spring

Feb. 18th, 2025 08:17 am
hudebnik: (Default)
On Valentine's Day, I was walking the dogs and spotted this on our front lawn:


After two days of rain and warm-ish temperatures, I spotted this on a lawn a block away:


So even though everything is going to hell in Washington, DC, and bird flu is killing pet cats and infecting humans, and five commercial US airplanes have crashed in a month, and thousands of government employees have been fired by people who have no idea what those employees were doing, and the President says as long as he "saves his Country", he hasn't broken any laws, and he doesn't need to abide by laws or court orders.... still, spring seems to be coming.
hudebnik: (Default)
Technically, today is a work day, although it's Monday so I'm WFH by default, and not many other people are in the office this week anyway.

Yesterday afternoon we agreed on menus for part of the next week -- at least Christmas Eve dinner, Christmas Day brunch, Christmas Day/Hanukkah dinner, New Year's Eve dinner, New Year's Day brunch, and New Year's Day dinner -- and I compared them with current supplies to generate a lengthy shopping list. Perhaps [personal profile] shalmestere will go on a shopping expedition today while I'm working-for-pay.

There's still snow on the ground, still mostly white. The weather forecast says it won't get above freezing today, and we'll get another maybe-an-inch tomorrow morning. Any of it that hasn't melted by Sunday (the 29th) will melt in the rain that day, as temperatures rise into the 50's. Still, a white Christmas of sorts.

Walked the dogs in the park yesterday mid-day, and every time we got to a decision point, Miss B. insisted on the direction away from the house, so it was somewhat over a mile before we got home. Beautiful weather, snow on the ground and the trees, but when we got to a moderately-busy street the sidewalks were salted, and the dogs didn't like that.

Yesterday we made two more batches of Christmas cookies, four so far (magic cookie bars, dried-cherry-and-white-chocolate-chip drop cookies, peanut-butter-chocolate-kiss cookies, and Mexican-hot-chocolate-marshmallow cookies). One or two more to go; we're skipping some of the fiddlier kinds because we have fewer places to give them away this year.

Last Friday night we had tickets to go to a Ceremony of Lessons and Carols at a church in the Village, with music performed by a local medieval group we've heard before. We didn't actually leave the house Friday night -- [personal profile] shalmestere was too tired -- but we heard and watched the ceremony on-line last night. It was a real church service, with real clergy, with the priest giving all the lessons (the Temptation in the Garden of Eden, the Slaughter of the Innocents, the Annunciation, the shepherds guarding their flocks by night, and one or two other episodes) in Middle English. [personal profile] shalmestere had some complaints about his pronunciation, but she's studied Middle English in school and he probably hadn't. Anyway, I could make out most of what he was saying, and I imagine many in the live audience could too. There were the usual audience-response components, some in Latin and the "Our Father" in Middle English (the live audience had a printed script). The music was good, mostly medieval, with one somewhat under-rehearsed piece written by our acquaintance David Yardley in "medieval style". I might have opted for fewer verses of some of the songs, but if they're trying to convey the idea of a less-hurried, less-clock-driven world, doing six to ten verses of a familiar Christmas song is a reasonable approach.

It being only 9 PM by that point, we then watched another of our library of Christmas-special DVD's: "The Year Without a Santa Claus", from 1974, which I'm not sure either of us had watched more than excerpts of before. It's no "Rudolph": animation technology had advanced somewhat in the ten years in between, but it feels as though the studio had suffered budget cuts and was just phoning in the music and writing.
hudebnik: (Default)
Three weeks ago we attended a recorder workshop at which the afternoon was devoted to playing on Renaissance instruments: I think everybody in the room had at least two or three Prescotts, and two people had Prescott C-basses. A day or two later we got an e-mail from the Prescotts saying one of their customers had returned a C-bass for them to sell on consignment; after a day's debate, we jumped on it, and Friday two weeks ago we got a box containing... the foot joint, bocal, paperwork, and a couple of neck straps. The rest of the instrument had been shipped in a separate box, which according to the online tracker was at a sorting facility in Brooklyn.

The following Monday, according to the online tracker, it was "in transit" from Brooklyn to Queens. Several more times that week, according to the online tracker, it was "in transit" from Brooklyn to Queens. I filled out an online form to find out where the package really was and why it hadn't been delivered yet, then called the Post Office and was directed to the same online form. The following Monday, according to the online tracker, it was "in transit" from Brooklyn to Queens. On Wednesday, according to the online tracker, it was "expected to be delivered Thursday", and on Thursday it was actually delivered, over two weeks after it had arrived in Brooklyn. It's gorgeous, it has a solid low C (equivalent to the low C for a tenor singer), and with a few weird unintuitive fingerings it's capable of playing over two octaves, up to the low D on a soprano recorder. Now we just need to find opportunities to play it with people....

And finally, yesterday's weather forecast rain or perhaps a few flakes of snow, but overnight it snowed, enough to stick on the ground, looks like about two or three inches. Not enough to be a serious nuisance, but enough to be pretty and Christmas-y. If the weather forecasts are right this time, it should stick around for at least a few days, although it may melt by Christmas proper.
hudebnik: (Default)
In case Thanksgiving wasn't a sufficient season-marker, we have another sign that winter is coming. First frost was Friday night, and it's forecast to get below freezing every night for at least the next week.

So I drained the rain-barrel, and drained the garden-hoses, and picked the last raspberry and the last few dozen Thai chili peppers, and denuded the basil plants of leaves (on the assumption that they'll die off in the next week anyway). Probably should have done all these things the day before first frost, rather than the day after, but that's life.

weather

Nov. 20th, 2024 07:45 am
hudebnik: (Default)
New York City and New Jersey are currently under a drought warning. We've had a gorgeous autumn, great for going on walks in the park, but only 1/4" of rain in the past seven weeks; there are burn bans, and people are vaguely encouraged to run dishwashers and laundry as seldom as possible, but they haven't instituted mandatory water-saving measures yet. Fortunately, we're expecting 2" of rain between this Wednesday night and Friday morning, which will reduce the immediate fire hazard but not substantially replenish the reservoirs.
hudebnik: (Default)
Today we were scheduled for a guided tour of the major Seville sights. We were given a meeting place in email, but then they changed the meeting place and informed all the registered guests… by WhatsApp. Which, last I checked, was an optional product that not everybody has — I had certainly never used it until a few days ago. But in Spain, apparently, it’s the universal mode of text communication -- so universal that it didn’t occur to them to try SMS, which AFAIK comes with approximately every cell phone.

In this case, the "registered guest" (the one who made the reservation) was [personal profile] shalmestere, so I didn't get the message, and she didn't and still doesn't have WhatsApp on her phone, so she didn't get the message either. And apparently the sender didn't get a bounce message saying "there's no WhatsApp user with this phone number," so nobody at the tour company knew that we hadn't gotten the message. It was mostly by chance that we saw the tour guide standing on the other side of a rather large plaza.

Anyway, the tour (of the Sevilla Alcázar, Mosque Cathedral, and minaret bell tower) went well after that. And again, the weather was perfect: 20°C high, blue skies, a few puffy white clouds.

The Alcázar in Sevilla and the Nasrid Palace in Granada, which we toured less than 24 hours apart, were built at the same time in the 14th century by a Christian king and a Moslem king who were friendly rivals and shared a lot of artisans. Both buildings have a lot of traditionally-Moslem-looking ornament, but when the money comes from a Christian king, Christian symbolism and the king's heraldry take pride of place. And the Christian king in question, Pedro I el Bajo Cruel Justo, had his artisans use the same textual formulas of praise for him that they would formerly have used for Allah, albeit in Spanish rather than Arabic. Pictures to follow.

The construction of the Seville Cathedral, unlike the one in Córdoba, started by completely flattening the previous mosque. They did re-use as many materials from the mosque as possible, which helped them finish building the then-largest (and today still third-largest) cathedral in the world in only sixty years, so it's in a consistent architectural style throughout. And they kept the minaret, the tower from which the muezzin used to deliver the call to prayer, adding only a cupola on top with about a dozen church bells. It still has the brick ramp all the way up for the muezzin's donkey. They also kept the patio where the Moslem faithful would do their ablutions before entering the mosque; it still works as an entryway to the cathedral.

Like most Christian churches, the Seville cathedral is cross-shaped, with the main altar in the eastern branch of the cross, but the gilded-wood "main altar" is almost never used -- only for high holy days and the Royal Family -- so most ordinary services use the silver "commoners' altar" in the north branch of the cross. The south branch has a sculpture representing the funeral procession for Cristobal Colón. The casket actually contains the partial remains of six different people, of which one finger has been DNA-matched to known descendants of Cristobal Colón, and nobody knows what other five people (men and women) contributed the remaining body parts. According to the tour guide, Colón's remains were originally buried in Valencia, then moved to Cuba, then to Puerto Rico, then to a couple of other places, and finally back to Sevilla, but every custodian along the way seems to have taken a piece of the original remains.

Anyway, as soon as we finished the tour, we returned to the hotel, ransomed our suitcases and rental car, and drove north. We were planning to visit a couple of Templar castles, but estimated that they would close about the time we got there, so we went straight to Mérida instead. Checked into our hotel, parked the car (in a residential neighborhood with very scanty street parking... feels just like NYC!), and had a delicious dinner at a tapas place inside the bullring two blocks away.

Mérida is best known not for medieval but for Roman ruins, and we plan to see some of those tomorrow morning.
hudebnik: (Default)
Guided tour of the Alhambra yesterday, on the first non-rainy day in a week. Glorious; pics to follow. Then drove three hours to Sevilla, checked into hotel later at night, went to bed and didn’t get up until breakfast was nearly over. Today, the Seville Cathedral and Alcazar, then drive to Mérida by way of Templar forts.

Travelogue

Apr. 1st, 2024 08:36 am
hudebnik: (Default)
After two rainy days in Córdoba, we checked out of our room and walked in the rain to the parking lot, where the car was intact and not flooded (although the lot was, as expected, even muddier than before). Drove in the rain to Antequera, where the stone gate had indeed been rolled aside and we were able to visit the dolmens, variously 4000-6000 years old. The two in town, Viera and Menga, have a slick modern visitor's center, QR codes to download detailed descriptions, etc. while the one a few km outside town, El Romeral (next to a shipping-pallet warehouse) has bathrooms and a couple of tour guides standing around. Viera is oriented, conventionally, so that its inner chamber is illuminated by the rising sun on either the equinoxes or the summer solstice (I forget which). The other two are more unusual: El Romeral, which we visited first, is unique in Europe in that its entry passage points west: specifically, it points at the highest point of a nearby mountain range.

And Menga's entry passage points south-southeast, at the highest point of a lone mountain which, seen from here, has the shape of a human facial profile. Although of course we couldn't actually see it through the rain and fog. Which are also why I don't have a bunch of pictures from yesterday.

Then we drove in the rain to Granada, parked at an underground lot, dragged our suitcases outside in the rain, caught a taxi in the rain, walked a block or two in the rain to the same Granada hotel we were at last week, and checked in. Hung things up to dry, put the room's climate-control system in "dehumidify" mode, and fell down in bed, about 3 PM.

We appear to have left a bag of Easter chocolate and related goodies in the hotel at Málaga, so we needed to replenish the supply before Easter was over. So after an hour or two of resting and drying off, we headed out (in slightly less-driving rain) to the downtown shopping district where the fancy chocolate- and candy-stores are. Then stopped at an Italian restaurant for dinner: [personal profile] shalmestere had gnocchi with some kind of Calabrian-pepper sauce, while I had lasagna bolognese (which seemed appropriately warming and hearty for the weather). By the time we finished, the rain had stopped, and we walked two blocks back to the hotel.

Turned on local TV to see what we could understand. Watched a few minutes of a hunting-and-fishing show, a few more minutes of an action drama involving a lot of people shooting one another and blowing up train cars, then stumbled into the Spanish-dubbed version of one of the "Shrek" movies that we hadn't seen (Shrek is in an alternate universe where none of his friends, nor his wife, recognize him). Which is good visual humor even if you can't make out all the words, so we watched that to the end. Next on the same channel was a show about a couple of teenaged friends who work in a garishly-colored video-game store, and at the end of every scene they metamorphose from live-action to frames in a comic book. Again, largely visual humor (the female protagonist had mistakenly put on a customer's boots, couldn't get them off, ended up borrowing a bucket of Italian dressing from their friend who works at the pizzeria next door and pouring it down the boots to lubricate her feet enough to extricate them... and then they return the boots to the wrong customer and have to retrieve them... and then there's a plot thread about the male protagonist having, then losing, the high score on a particular video game and trying to regain his title).

My scratchy throat of a few days ago has mostly gone away, but the occasional coughing fits continue, and today I added occasional sneezing fits to the mix. Which was a problem while I was driving in the rain; fortunately I didn't actually hit anything. Slept with a bunch of pillows under my head, getting up every few minutes to drink water or blow my nose or pee. Not the most pleasant of nights, but we both eventually got some sleep.

The good news: the long-term forecast for our remaining week in Spain shows no rain whatsoever in the places we'll be, on the days we'll be there. In particular, our Alhambra tour this afternoon and our Sevilla tour tomorrow should both be rain-free.

Travelogue

Mar. 31st, 2024 08:23 am
hudebnik: (Default)
Another rainy day.

Got empanadas at the shop a few blocks away, "dining in" this time rather than bringing them back to the hostel room in the rain. Then spent about two hours at the Archaeological Museum of Córdoba, which not only houses a lot of artifacts and displays from the Paleolithic through the Reconquista, but was built on top of a Roman theatre, so its basement level is largely excavations of the theatre: seating, stairs, drainage channels, etc.

We had a bit of time before our 2:00 timed entry to the Mezquita, so we stopped at a cafetería for pastries and hot chocolate (still in the rain). Then walked in the rain to the primary tourist attraction of Córdoba, the 10th-12th-century mosque with a 16th-century cathedral in the middle.

(Before that, there was a 6th-century Visigothic church on the same site, and probably something Roman before that; this city was a Roman provincial capital for 200 years before the Visigoths took over.)

There are mosques-turned-into-Christian-churches all over Spain, but this one is unusual in that the builders of the church destroyed as little as possible of the mosque, incorporating much of its architecture into the cathedral building. The interior is a seemingly infinite forest of red-and-white double arches, most of which are intact (and many of which include recycled Roman or Visigothic columns and capitals). The outermost row of them near the walls became the gates of chapels devoted to particular saints (and presumably sponsored by particular rich families or guilds in town). Sixteen of them in the middle were replaced with Gothic arches for the larger "Villaviciosa Chapel". The 16th-century cathedral altar area doesn't show much trace of the mosque (and really isn't to my taste!), but in other chapels they simply repainted the Moorish arches with 16th-17th-century Christian artwork (which also doesn't particularly ring my bell, but it's non-destructive).


After the Mezquita, we walked (in the rain) to the Royal Baths of the Caliph, which are partly archaeological ruins and partly reconstructed. But underground, so at least we were out of the rain.

Then walked (in the rain) through the Jewish Quarter. We were too close to closing time to see the Casa de Sefarad, which is about the life of pre-1492 Sephardic Jews, but we saw the preserved-and-restored early-14th-century synagogue (small but moving). Since there are so many tourists in the neighborhood, several other buildings have been turned into tourist attractions. The Casa Andalusi tries to present the feel of a 12th-century Al-Andalus urban house with internal courtyard and fountains. The furniture doesn't fit the time period, and there are a lot of obviously-modern books, lights, etc. mixed in with reconstructed stuff, but there's a nice Moorish tile mosaic in the basement. The next-door Al-Iksir Alchemy Museum is even weirder: again attractive courtyards and fountains, and they've gone to a lot of trouble to provide high-tech audioguides in various languages, but all the content seems to be modern woo-woo, nothing historical.

It finally stopped raining in time for us to have dinner (fideuhá, a sort of glorified Rice-a-Roni, with pork loin, chicken, and portabello mushrooms, followed by molten-centered chocolate cake).

Fell asleep last night to Easter-vigil bells, and occasional singing, in the distance.

The plan for today was to check out of the hostel, leave our luggage at the hostel management office, attend Easter services at the Mezquita, retrieve the car and the luggage, and drive back to Granada for tomorrow's Alhambra tour. It turns out that the fastest route to Granada goes by way of Altaquera, so we may get to see those Neolithic dolmens after all. However, on waking up this morning, [personal profile] shalmestere decided that Easter service was too much complexity to add to the schedule, so we'll just check out and drive to Granada by way of Altaquera.

Travelogue

Mar. 30th, 2024 08:34 am
hudebnik: (Default)
Checked out of room near Málaga airport and drove north towards Córdoba. By the time [personal profile] shalmestere was awake and functional, the hotel's breakfast buffet was closed, so we planned to find brunch on the way.
There's one town of any size between Málaga and Córdoba: Antequera, which I'd never heard of before starting to research this trip, but it apparently has an impressive Moorish fortress and a couple of Neolithic dolmens. So we headed into the town center to find food. It was pouring rain, and not quite noon, and Good Friday, so not much was open, but here's what appears to be the main church in town:

We eventually found a pastelería crowded with locals, saw somebody getting up to leave, nabbed their table, and had some delicious croissants and thick drinking chocolate. And by the time that was over, the rain had mostly stopped. Walked up

to the hilltop Moorish fortress, the Alcazaba, which was captured by Ferdinand I de Aragón (whose grandson Ferdinand II married Isabella de Castilla) in 1410 after a months-long siege. Entry to the fortress compound (of 62,000 m2) is through an arch that was originally Roman, then Visigothic, then reworked by the Moors, then reworked again by Ferdinand

who, on the day of his victory, not only reconsecrated the mosque inside the fortress as a Christian church, but ordered the construction of a new larger church just outside the walls but still near the top of the hill.

The Alcazaba compound includes remnants of Roman housing, a Visigothic church, and the aforementioned mosque as well as the towers and barbican walls that make it a military stronghold.


Walked back down the hill, retrieved the car, and headed off to see the megalithic dolmens. Two of them are in town, next to a Ford dealership ("Auto Dolmens"), behind a fence and an admission office that was closed for Good Friday. The third is a few km outside town, next to a rock quarry or something, with no admission office but behind a fence and a gate that was closed for Good Friday. So that didn't work. [personal profile] shalmestere suggested we return on the third day to see whether the rock has been rolled aside....

Anyway, in frustration at the rain and the dolmen closures, we stopped at McDonald's (not terribly different from a US McDonald's except for the names of the sandwiches: the Whopper approximation is named the McExtreme), ate a late lunch, and drove towards Córdoba under sunshine and blue skies.

For our two nights in Córdoba, I had reserved a room in a youth hostel -- not so much because it's cheap as because it's well-located in the historic district. However, the hostel has no "front desk staff"; you contact them a day or two in advance to make arrangements for check-in. I had done that, and Friday morning I received an e-mail (forwarded through Orbitz) asking for my e-mail address and phone number, so I sent those. At lunchtime I checked my e-mail and found one with an "online check-in" link where I could provide my phone number (again), e-mail address (again), and scans of passports. So I did that from the McDonald's parking lot, although there was some confusion with the online check-in form.

An hour later, when we reached Córdoba's historic district, I followed Google Maps directions to the hostel (which ended probably 50m away from the hostel, since Google Maps thought incorrectly that the last 50m was pedestrian-only), checked my e-mail again, and found nothing. I parked in a tiny square, not blocking traffic, and left [personal profile] shalmestere to guard the car while I walked to the hostel and tried to negotiate our way in. I e-mailed again, I text-messaged, I phoned, and after several tries I got somebody on the phone who said I needed to provide my phone number (yet again), my e-mail address (yet again), and upload scans of both passports (I had only seen a place to upload one at lunchtime, and that one apparently hadn't gone through). So I did all that. The guy wanted to communicate on WhatsApp, of course, which I didn't have, so we did most of this by e-mail. I got an e-mail saying "OK, I will send you the code to get in the front door." Ten minutes later I e-mailed him again asking where the code was, what room we were in, and how to get a room key; no reply. Another fifteen minutes later I e-mailed him again asking the same questions; no reply. (This whole time [personal profile] shalmestere was sitting in the car 50m away, probably illegally parked, fuming and sending me increasingly aggrieved text messages.) So another ten minutes later I called the guy on the phone to ask the same questions, and he said he'd sent me an e-mail with all that information half an hour ago. He sent the e-mail again, I saw the subject line pop up briefly on my phone screen, but then couldn't find it in either my inbox or my spam folder. So he dictated the information over the phone, I got into the building, got the key, found the room, dropped my suitcase in the room, and told both him and [personal profile] shalmestere that everything was (finally!) resolved.

I returned to the car (still illegally parked with the blinkers on), gave [personal profile] shalmestere the room key and the instructions, and had her take her suitcase to the room while I looked for a place to park the car legally. It took probably ten minutes, a certain amount of scraping, and the assistance of several locals just to get the car turned around and pointed the right direction (the car is classified as "compact", and looks like a small car by US standards, but it's actually fairly large by local standards and has way too large a turning radius to maneuver in a medieval city!) Google Maps told me there were two parking establishments a 5-minute walk away, but when I got there, I saw nothing but a couple of bars. So I followed the hostel manager's recommendation to a place 15 minutes' walk away, on the other side of the river. There were police cars and people setting up barricades to block off the street for a Good Friday procession, but I was the last car across the bridge before they blocked it. The parking turns out to be not a commercial parking garage, but a free public parking lot. And since it had been raining much of the day, it was a very muddy public parking lot.

Anyway, I left the car there and walked back to the youth hostel, across a crowded pedestrian bridge over a rain-swollen Guadalquivir river.

[personal profile] shalmestere didn't want to leave the room for dinner, so I went out looking for take-out, in a crowd of tapas-crawlers; eventually grabbed some empanadas and patatas fritas and brought them back to the room. Fall down go boom.

Today, we see what we can of Córdoba. It's supposed to be raining off and on all day today and tomorrow. Hope the parking lot doesn't flood.

Travelogue

Mar. 27th, 2024 08:33 am
hudebnik: (Default)
Weather yesterday: much cooler than the previous week (high about 10°C), but gorgeous blue skies with puffy white clouds, bright sunshine, with intermittent rain showers.

[personal profile] shalmestere was concerned that she was "coming down with something", and was in all kinds of hurt after a day or two of hill-climbing in Toledo, so we took it easy yesterday, avoiding anything that involved lots of climbing. Fortunately, much of the tourist area in Granada is stretched out along the street along the river, which is about 20 m from our hotel, so not much hill-climbing was necessary. (The river is also about 10m straight down, in a gorge that doesn't invite pedestrian traffic).

In the US, the word "river" implies "navigable": if you couldn't put a cargo or multi-passenger boat into it, you wouldn't call it a "river" but rather a "creek", "brook", "stream", or "branch". And most old cities are built on one or more rivers. In Europe, most old cities are likewise built on rivers, but many of them are only a few meters wide. A "river" serves as a source of fresh water; transportation, if you get it, is a bonus. Toledo is tucked into the sharp bend of a small-but-navigable river; the old part of the much larger Granada is built on two hills on either side of a river that I'm sure I could cross with a running broad jump. Except that the gorge isn't wide enough to make the running approach. And in Madrid, the current capital and the biggest city in the country, I gather there is a Río Manzanares that (according to photos on Google Maps) is at least 10m wide, but we never came across it.

Anyway, we bought some yummy empanadas for breakfast, walked a few hundred meters west to the Alcaicería, the Moorish shopping district (rebuilt in the 19th century for tourists after being destroyed by fire), bought some sweets, bought some souvenirs and 1/12-scale miniatures, didn't stand in line to get into the 16th-century Royal Chapel where Ferdinand, Isabella, Philip, and Juana were buried, bought some more sweets, visited the one remaining Moorish caravanserai in the city (with its 14th-century carved-limestone gate), returned to the hotel and took a siesta (not that it's hot out, but we were tired).

Then got up and walked a few hundred meters east, visited the Museo Arqueológico (which is in mid-renovation, so admission is free), tried to visit two Arabic baths (one is functioning again as a bath/spa, and we decided not to spend the time and money on that, while the one that's just an archaeological site was closed), bought some more sweets, sat on benches overlooking the river and underlooking the Alhambra across the river, and returned to the hotel.

I heard drums and trumpets outside and guessed there was another Semana Santa procession going on, so I ran downstairs to see. A brass band was just finishing up on the front steps of the nearest church, when another brass band marched up the street and stopped. I saw a guy walk by in what looked like a KKK pointy-hooded costume, only purple for Lent, followed by several choirboys also in purple (at least one carrying a pointy hat). There was much milling around as though waiting for something. Then the latter brass band started playing again and marched back down the street towards the downtown business district whence they had come.

By this time [personal profile] shalmestere had come outside to see what was to be seen, and we walked a hundred meters to an Italian restaurant where we had some delicious spaghetti carbonara, then returned to the hotel, read and did DuoLingo Spanish exercises for a while, and went to bed.

Today we're scheduled to pick up a rental car that we'll use to visit the next several cities and towns. Not sure how close I can get to the hotel with a private car: the hotel itself is on a callito with steps, while the cobblestoned riverbank "road" is variously 2-4 m wide and full of pedestrians.
hudebnik: (Default)
Checked out of our hotel in Toledo (in the rain), caught a cab to the train station (in the rain), bought some empanadas and a sandwich at the station cafe (in the rain), and took the high-speed train (in intermittent rain) back to Madrid.

When I originally planned this trip, I had an hour's layover planned in Madrid before leaving for Granada, but by the time I actually bought the tickets, that train to Granada was no longer available and I could only get one three hours later. So I tried to leave Toledo later, but those tickets were immutable. So we sucked it up and spent three hours sitting on a stone benchlike-thing with no back (seats with backs are at an extreme premium in the Madrid-Atocha train station) before boarding our train to Granada. Which was uneventful, and of course raining part of the way. We've probably seen several million olive trees today, and that's not an exaggeration: they're small trees, planted in a rectangular grid probably 3m apart, so a 30m square is 100 trees, a 300m square is 10,000 trees... it adds up quickly. And there were some striking mountains along the way too.


Got to Granada, caught a taxi (in the rain), which was stopped by a police road-block about 200m short of the hotel, so we had to walk that last bit with suitcases in the rain, dodging crowds of other tourists.

The hotel is nice, though: in a 16th-century building, with terracotta tile floors and wood-beam ceilings, and it's very conveniently located to shopping and sights. Got a delicious take-out dinner at an empanadas stand 100m away, brought it back and ate it in the room.

Tomorrow, probably more rain, but it's our one full day in Granada, so we'll see what we can see between weather and our physical stamina.

We won't get to the Alhambra tomorrow: by the time I looked for tickets, none were available for either of the days we're here, but I got tickets for April 1, so I changed the itinerary to come back to Granada for one more night (from Córdoba, where we'll be the night before).
hudebnik: (Default)
We’ve been in Spain for almost six days so far, and for that whole time there’s been a heat wave: temperatures 5-10°C above normal, and “unhealthy” air quality (mostly PM10). I think the latter improved to “fair” yesterday, but is now back to “unhealthy”.

Today’s forecast calls for intermittent rain all day, with temperatures close to normal. Which is OK, because today is the day we’re spending largely in train stations and on trains. But it’ll be cooler still, and still intermittently rainy, for the next week as we visit Granada, the south coast, and Córdoba. On the bright side, perhaps the rain will wash some of the PM10’s out of the air.

Also, an air quality described as “very unhealthy”, dark red on the EU scale shown in the Weather app, is apparently in the yellow “moderate” zone on the US scale shown in Google Maps.

pavilion

Jul. 3rd, 2023 07:00 am
hudebnik: (Default)
Spent a weird weekend at Northern Regional War Camp.

We had both taken a vacation day for Friday to pack for the event. There was yet another smoke plume from Canadian wildfires, and the air quality was getting bad in NYC, and predicted to get bad in the Hudson Valley, so we weren't sure until 10 AM on Friday that we would go at all, but I pointed out that it was an opportunity to test the brand-new pavilion that arrived mail-order from India a few days ago. So we packed things up and left Friday afternoon. Traffic was bad getting out of NYC, but clear thereafter. We reached the site (one of the numerous ugly but flat county-fair grounds the groups in the Hudson Valley tend to use for events) before dark and started setting up the pavilion.

The pavilion appears to be very well-made: solid cotton canvas, with solid machine seams everywhere, hand-sewn reinforced eyelets, steel D-rings (or I guess Delta-rings) at the shoulders to attach guy ropes, which are provided and apparently made of hemp (!). As advertised, it was shipped without poles, but it did come with steel stakes (in two lengths, presumably the longer ones for guys and the shorter ones for walls). There's no hole at the peak, but rather a reinforced pad, which means you don't need (and can't have) a spike from the center pole or a finial on the outside. We might do some surgery to change that, since the finial on the outside provides not only decoration but an attachment point for external storm guys.

First surprise: we thought it had 16 roof segments, and it actually had 10. Which makes it more difficult to lay out initial stakes before raising the roof, but not impossible.

The pavilion was intended to be set up with vertical perimeter poles: each roof seam has an eyelet near the bottom, and each wall seam an eyelet near the top, and the spike in the top of the perimeter pole goes through both to hold them up and together. However, the pavilion was shipped without any poles at all (as advertised), and we didn't want to add vertical perimeter poles for a variety of reasons (more stuff to transport, and we've never seen any evidence of them in any picture of a tent before the 16th century), so we had come up with a mechanism involving eye-bolts, washers, and S-hooks to hang the walls from the roof edge. Which basically worked, except the washers I had bought turned out to be too small, so they occasionally popped through the eyelets and the wall fell down. So that was a second surprise.

On our way to the site, we had stopped at a craft store to buy wooden ball finials to screw onto the aforementioned eye-bolts to (a) hide their obvious modernity, and (b) protect the fabric from the screw tips, so (c) I could pack up the pavilion with them in place rather than re-attaching them every time. The eye-bolts are 3/16" diameter (i.e. #10 gauge), 24 threads per inch, and the holes in the finials are 3/16" as advertised, but slightly too large to screw on: I can put them on but they won't stay unless I also use glue or wood putty or something. Third surprise.

The center pole we re-used from our oval pavilion (two hardwood wheelbarrow-handles held together by a 2' length of plumbing pipe) was too short for this pavilion (not completely a surprise -- I thought it might be the case), so the walls puddled on the ground (even where they weren't falling off the walls). And it seemed to me that if the center were any higher, and we continued not using vertical perimeter poles (so the guy ropes need to be at the same angle as the roof), the ropes supplied with the pavilion wouldn't be long enough.

With all this, the pavilion clearly wasn't habitable for the night, particularly with two hounds who might panic and run away if anything fell down, so we stayed in a motel.

Saturday morning I got up and went to the nearest hardware store for bigger washers, longer pipe, more rope, etc. I found a very nice hardware store with helpful, knowledgeable staff and almost everything on my list... except the pipe. They had the right length of pipe, but too narrow to fit over the wheelbarrow handles, and they had the right diameter of pipe, but only in 5' lengths, and they didn't have the capability to cut that kind of pipe in-house. So I tried another hardware store, and then a Lowe's, and nobody had the pipe. But at least I had better washers, and spare nuts, and more rope, and good scissors for cutting the rope, and tape for binding the ends of the rope. So I replaced the washers, and the roof is no longer falling down. I replaced one rope, as a test of feasibility, and concluded that we could do it, but (a) the manila rope is really nasty, unlike the lovely apparently-hemp rope that came with the pavilion, and (b) even with longer ropes and a longer center pole, the pavilion will take up too much real estate to be usable at Pennsic.

Which leaves us with three choices for Pennsic: (a) use our old oval pavilion, which is over twenty years old and showing its age; (b) use this one with vertical perimeter poles, which we would have to make; or (c) finish the new oval pavilion.

I have today off from work, so I plan to spend a good deal of it on option (c).
hudebnik: (Default)


I thought it was smoky yesterday, but this is way worse than yesterday.

Da Weekend

May. 8th, 2023 06:46 am
hudebnik: (Default)
Spent much of Saturday at an SCA Crown Tournament, which was conveniently less than an hour and a half's drive from our home. Weather was lovely. We set up a musicians' gallery (inherited from Will McLean) facing the tournament field, and played three-part shawm music during and between bouts. Several people came by and thanked us for adding appropriate music to the event atmosphere, including the guy who was named Crown Prince at the end of the day. Had some logistical difficulties with the wind blowing sheet music off the stands.

After the new Prince was chosen, [personal profile] shalmestere and I had planned to go immediately home, but Deonna wanted to go to dinner together, and also wanted to stay for Court. So we watched Court, finished packing the cars, and went to a Thai restaurant -- which we picked because it was two miles away, but it turned out to be quite good. Drove home, tired and dehydrated. Got home about 10 PM, walked and fed the dogs, unpacked the car, and fell down boom.

An old friend of [personal profile] shalmestere's from the Chicago area was in town for a music workshop, and we agreed to meet her at the Cloisters before she flew home. She hadn't been to the Cloisters in over thirty years, so we were able to see a lot of our old favorites with new eyes. Again, the weather was lovely, and we walked around the various gardens of the Cloisters exclaiming over the useful herbs and beautiful flowers. We had brought a picnic lunch, which we ate while sitting on a stone wall in the park.

Then we drove home, made dinner, made some chocolate-chip scones, and watched a video of Saturday's UK Coronation. Still tired and dehydrated. But now it's Monday.

weather

Dec. 24th, 2022 12:36 am
hudebnik: (Default)
24 hours ago, it was 11°C, and when we gave the dogs their bedtime walk, I wore a light windbreaker against the intermittent rain.

Now it's -13°C, with a blustery wind; the bedtime walk was quite brief, even with me wearing a parka and the dogs wearing wool coats.
hudebnik: (Default)
My culinary goal for the weekend was to get the Thanksgiving turkey carcass out of the fridge. So [personal profile] shalmestere made the beginnings of a stock (water, clove-studded onions, onion skins, celery leaves, carrots, stuff like that), I segregated the remains of the carcass into white, dark, and garbage, then threw the last of these into the stockpot and boiled for an hour or two. The house smelled heavenly.

Then I put the contents of the stockpot through a strainer, put the unctuous, delicious-smelling liquid back into the stockpot, and set it back on the stove to reduce some more.

Time passed. [personal profile] shalmestere came up the stairs saying "Do you smell something scorchy?" Now that she mentioned it, I did. I ran downstairs to the kitchen, looked in the stockpot, and saw not unctuous liquid but a souffle-like dome of brownish black. The lovely stock was clearly ruined. I turned it off and started adding water in hopes of at least soaking the stuff off and rescuing the pot. As I added water, the dome belched at me, let out a last gasp, and collapsed into the water.

Well, at least I salvaged the remaining meat. There's enough white meat for a couple of sandwiches, and lots of dark meat. And I completed a shopping trip for not only staples but the unusual ingredients necessary for this year's round of Christmas cookies.

Around 9:00 the light shower of rain that had been going on all afternoon became a light shower of snow -- the first of the year -- so we had hot chocolate. Which was not burnt. The snow isn't sticking to the wet ground yet, but car rooves are turning white.
hudebnik: (Default)
We had a thunderstorm Wednesday afternoon, which seems to have cleaned a lot of the soot out of the air, and we've since had two nights in a row with a white moon (not pink). It's supposed to be in the orange again tomorrow, though.
hudebnik: (Default)
A few nights ago we walked the dogs before bed, and noticed the crescent moon, a bit above the horizon, with a distinct pinkish cast. I pointed it out to [personal profile] shalmestere, naturally assuming it was pink for the same reason the setting sun is red: it's just above the horizon, and therefore filtered through a lot of atmosphere, dust, and haze.

Last night we walked the dogs before bed, and the moon was now slightly gibbous, farther above the horizon, and still pink. I went "Huh."

Tonight the moon is about 3/4 full, even farther above the horizon, and still distinctly pink. And the only explanation I can think of is smoke from the fires in California and Oregon. The air here in NYC doesn't smell noticeably of smoke, but it has a certain opacity; everything is just a little fuzzy around the edges, as it hasn't been for the past fifteen months. I knew intellectually that this was a really bad fire year on the west coast, but this kind of effect 3000 miles downwind makes it much more real and visceral.

Edit: See this site for real-time Air Quality Index measurements and forecasts. The forecast for yesterday was red, today and tomorrow green, but the actual real-time measurements in most of the NYC area this morning are orange. Perhaps the forecast for today is lower because of the forecast thunderstorms this afternoon. One can also easily compare different kinds of pollution -- overall AQI, particulates under 2.5µm, ozone, sulfur dioxide, and carbon monoxide. For example, AQI, PM2.5, and CO were all in the red yesterday, as one would expect from wildfire smoke, while ozone and SO2 were both in the green.

Profile

hudebnik: (Default)
hudebnik

May 2025

S M T W T F S
    123
4 5 67 8910
1112131415 1617
18192021222324
2526 27 28 293031

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 10th, 2025 07:01 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios