our frequent flyer points to get around the world. This time we were able to snatch flights on our favorite airline, Singapore Air, to get us back to the US. It required going out of our way and going northwest to get to Singapore before heading northeast to America.

But their service is so much better than we have been getting on other carriers that a few extra hours doesn't seem like a sacrifice at all. Besides, they also offer inexpensive layover packages with many Singapore hotels, so we stayed over and were able to have a fantastic evening with Mark, a friend from our work days who is now doing the tough job of trying to keep a computer publishing/internet/events business a few dollars ahead of the collapses being experienced in most other parts of the world. It will be a tough challenge, but he's a fantastic guy and has a better chance than most if  his Singapore business isn't wrecked by the collapsing fortunes of the Australian corporation that owns it.

So we had a big (really big) dinner with Mark on the night before we boarded our flight here. It's not always (in fact is almost never) a good idea to have a big night out before getting on a long-haul flight, but in this instance it didn't seem as if it would matter. And that is because, without even being aware of it at the time we secured our tickets, we had booked ourselves on the world's longest non-stop commercial flight.

At just short of 19 hours, the Singapore to Newark flight looked daunting, and the idea that we might sleep much of it away didn't seem like such a bad thing. LK and I are quite used to the long-haul flights lasting 13 or 14 hours, but those extra hours did mess around with our heads before we boarded.

It didn't help that we knew there were not many good movies making the airline play lists right now. Choosing between 21 Jump Street and John Carter was easy, I suppose, because John Carter really is as bad as everyone said (based on about 10 minutes of painful viewing). Young Adult was a very nice minor movie. But the only real entertainment came from the TV section where they had the first five episodes of the Walking Dead season 2, which hasn't aired on Oz yet.

(And yes, Jason, it is even better than Season 1. And definitely not one for Lora.)

So I spent my 19 hours of my birthday snoozing and watching zombies and thinking that with all this time I really should write a blog post since we are off on a very interesting seven-week trip. Of course, I couldn't be bothered actually writing it on the plane because - well, who knows why. But today it seems easy to be sitting in the warm New Jersey morning and getting this done.

Tomorrow we take the train to Rutland for my Dad's memorial service. After a week there I will return here for a couple of days and then we are off to London to begin a cruise to Iceland, the Faroe Island and Norway. Then the train to Paris for a few days and another train to Lyon to cruise the Rhone and Saone Rivers.

This is, you may have guessed, not a bad way to deal with winter in Tasmania.

A Week of Lilyfixes

On the ride to school

We just returned from (mostly) sunny Queensland, and it was a great week. But then any week that includes Lily every day is bound to be great.

The World's Most Wonderful Girl is such a delight. And now that she is almost 10-years-old, she has moved into that super nice combination where she will have a real adult-level conversation, but still cuddle up to you and play a game on her iPad. Which, by the way, she uses so fast and fluidly and easily that it takes away any excuse an older person has for not figuring the stuff out.

I could, of course, write several thousand words about how fantastic our granddaughter is, but I somehow get the sense that this would be as much fun for you as, say, spending an hour locked in a room with Donald Trump.

So let it just be noted that this was an outstanding way to spend seven days. We picked Lily up from her school every day and even had a sleep-over one night when her mother, Rachael, was on call from the hospital. That night LK taught Lily how to make meatballs and sauce, and for some reason they were the best meatballs I have ever eaten. Oh, I'm sorry - have I slipped back into telling you how great Lily is? Didn't mean to.

Probably the only downside was that we had hoped to see our friend Jon who lives about an hour north in Brisbane, but because we were spending time with Lily every day we never had a chance to get up there. 

We had a nice enough place to stay - another one of LK's online treasures where she scouts out bargains. Whenever I do that, we seem to end up in places that charge extra if you want access to a bathroom. But this place was quite nice for a week.

Sure, it was a bit dated. I knew that because the speed dial on the phone listed the number for Ansett Airlines, which went bankrupt in 2001. And of course the bed was neither very high nor very soft. And the shower didn't feature a rainforest effect.

So, beyond a doubt a week with Lily was great but it was also great to be back home again. We missed the Very Very High Bed and the World's Best Shower. In fact, we like them so much that I think we will stay around here for another three weeks before heading off on another trip.

And finally, Happy Birthday, Mama. Bubba loves ya.

Stagnant

Elizabeth Harrower is one of Australia's most celebrated writers,  or perhaps I should say "was" one of our top writers. Until this week I had never heard of her. That is because, after writing some highly praised and successful books 40 years ago, she just stopped writing.

There's an interesting interview with her in the Sydney Morning Herald here. The interviewer, Gay Alcorn, presses for an explanation of why Harrower stopped writing after such a successful start to her career, and the 84-year-old cannot or will not explain.

It's not as if she wasn't pushed to resume. She happily talks about people like Nobel Literature Prize winner Patrick White being quite insistent that she should put words on paper. She even shows Alcorn an inscription White wrote in one of his books reading,  ''To Elizabeth, luncher and diner extraordinaire. Sad you don't also WRITE.''

OK, everyone knows where this is going and everyone is thinking, "No, Don, you can't compare your not writing a blog post to a great novelist not writing anything for more than 40 years." True - unless you count that luncher and diner extraordinaire bit.

But it does seem to me that Harrower shows that even wonderfully talented people can go 200 miles-an-hour putting their thoughts and words on paper (or now on screens) and then simply stop. And if it happens to those with great talent, how much easier for the rest of us?

It's almost cold comfort to take a look at my RSL feed and see the blogs to which I have subscribed and how few of them are posting much any more. Chubby Hubby's great food blog is on hiatus; Daniel Negreanu's poker musings have dwindled to a few a year as he substitutes Twitter feeds for the long-form; our almost-neighbor Matthew Evans who does the TV show Gourmet Farmer has reduced his output to a once-a-month trickle. Hey, even cousin Joanne hardly ever bothers telling anyone what's for dinner any more.

I am quite sure all of them have been urged by fans and family and friends to get back to that keyboard and post some more. But none of my favorites seems to have checked out completely, like Elizabeth Harrower who, Alcorn reports, was asked to send some stories to a publication. She declined saying, ''[I] realised I just can't be bothered any more.''

But I think the days of my Dickens-like volumes of posts will only come sporadically and the occasional post is much more likely to be the norm. Still, it's nice to get encouraging comments like the one from Wally and Judy on the last post. It's even nice to have my bride get testy that I am not posting.

Even Sandy is making noises about how I need to do more. But then, she's in no position to talk. After being my favorite Words with Friends friend nearly every day for over a year, she hasn't made a play in more than a week. Maybe she's teaching me how disappointing it is to doubleclick on something you like and find there's not a single new thing there.

Stained

Yesterday turned out to be not quite as I had hoped.

On a beautiful sunny autumn day, we drove about half an hour to a market that we had learned about from a roadside placard. While it was not a terrible market, it was certainly not a great one, either. There were very few stalls, undoubtedly reflecting their bravery (or foolishness) in going up against the huge Salamanca Market only ten minutes down the road and across the bridge.

And the stalls that were there featured pretty much nothing we were in the mood to buy - most were the sort of arts+crafts things we don't buy anyway; LK isn't shopping for inexpensive jewelry; we have no toddlers to buy cute, overpriced clothes for; and this eternal South Beach diet cannot quite find room to include toffee apples and macarons.

But choosing your Saturday activity from a roadside placard was always going to be a gamble, so it wasn't the market that made the day turn out to be not quite as I had hoped. Nope, it was the bright sunshine.

For when I got out of the car at the market, I looked down and saw that my standard-uniform hoodie was speckled with dots of tomato sauce. And that is when I made the strategic misstep of saying to my bride that I was surprised she didn't tell me I looked a mess before we left the house. Let's make that a major strategic misstep.

For at the point LK proceeded to review my look and decided I did indeed look like one of those clueless retirees who wander around with food stains on their sweat clothes. It was hard not to agree, of course, since I was precisely that.

She acknowledged that these spots were not the result of sloppy eating but sloppy cleaning up after eating. "I know where the stains would be if it was from eating," she said.  She then proceeded to expand the review by telling me that my beard was seriously lopsided, looking as if I hadn't shaved or trimmed the right side for weeks. I couldn't really argue since I had noticed the same thing yesterday but hoped it wouldn't be all that obvious. I was wrong.

By the end of our trip, she declared with full solemnity that henceforth she is reviewing my look before I leave the house. She noted that I change out of my house sweatpants and into chinos when I go out, and wondered how I could care enough to do that and not bother to see if I was stained, smeared, or otherwise disheveled.

Grasping for an answer, I told her there weren't enough mirrors in the house. She looked at me with an expression roughly translated as "Is that the best you can do?" and proceeded to list the large  number of mirrors in the house. I had to admit that what I really meant was that there weren't enough mirrors in the house that I used to see how I looked. In other words, I lost.

And so, strengthened even further by my strategic misstep LK later that day told me in no uncertain terms that it was just plain wrong that I haven't posted on this blog in more than a month. And that's why you are now reading this and I am wearing a clean hoodie and have trimmed my beard.

And somewhere in the distance I hear a whispery voice saying something about how my life has just changed significantly.

But at least I will look better.