Why Would Anyone Watch This?

When I was in Milan, I was home killing time before bed, and I turned on the TV. The shows were all in Italian, of course, so finding something to watch was difficult, but I found a couple of soccer games. Those are something that can be understood without speaking the language. Both Inter Milan and AC Milan were playing games in the Champions League that night, but for some reason I could only find Inter on the TV. AC Milan was playing that night in the San Siro, and their game might possibly not be on the TV to encourage people to attend in person. Maybe they do things like they do in the NFL, where the local game isn't on TV unless it's a sellout?

Anyhow, what I did find surprised me. I found this:

That guy is the radio announcer for the game. They had a TV show where you could watch a locked down camera pointing at the radio announcer as he called the game. You couldn't watch the game itself...but you could watch the radio announcer talk about it. I was really surprised by that. Who would want to watch that? I can understand listening to it on the radio, but if you're going to watch TV of the game...you want to actually watch the game, right? Why would you watch someone else watching the game? If we're going to do that, I ought to take it another level and have a show of me watching this guy watching the game. Or maybe I could start a whole industry of YouTube content reacting to the guy reacting to the game.

Milano

Now that I was there, it was time to see some sights. My wife was still doing her training, so I was on my own for this, but that was fine, because I was pretty knowledgeable about how this stuff was done now. I could pretty easily get a taxi, take a train, and see some things. Also, my wife had found the setting on my phone that I hadn't checked the day before, so it was working for internet as well. I was set.

I had the front desk call me a taxi, and I took it to the train station. From the train station, I went right back to Milano Centrale where I had been the day before.

Outside, they had a taxi stand similar to what they had in Piacenza only on a much larger scale.

I had to wait in line for about fifteen minutes to get a cab because there were so many people there. The driver took me to Piazza del Duomo where I could visit the cathedral of Milan. It was a very impressive place. When I got out, it took my breath away.

I don't know if I've ever personally seen a more impressive, inspiring creation of mankind.

This building blew me away.

I find it more inspiring than even the Empire State Building, which was very neat, but couldn't hold a candle to this place.

I walked around the building...which turned out not to be as worthwhile as I'd hoped. The building was undergoing renovations, so a great deal of it was covered by scaffolding and sheets. Then I bought my ticket to go inside. Upon first coming in the door, the most impressive feature presents itself: the cathedral's massive height.

Human beings made this place, not even under direction from a super-advanced alien race. It took six hundred years to complete. They didn't actually finish it until 1965. That right there boggles my mind. How can people keep the blueprint for a building in their heads for 600 years? The thing should be so wonky and out of whack. I can't manage to stick to plans for six days without changing them up, and these people stuck with it for six centuries.

Some of my favorite things were the stained glass windows that stretched high and wide all through the cathedral with hundreds of panels, each individually designed.

Those were really only the beginning, though. There was so much to be seen. I wandered around the building with my mouth open and my camera constantly clicking.

I eventually wandered the whole grounds, and it was time to use the rest of my ticket, which took me to the rooftop terraces. Unfortunately, I had to take the stairs. That's right, I was going to the top of this supremely high building...

...by stairs.

This was my experience:

You can loop that video about a dozen times to see what the real experience was like.  I could have paid an extra ten bucks to ride the elevator to the top, but I refused to play that game. I'm not some old man who can't climb a few flights of stairs. I refuse to go gentle into that good night. I walked all the way to the top. Sadly, the whole way I could hear some young kids coming up behind me, hot on my heels. I was sure I would have to stand aside and allow them to pass me, confirming that I was in fact an old man and that I should have gone gently into that good night. However, I made it to the top just before they caught me, so I didn't have to admit any failure. I was indomitable on my way to the roof.

The roof, by the way, was amazing.

As if this place needed anything to make it more beautiful? They couldn't even just have a normal roof. No, it was covered with spires and flying buttresses everywhere I looked.

It was the highlight of the whole day in Milan.

I was frustrated while on the top of the cathedral because my phone suddenly dinged me to say that I was low on battery. Already? I was just getting started, and I kind of couldn't do without it. I needed it for pictures. I needed it for directions. I needed it for my train tickets. I only had twenty percent battery power. What did I do to run it down so fast? I had to make sure it didn't go belly up on me, or I might get stuck in Milan.

I powered it down, and figured I would only turn it on when I needed it. I went down the stairs, and found the next place on my list to see. Right next door to the cathedral was the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. This was a shopping mall that was absolutely beautiful. It was built in 1877, and is the oldest active shopping gallery in Italy. The architecture was beautiful.

But that was all I cared about. The place was filled with Gucci stores and fancy restaurants. I didn't need to bother with that noise. I just strolled through, took a couple of pictures, and moved along.

Up the street from the cathedral is the Castello Sforzesco.

You could walk through and see it easily, but it didn't feel like there was much to see.

Maybe I should have taken some kind of tour instead of doing it on the cheap like I did.

There was a big park on the other side of the castle, and I strolled through that until I came to the Arco Della Pace.

It was built in the early 1800s, has to do with Napoleonic rule and the Austria-Hungarian Empire that took over Italy upon defeating it and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. To tell you the truth, at this point I'd had enough. I hadn't even seen that much. For example, "The Last Supper" by Leonardo Da Vinci was only an eighteen minute stroll from this point. I could have gone to see it. The Chiesa di San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore, another place I was interested in seeing was only a couple of minutes past that. I could have done so much more, but I didn't feel like it.

I was here in Milan alone, and that wasn't any fun. I know that these days, more and more people would rather be alone than have to devote the energy it takes to spend time with other people, but I am not one of those people. I don't mind being alone, but I it's not how I choose to have fun. As I wandered downtown Milan on my own, and was treated to amazing sights and history, there was no one to share it with or even comment to. Had my daughter been there like we'd originally planned, it probably would have been a completely different experience, but things hadn't turned out right for that, so rather than doggedly continuing to spend money and walk around in the sprinkling rain, I went and got a taxi, went back to Milano Centrale, and took a train back to Piacenza.

I got home right about the time my wife finished up her day's work, and we went down and spent the evening with her crew, talking and telling stories in the hotel restaurant. I didn't know any of these people before that night, but I had a much better time talking with them than I did wandering all by my lonesome through Milan. Maybe the next day with my wife would be better.

Getting to Italy

My wife and I took a trip to Italy. We piggybacked on a work trip she was doing, scheduling a vacation in on top of it. That way, we only had to pay for my ticket. It was as if she got to see Italy for free.

Getting there was a little crazy. I had to do it all on my own, because my wife had already come a few days ahead of me, but worse, I was only following her instructions the whole way. She'd set the whole thing up, and I was just following her honey-do list to get there. I usually don't pay enough attention to my wife's honey-do list to understand it without asking several follow-up questions later...only she wasn't available for that this time, so I was pretty nervous about doing something wrong...and being lost in Frankfurt or soemething.

So, I took a flight from Houston to Frankfurt. It was a ten hour flight, and I was jammed in the middle between a couple of people...one of them being a guy about 1/3 larger than the size his seat could hold. That 1/3 was in my seat instead, and pressed tightly up against me, because I am large enough that I filled 100% of what my seat could hold. There's no extra space for the guy next to me to fill. On top of that, he was wearing a very thick sweater, which meant that I was basically wearing that sweater, and it was hot. I was sweating like a dog the whole flight through with my arms pressed to my side, unable to sit comfortably, and barely even able to breathe comfortably.

I was miserable through that entire ten hour period, and landing in Frankfurt felt like a release from the prison's solitary confinement. Of course, now I was in a foreign country. My phone didn't work anymore. I got on the wifi in the airport and checked my flight on the United app. It told me I needed to go to gate A2, which is what my boarding pass that I'd downloaded before leaving Houston said. I walked all the way there, but the board above the gate said that flight was going to Helsinki.

I didn't know what to do, so I hoped for the best, walked up to a guy behind a counter, and said, "Sprechen sie Englisch?"

"Of course. Can I help you?" the man said in return. I thought it might work this way. Everyone told me that it was easy to find people in Europe who speak English as a second language, but I had no proof of my own until now.

"Can you tell me where my gate is?" I asked, and pulled up my boarding pass on my phone. At that moment, I noticed that it had updated. The gate didn't say A2 anymore. It said A26. "Oh..." I muttered, "that just changed."

The guy dutifully went through the motions of scanning my QR code and telling me that my flight was boarding out of A26, and I thanked him and went my way. I tried to say it in German, but found myself saying, "Bitterschön" instead of "Dankeschön." My single semester of college German in 1993 did me no good.

It was a long walk to go from A2 to A26, but I got there in plenty of time for my next flight. This time it was less awful. The folks next to me weren't taking all of my space, so I wasn't crushed and sweaty when I made it to the Milano Linate airport.

From there, I was only just over halfway there. I still had to go to a different city called Piacenza. Now it was time to downshift to ground transportation. I had to figure out how to get there using trains, buses, and taxis. My wife set me up with a few apps that dealt with those things. I already had a passage paid for to get me to Piacenza. I just had to figure out where to board.

The first level was a bus from the airport to Milano Centrale train station. I followed the signs through the airport, found where buses left from, and took a seat to wait for the bus I had a ticket for (which was not for an hour. We were being careful when buying tickets to make sure I would be able to make it, but I easily could have caught the bus that left an hour earlier than the one I had paid for). While I waited, I tried to figure out the eSim card thing I had paid for to get internet on my phone while in Italy. I wasn't doing it right, though, because it wasn't working.

The bus that pulled into the slot was not labeled with the company name my ticket had on it. Was it the right bus? Crap! Was I in the wrong place? It said it was going to Milano Centrale, and there weren't any others around that said that. I figured I would have to just buck up and ask, despite my lack of Italian. 

I approached the guy taking tickets, showed him mine, and asked if I was in the right place. Turns out I was. He scanned my ticket and said, "Prego." I took a seat inside and waited to pull away. Italy has a surprisingly small number of stoplights. I think I only saw a couple the entire time I was there. Every intersection was a roundabout, and these MFers were freakin' cavalier about the way they drove through them too. I don't know how there aren't constant traffic accidents in those things. From what I understand, there are more accidents in roundabouts than there are at stoplights, but the accidents themselves are less severe because the cars involved aren't coming from opposite directions...so, there's tradeoffs, I guess.

The bus pulled in and offloaded us at the train station. Some kid came up to me as I was trying to exit and said, "Ciao," and then proceeded to spout a bunch of Italian that was Greek to me. I had to shrug my shoulders and say, "Sorry, but I don't know what the heck you're saying." He shrugged too, and went in search of someone with actual knowledge of this place to question, and I walked into the train station.

It was surprisingly nice. I could tell that it had been built in a time when people still cared about things like this being pretty instead of just generic and bland like most airports are. Can you imagine if an airport looked like this? I went to Grand Central Station in New York when I visited there too, although in that case it was just to see it not to use it for its train services, and Milano Centrale was built in the same vain as that place.

Milano Centrale was even nicer by far than that, in my opinion. Grand Central Station was big and imposing, but less opulent in comparison.

There are different schools of thought. Some find that clean lines are better, but in my opinion, the statues, scrollwork, chandeliers, arches, and skylights are so much more impressive than clean lines might be.

In the station, again, I had to figure out how another form of transportation worked. There was a big board on the wall with train numbers, destinations, and platform numbers on it. Looking in my app at the ticket I'd already downloaded I figured out where my train was on the list, but it hadn't arrived yet, and would have no platform until it did (again, being cautious about the possibility of missing a connection left me with plenty of time to wait). I watched for a seat on the few benches available, jumped into one when I got the chance, and waited for my platform to appear on the big board.

About a half hour later, my train platform appeared, and I headed over to board.

There were assigned seats, and it took me a minute, as well as another question to an employee who happily spoke enough English to help me out, for me to figure out where the train car numbers were displayed so I could get on the right one.

Eventually, I was all boarded and ready to go. At this point, I was totally exhausted. I left for Europe at 6:00 PM the day before. It was 6:00 PM in Italy now...which meant it was about 11:00 AM in Houston, so that's what my body was feeling. I had slept very little on the overnight plane ride to Frankfurt...maybe a couple of hours tops...so I was really dragging. The clack-clack-clack of the train was the perfect thing to put me to sleep...except I couldn't let it do that. The train I was on would pass through Piacenza, my ultimate destination, but that wasn't the end of the line. That was just one stop along the way to Bologna. If I slept through my stop, I might find myself hundreds of miles from where I was supposed to be, so I doggedly fought sleep to get there.

I was worried as hell about what I would find there. My phone wasn't working. My wife had set me up with an app that was supposed to be good for taxis, but while on the wifi in the Milan airport, I had discovered that Piacenza, Italy was not one of the territories that it serviced. Of course, even if it had, I was getting no service on my phone, so I wouldn't be able to order up a taxi if it did work. I had no idea what Piacenza or its train station was like. Would there be taxis there? It was my final leg of the journey, but would I be able to fulfill it? I sure hoped so, because I couldn't call for help if there weren't any taxis.

When the stop arrived, I was sick to death with worry. I got off the train, walked under the tracks to the station, went out into the parking lot and, hallelujah, there was a line of taxis waiting for someone like me. The city was at least big enough for that. I hired a driver, and got a ride to the Best Western Park Hotel.

Now, here's where it broke down. I couldn't contact my wife. We hadn't worked anything out with the hotel. When I came in the door, I went to the front desk and told the guy I was here to meet my wife. He called her room. She didn't answer. She, of course, was doing something. She was out for dinner with the people she was working with. So, I said, "I guess I'll just wait for her."

I sat down in the lobby, put on my audiobook, and desperately struggled to stay awake even longer so that I didn't miss her when she walked in. I could just imagine me falling asleep, and her walking right past me without noticing I was there, and heading to her room for the night. I sat there for about an hour and a half before she finally managed to save me.

She had been worried sick about me, because she hadn't heard any updates from me all day. Once I left the wifi from the airport in Milan, my phone was just a brick. She didn't know if I'd made it at all. She couldn't call with her phone either, but she did manage to borrow the phone of one of her co-workers and call the hotel desk. She told them that I would be coming and to let me into her room.

The guy knew exactly who she was talking about, told her he would take care of it, and came to give me a key to the room. I was so glad. I couldn't stay awake any longer. I thanked him, and stumbled up to our room, fell onto the bed, and passed out for about ten hours.

I'd made it. In the morning, it would be time to see what I could do here.

I'm Back

I was out of town in Italy for about eight days, and then, upon arriving back in the USA, I came down with a pretty intense sickness. So, I haven't done a blog post in a while. I was too foashed to manage. I've healed enough now that I can do a little something something, though. So, you can expect me to be back to my usual routine again. See you tomorrow.

A Free Picture

On Friday morning, when we were camping at the Frio River last weekend, we got up and started making breakfast. Our campsite neighbor came walking over.

"Excuse me," she said, "Sorry to be weird, but I was wondering if you guys wanted this picture I took of you."

She took a picture of us? That's kind of weird and creepy. Especially when you're out camping and you don't even have walls to put between you and your stalker. What was this all about?

"What?" we asked.

"Oh, last night, I was taking pictures of the Northern Lights, and I got one that had your family in it. I thought you guys might like to have it."

She held up her phone, and showed us a really neat picture. Both me and my wife filled with regret. The Northern Lights were visible last night? Here? Crap! We knew that they were supposed to be visible in a lot of the states they normally never visit. My wife had been glued to her phone for our entire five-hour drive over from Houston. One of the things she'd seen was a story about that.

"The Northern Lights are going to be visible in most of the lower United States tonight," she'd blurted out at one point during the ride. "I bet I know what state they won't be seen in."

With that, we'd all forgotten about the possibility at all. The Northern Lights were right above us, and we hadn't even looked up. I haven't seen the Northern Lights since I visited my then-girlfriend now-wife-of-25-years in Edmonton in January of 1998. They were right there above my head, in friggin' Texas no less, and I didn't even think to look.

"Oh, this picture is great. Thank you," we said.

She airdropped the picture to my phone, and I have it to show to y'all.

So great. You can even see Cassiopeia up there. My phone could never manage a picture that nice. One of downfalls of buying a phone about two years or more after its been released so that I don't have to pay $1,000 for the pleasure of owning one. Usually, I don't mind, but when I see a picture like this, I feel it a little.

The good news is that I just heard that there should be more instances of the Northern Lights making excursions down south over the next several months. Maybe I can manage to see them with my own eyes again, instead of just getting a picture of myself with the lights that I never looked up at.

PS - The saddest part is that I sat out there for another hour after everyone else went to bed getting in my 1,000 words on "Lazerfist Saves Christmas" and still never looked up in all that time. That bright light that you see around us had been turned off, and there was nothing to hinder my sight, but I still never looked up.

More Stickers

I got all worked up yesterday about being able to do things that I couldn't do before, and I forgot to mention that I further added to my crazy collection of window stickers. I got a Frio River sticker and put it just above the big sticker for The Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park sticker. 

Sadly, I effed it up. It was a sticker with just the words "Frio River" on it. So, basically it was nine separate letter stickers. They were held in place by a clear film that you put on your window, then peel away, and the stickers stay in their proper place.

When I went to put the stickers on, though, I misjudged the shape of my window. I didn't account for the curve in the corner, and the F in Frio went up onto the rubber edge. When I tried to back out of it and pull the stickers back off, it didn't work. The film came away, but the letter stickers remained. There was no way to get it off without totally effing it up.

It's not terrible, so I guess I'm going to leave it, but I did get a razor blade when I got home and cut the corner that was folded up off. Having that curled up onto the rubber looked bad. I had to at least remove that. So, now it looks like this:

It's alright, but it won't take much to convince me to remove it and get something else to put in its place, that's for sure.

A Trip To The Hill Country

This past weekend, we took a trip out to Garner State Park along the banks of the Frio River in the Texas Hill Country west of San Antonio. We went here once before back in 2021, and the family liked it so much that they requested a return trip.

We did pretty much the same things as we did last time, though I did have my daughter who was off at college last time we went here with us this time, so it was all new to her. We camped in the same area.

We tubed down the river from the same spot.

The only real difference is that I am willing to actually let a picture of me in my swimsuit be seen by anyone. 

I've managed to get in decent shape and stay that way for more than a year. That's a first for me. I'm still nowhere close to being all the way there. I'm even thirty pounds heavier than I was back in May, and I'm trying to get back down to that level, but I'm doing okay, and I'm going to act like it for once. 

Not only did I get a couple of pictures of me in a swimsuit, I even went on the rope swings that my kids went on. I think the last time I went on a rope swing, it was still the twentieth century, which was about the last time I weighed what I do now. So, there might be a little correlation there.

I was sitting in my tube, and using my phone to record the kids swinging on the rope, and when they finally figured they were ready to move on, I suddenly thought, "Why the hell am I just watching? That rope swing is nothing dangerous. I may be almost fifty years old, but that doesn't mean a damn thing in this case. I can swing on that as easily as anyone else."

I paddled over to the shore, climbed off, grabbed the rope and took a shot.

It was nothing crazy, but it was fun, and I think I did a good job. I took another shot using the other rope. I didn't do quite as well with that one.

I should have tried to get my knees up and wrapped around the knot so I could hold on better. My arms weren't enough to counteract the centrifugal force trying to fling me off, so I just plummeted when it got too strong. That's not the point, though. The point is that I tried it at all. I tried it, and I was just fine. Life is better because of what I've been doing for the past few years. I'm healthier and stronger, and I won't quit improving. No matter how much I feel like life could be a lot easier if I just did all the same BS that the average American does. I'm not going to.

Sorry, I was just going to talk about going on a fun trip, and it turned into some rant about why I gotta keep doing my own thing and give the middle finger to the world that wants me to quit. I didn't mean to go there. I guess it was just on my mind.

Hope your day was fun, and you're having a happy life. Carry on.

So Much More Of Those People

I said in the end of my last post about this that it would certainly be something that got out of hand quickly. I, who had aspirations of filling my back windows with stickers of the places I'd visited in my life, was able now to make my own stickers at any time. What would I do? Well, go overboard of course.

The first thing I did was take scans of the stickers that Temu sent me in grossly over-exaggerated proportions. Then I asked my daughter to make versions of those in a normal size. So, I now have a normal-sized version of my Grand Canyon sticker along with my St. Augustine, Florida sticker.

That St. Augustine one, I think, is my favorite. I loved that freaking lighthouse, so I couldn't resist getting the sticker. I was so sad when it was way too bug, but now I get to use it after all.

My daughter also made me the Mesa Verde sticker that came too big. The normal-size one looks good.

But that certainly wasn't where I stopped. I could make my own freaking stickers if I wanted to! So, of course, I was going to do that. There was a spot on my window that was likely to remain empty unless I made a sticker that fit it perfectly. It had to be tall and skinny, which seemed like the right place for a tree-shaped sticker. I just did that with the Muir Woods sticker from my last post though, so I tried to come up with something else. I figured, a lighthouse would work. 

I love lighthouses. When I was in my early-twenties, my family took a trip to the Outer Banks in North Carolina, and they had a lot of lighthouses there. We went to a few of them, including the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, and the lighthouse on Ocracoke Island. 

I asked the AI that I usually use to design my book covers with to make me a picture of the two lighthouses, and was surprised to find that the Ocracoke one looked pretty close to correct. So, I cropped it, and created this sticker.

I measured the spot on the window to make sure the sticker would fit, and my daughter printed it out for me. Now, that empty spot is filled in nicely.

While I was at it, I couldn't find a good sticker for the Bahamas, which I had visited on a cruise once back in the nineties on that same trip where we went to the Outer Banks, but also just this year in February. I'd ordered a sticker from Temu that I didn't really like that much, but now, I could make something much better.

I again had the AI make me a picture, this time of a white sand beach with palm trees. I sifted through the various options, and settled on this picture that I designed into a sticker.

We printed it out. We didn't even have to worry about making it fit in any little nook, so it could be a normal shape and size if we wanted. I like how it turned out.

There was one more place I thought I ought to put on my window. I had a sticker for Cancún, San Diego, San Francisco, Park City, and New York City—all cities that I've seen in the last ten to fifteen years or so. One big destination that I didn't have, though, was New Orleans. We visited that city for the first time not long after coming to Houston, and have been back a few times since. I love that place, despite the fact that I lost (or was pickpocketed) $100 out of my shorts pocket and also dropped my off-brand GoPro camera into the swamp while I was there.

I had looked for good NOLA stickers on Temu, and come up empty-handed. But I could make my own now, folks! I found a sticker that had a good bit of art, but had a crappy design. I cropped the crappy design elements out, and redesigned it for myself, coming up with this look:

If you're wondering, yes, that's the same font I use for Rish Outfield's name on all of his book covers. It's a good looking font. We printed out the sticker, and now, it's on my back window.

So, I added another six stickers to my window. This can't go on for much longer. This is what it looks like now.

Not a whole lot of space left. I can probably fill up both of the side windows, but the middle one needs to remain sticker-free. That's where the rear-view mirror looks. As much as I love covering my window with stickers, I need to be able to see what's going on behind me more.

There are still some places I'd like to do stickers of, though. One place I loved as a kid was in far Northern California called Lava Beds National Monument. It was a network of caves carved in prehistoric days by lava flow. It was so fun exploring our way through those caves. I'd like to do a sticker for that place. I'd have to make my own, though, because I can't find any place online that has one for sale. Maybe the AI can make me a cave that looks good enough. We'll see.