tour guide fail

i love off-season travel. no queues. no high prices. but, as i recently learned, no "open" signs, either.

my brother came for a week to see me and i had it all planned out, as usual, based on my past tour-guiding experiences with mom, dad, in-laws, and friends.

but i didn't know that jared had the same interest in old churches and museums that i did -- get in, get a photo, get the key facts, get out, get on with it. it was fantastic.

so, after what i thought would be a full day of sightseeing, we found ourselves with still an hour or two of daylight with no plans each afternoon. so we "winged it."

i am not good at winging it.

on wednesday we finished our touring and i remembered a local castle nearby. unfortunately i punched in the wrong address on the GPS so the mini was up to its rusty undercarriage in slush before we found the right route. just as we got a great parking space and it began to snow, we saw the sign "closed on tuesday-wednesday, december 1 to january 31." DaMMIT!

oh, well. it was a lovely drive.

i thought we might be able to catch the last tour at the Greene King Brewery, but we got there at 3 p.m. the last tour was at 2. DaMMIT!

so we came home with plans to get a pint at the pub before dinner. but it was the empty hour -- the time between 2:30 and 5 p.m. that pubs close for their own landlord's lunch break. no pubs, no castles, no fun.

on thursday we saw ely cathedral and toured all of cambridge and ate lunch, and still had hours of daylight! so i knew of a local manor house that was a national trust property. they had to be open. nope. closed january. all of january. DaMMIT!

on friday we went to London. i knew it would be open. except for the London Eye ferris wheel. closed the middle two weeks of January for annual maintenance. this is getting bad.

"at least i got to see the outside of a lot of things," said jared.

very funny.

i'm fired.

(but we really did have an awesome time. as if there was any doubt! :O)

i miss my grammie

before we get started i am not barefoot, nor am i pregnant. thankyouverymuch. but i did recently purchase a sewing machine.

already i have fixed four pair of trousers, three shirts, and a coat. (i use the term "fix" loosely because my seams sort of resemble the arabic alphabet: أ ب ت ث ج ح خ د ذ ر ز س ش ). but i am improving, sort of. mom sent me some fabric for christmas so now dan and i have matching Oregon/Oregon State pillows, aprons, and potholders. i even made dan a coffee cosy for his cafetiere.

not only is this saving me some money in alterations, but it is providing me an "occupation." instead of watching hours of TV during the long dark winter, i watch hours of TV while pinning stuff together. or i listen to podcasts while i crookedly stitch my latest project.

as i sat concentrating on my ducks potholder, i suddenly thought of Grams. as a kid she taught me to embroider, and i sucked at that, too. but it was fun to sit next to her and work on my Simba dishtowel as we watched Perry Mason on TV. she was always occupied with sewing projects -- zillions of doilies, patchwork quilts, afghans, embroidery, braided rugs...

after a few sewing projects, i feel like i understand her a little bit more. she was drawn to sewing for the same reason i am: being occupied. productive. creating. passing time with a purpose.

i wanted to keep learning, but i kept growing up - sports, 4-H, school, driving, music, and a million other things took priority. i always thought i would get back to it later when i had more time.

when i bent the needle on my little machine yesterday, i wished for the first time in years that i could call her. i wanted to ask advice and tell her that i wanted to learn what she knew. could she teach me how to make the rows straight or join the fabrics on a corner? could she show me how to knit a scarf? would she define "basting" and "on the bias" for me? why won't my invisible hems catch right? how come the tension on the thread is so testy?

the worst part is i can call her. but she wouldn't know who i was. it's been like this for a while and we've all sort of come to terms. but this rekindling of interest in things domestic made me miss her all over again. it's horrible missing someone who is still alive.

i don't have regrets, really, because we did spend so much time together doing so many fantastic things -- from motorcycle trips, crab fishing, and mushroom hunting to walking the dogs, making biscuits on sunday, and playing Muggins in the camper -- but still, there was so much more we could have had. so much we could have learned. it is so crappy.

i miss and i love you grams, and i hope you still remember that somehow.

sliding off my chair...lift

i called my parents yesterday to thank them for being so damn cool to teach me the ins and outs of downhill skiing when i was a kid. how cheap and easy it would have been for them to teach us to "hike" or "watch tv." instead they threw in loads of time and coin, and now i am capable of not killing myself on most alpine runs. this came in handy last week as we found ourselves high in the Italian alps near a lovely ski resort called Madesimo.

we drove up 12 km of switchbacks, parked the car on an icy lot, went into a tunnel, and took a funicular (a train that goes straight up the side, or in this case inside, of a mountain) and found ourselves at the bottom of a chairlift! up, up, up, to a cable car, up, up, up. and we skiied all day long.

after lunch i said something in spantaliangish to a nice looking italian man like, "molto mille bueno montanas pretty, eh?"

"yeah, it's really beautiful."

doh...he speak-a the englaysh. i'm retarded.

we got to chatting about skiing and he said we must, must, must, must make the 1 hour drive over to Engadin, St. Moritz in Switzerland to rub shoulders with the richest people on Earth and ski some of the best terrain in the world.

thank you mr. italian man. thank you.

our day at St. Moritz was the best skiing i have ever done in my life. granted, i sucked and found myself sliding headfirst down the side of the alps at one point, but even upside down the view was spectacular. it was sunny with perfect snow. there are thousands of acres of runs. trophy wives sporting fur-lined collars and gucci glasses swooshed by us at every turn, probably heading down to meet their sugar daddies at the "reservations only" lodges to share some Cristal and steak for lunch. the parking lot was crammed with land rovers and mercedes. every once in awhile we would hear the sound of a helicopter shuttling some billionaire backcountry skier off deeper into the mountains.

it was surreal. a beautiful day with the beautiful people.

we skied into the ski-up bar and dan went to grab us a round of drinks. as we sat in the sun, enjoying the views and marveling our good fortune, trying to blend in, i said, "look at us, we're enjoying a real pint of beer, in a real glass, in real Switzerland, at one of the best ski resorts, with the richest vacationers on earth."

erin aptly pointed out, "yeah, but we're the only people who brought our sandwiches stuffed in our coats."

touche.

back over the border for us. but what a great sojourn it was to the other side.

a day trip

on Saturday dan and and i took a tour through the Polish countryside to a small village called Oświęcim, or, in German, Auschwitz. i will never forget this visit to the Auschwitz-Auschwitz II (Birkenau) Concentration and Extermination Camp Museum and Memorial. never, ever.

i can't say much of anything about this experience that doesn't seem trite. my generation is so far removed from what happened during the war, protected by overlapping layers of time, distance, culture... it's hardly reality for me, what happened so long ago. for that matter, those horrors that may be happening now, but so far away, aren't a part of my reality either. i am not and was not there. i have no idea. it is difficult to even imagine it. and it's so easy to stay within the boundaries of my comfortable life.

i will say this, walking into a room where the braided tresses of more than 40,000 women are piled in a mountainous heap was an experience that almost made me puke. literally. seeing a piles of suitcases, combs, shoes, kettles, clothing was gut-wrenching. it was an appropriately dark, bitterly cold, windy day. uncomfortable in every sense.

i was finally brought to tears when i saw a pile of toothbrushes, the mundane and intimate little toothbrush. these people were told they were being resettled, so of course they would bring along a toothbrush. it is something i never leave home without. i guess that was my moment. the moment when, for me, the masses who were exterminated became individuals who were murdered.

i think they've kept those objects in the museum to connect the unfathomable number - 1,300,000 brutally murdered people - to the individual. for some people it is the name and birth date written on a suitcase. for others it is a face from a photograph or a pair of children's shoes. for others it is the forest of chimneys or the reconstruction of the crematorium. for me it was those toothbrushes. an item of the everyday that symbolizes an ending of someone's everyday.

historians keep telling the stories of Auschwitz, hoping that humanity will learn from its own horrors in efforts to help prevent a repeat of them. i am glad i saw what i saw, even though it was uncomfortable and disturbing.

we viewed this trip as a historical pilgrimage. a voyage from the comforts of our day to day. to see history. to feel sad. to wonder about the nature of our own kind. someone in a pub in Krakow said, "But, it's Christmas! How can you stand seeing that kind of thing during the holidays?" well, we hope to have many more christmases and many more holiday parties and many more presents and many more nights spent with friends and family in our future, but when an opportunity to do something important presents itself, it seems to us like a good idea to take it, no matter what time of year it is.

and it was.

facts about Auschwitz-Auschwitz II (Birkenau)

• more people were exterminated in the gas chambers at Auschwitz II (Birkenau) (estimate: 1.2 - 1.5 million) than were killed in action during the war from the U.S. and England combined (800,000)
• the Auschwitz camp, like all concentration camps, started as prisons for political "enemies of the state" and, other than military executions, it was not a killing camp at first.
• the series of events, the evolution in philosophy, that took place to slowly dehumanize, and finally mass murder, took place over many months/years and with the input of the intellectual, political, and military elite of German society. these were often not "crazy" people, but very intelligent people making rational decisions based on their ideals of right and wrong.
• at the peak of the "final solution," those Jews who weren't immediately killed on their day of arrival at Birkenau (just 20-30 percent) were forced to work hard labor with little clothing, 400 calories of poor food, and little heat or fresh water. they usually died within four months.

sleeping with the enemy

go ducks! i am proud to say that i set the alarm for a respectable 1:50 a.m., coincidentally the same time dan was getting home from work, for the 2:01 a.m. GMT kickoff of the the 113th Civil War. we sat up drinking ale and watching ESPN America until well after five. yes, the game was that good. yes, it was worth it.

as i read through the facebook posts this week, i realized that the beavers in my life outnumber the ducks about 4 to 1. maybe more. although i knew i was destined to go to Oregon from the seventh grade, i didn't actually move in until junior year. so my circle of alumni friends include cissy, mike and raman. sad, right? i also have angie (a gator-duck like me) and a few others in the network who sport the green and yellow. but it was mostly beaver believers posting: my husband is a beaver; my bestest friends are beavers; my in-laws are beavers; most of my high school alum are beavers. even my own dad seems to support whoever is doing the best during the season. unfair.

(i even found myself getting so angry at all the stupid duck fans with their stupid roses. we had a raging OSU machine coming to our house, on a roll, aiming to take our rose-bowl bid and we bring roses? like the game is already over? who does that? well, the beavers did last year. it was a dumb idea then, and a dumb idea now. we got lucky. bunch of idiots.)

so, you'd think a win would be extra-awesome against the beavs, but it's so strange...when we finally clinched the win and coach kelly was getting his gatorade shower, i was jumping up and down while dan slumped on the couch. as soon as it was over, radio silence. it's so lonesome being a duck in my life and knowing many of my friends were suddenly so bummed. and it's extra lonely when we lose and the crushing weight of shame hits me like a ton of bricks. it's amazing how emotionally invested we can get in our teams.

anyway, i guess the point is, i love the ducks and i am so happy they won. and i love all my beaver network, despite of and because of their allegiance. and i am more than ready for another 113 years of trash-talkin', high-stakes, barn-burners.

i just don't want to have to stay up until 5 a.m. again to watch them.

in all, it was a great game, State of Oregon.

i love college football.

p.s. dan got this in an e-mail last night. wtf? really? will people never learn.
and my friend emily sent me this, who doesn't love sportscenter (and a gigantic fuzzy duck)?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN53yX9OnP0&feature=youtube_gdata.